I once saw a bumper sticker, “If you can read this, thank a primary school teacher”. The history wonk in me felt a strong urge to grab a sharpie, cross out the last three words and replace them with “Sumerian”.
Of course, the history wonk knows that writing probably developed independently, in different times and at least four different places. But the fact remains that the alphabet as we know it today can ultimately be traced back to the invention of writing by the Sumerians.
The Sumerian civilisation (known also as Sumer) was one of the earliest civilisations in the world. This ancient civilisation emerged in the region of southern Mesopotamia (modern day southern Iraq), between the Tigris and Euphrates River. The Sumerian civilisation began around the 4th millennium BC and ended around the 24th century BC, when the whole of Mesopotamia came under the control of the Akkadian Empire.
The Sumerians re-emerged during the 22nd century BC and ruled southern Mesopotamia once more. The Third Dynasty of Ur that they established, however, did not last for long and fell after about a century. Although Sumerian dominance in Mesopotamia ended definitively this time, its numerous innovations benefitted subsequent Mesopotamian civilizations, and its legacy can still be felt even today.
That legacy includes not just the alphabet we use today, but some of the earliest mathematics.
Ancient Sumer was part of the “Fertile Crescent”, which covered the modern areas of Iraq and the Levant, and the Nile Valley. With its rich flood plains, the area was highly suited to agriculture. Following the agricultural Neolithic Revolution, humans began to settle the area in larger and larger communities.
As Sumerian society grew denser-settled and more complex, more complex communications became necessary. Most land belonged to the temples and the priestly class, and, as landlords will, they wanted to keep accurate track of who owed them what.
Many important innovations were made by the Sumerians in order to ensure that the management of the agriculture by the temples went smoothly. One of the most significant of these was the development of the cuneiform script, which is the earliest known writing in the world. This script was originally developed as an administrative tool and was used to keep track of the flow of goods, including agricultural produce.
In time, the Sumerians would use this script for other purposes as well, for instance, for the writing of scientific or literary texts.
Successive civilisations adopted and adapted the Sumerian script, eventually resulting in the alphabet as we know it. But the Sumerians’ bureaucratic needs also spawned another gift to the ages.
Knowledge of arithmetic made it easier for the scribes to keep a record on the goods that were coming in and going out of the temples. Prior to this, the amount of goods was represented by clay tokens.
Once arithmetic was developed, however, they could be represented as numbers on clay tablets. Arithmetic also contributed to the invention of the calendar and clock. The Sumerians invented several number systems, including the sexagesimal system (base 60), which became the standard number system of the Sumerian civilization. Using this number system, the Sumerians invented the clock, with its 60 seconds, 60 minutes, and 12 hours; as well as the calendar, with its 12 months. The impact of these inventions is felt even today.
Ancient Origins
There are millions of Sumerian clay tablets with their cuneiform script still extant today. Only a fraction have ever been translated. Those that do reveal a society that used writing in ways that we still easily recognise: business transactions, story-telling, family letters and even jokes.
The invention of writing also lead to another momentous development: the codification of laws. The oldest known law code in the world is the Code of Ur-Nammu, written down some 4,000 years ago. The importance of that cannot be overstated. When the law code was transmitted orally, it was literally whatever it was said to be – and easily mutable by the powerful. Once it was written down, though, it was there for potentially everyone to read.
And so began the long, tortuous road from the Code of Ur-Nammu, through the Mosaic Laws and the Twelve Tablets of ancient Rome, to the Magna Carta, Blackstone’s Commentaries and the entire evolution of Western liberal democracy.
