Sumer: The First Civilization
Before there is an Israel, there is Shinar. Before Abraham hears the call, his fathers dwell in the land of the two rivers, where the Euphrates meets the Tigris. The Bible knows this land. It is…
Biblical Narrative
Before there is an Israel, there is Shinar. Before Abraham hears the call, his fathers dwell in the land of the two rivers, where the Euphrates meets the Tigris. The Bible knows this land. It is the land of Eden, of the Tigris and the Euphrates running out of the garden; the land of Shinar where Babel rose; the land of Ur of the Chaldees, the city of Abraham's father Terah.
Genesis chapter 10 — the Table of Nations — names the descendants of Noah's son Shem, and locates the cradle of mankind in this very plain: Asshur, Elam, Arphaxad. Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord, is said to have built Babel, Erech (Uruk), and Akkad, the beginning of his kingdom. The biblical author knew, with surprising historical accuracy, that the world's oldest cities lay between those rivers.
It is from this world that the patriarch is summoned. 'Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.' The call is a tearing-away from a particular civilization — wealthy, literate, and idolatrous — to walk westward into a future hardly visible. Joshua remembers it bluntly: 'your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, and they served other gods.'
The world Abraham left behind was not primitive. It was the first civilization, the inventor of the city. To leave Ur for Canaan was to leave the metropolis for the highlands; to leave the temple-tower for the desert oak; to leave the gods of stars and storms for a single God who walks with a wandering man. The biblical journey is at its root a counter-cultural one.
Your fathers dwelt of old time beyond the River, even Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nahor: and they served other gods.Joshua 24:2
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Sumer, in the alluvial plain between the lower Tigris and Euphrates, was the world's first urban civilization. From roughly 4500 BCE the people of southern Mesopotamia built drained, irrigated farmland; from c. 3500 BCE they built proto-cities; and by c. 3100 BCE they had invented the world's earliest writing system — proto-cuneiform pictographs scratched on clay tablets at Uruk to keep accounts of barley, sheep, and labor. The same period saw the first wheeled vehicles, the potter's wheel, and monumental temple architecture rise above the plain.
The Sumerians invented or perfected, in roughly two millennia, an astonishing inventory of cultural firsts: the city, writing, schools, codified law, mathematical positional notation (their sexagesimal base-60 system survives in our hours and degrees), the lunar calendar, the brewing of beer, the wheeled cart, the sailboat, the seal cylinder, and the literary epic. Their language is a linguistic isolate — unrelated to Semitic, Indo-European, or any known family — and was deciphered through bilingual Akkadian-Sumerian dictionary tablets in the late 19th century.
Leonard Woolley's excavations at Ur (1922-1934), funded jointly by the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania, revealed both the great Ziggurat of Ur-Nammu and the Royal Cemetery, where 16 elaborate tomb-pits dated to c. 2600 BCE contained kings, queens, sacrificed retainers, and treasures of gold, lapis lazuli, and carnelian. A flood layer eleven feet deep beneath the cemetery led Woolley to identify it dramatically with the biblical deluge — a claim modern archaeology has set aside.
By the time of Abraham's traditional date — c. 2000-1800 BCE in the conventional chronology — Sumer proper was already a memory. Its language had ceased to be spoken; its cities had passed to the Amorite kings of the Old Babylonian period under whose rule Hammurabi would soon issue his famous code. The 'world Abraham left' was, in effect, the world of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia — heir to the Sumerian cultural inheritance.
History begins at Sumer.Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (1956)