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The Sumerians of southern Mesopotamia built the world's first cities, Uruk, Ur, Eridu and Nippur, and invented writing itself, pressing cuneiform signs into clay from around 3300 BCE. Their religion served each city's patron deity from a temple household raised on a ziggurat, with An, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Utu and Nanna chief among the pantheon. Sumerian died as a spoken language around 2000 BCE but lived on for nearly two millennia as the liturgical tongue of Babylon and Assyria, and its literature underlies myths from Inanna's descent to the flood.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
Southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates, in present southern Iraq: the city-states of Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Nippur and Lagash 1
Language Family
Sumerian, a language isolate with no known relatives; it died as a spoken tongue around 2000 BCE and lived on for nearly two millennia as the liturgical and scholarly language of Babylonia and Assyria 1
Writing System
Cuneiform, pressed with a reed stylus into clay, developed at Uruk around 3300 BCE from accounting practice; the world's earliest writing system, last used in the first century CE 1
Practice
Practice Status
Discontinued as a state religion 2
Sumerian religion was absorbed into Babylonian and Assyrian practice and ended in antiquity; it survives in excavated temples and one of the largest recovered literatures of the ancient world
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
City-state polytheism in which each city served its patron deity from a temple household on a ziggurat, An, Enlil, Enki, Inanna, Utu and Nanna chief among the pantheon, with kingship held to descend from heaven 2
Learn More
An, Enlil, Inanna and the Temple Cities

Sumerian religion was city religion. Each city belonged to its god, whose temple was literally the god's household: Enlil, lord of the air and executive of the divine assembly, ruled from the Ekur at Nippur, the land's religious capital; Nanna the moon lit Ur; Enki, cunning lord of the sweet waters beneath the earth, kept the divine ordinances at Eridu, which Sumerian tradition counted the oldest city in the world; and Inanna, goddess of love and war, the morning and evening star, shared Uruk with the sky father An, the remote head of the pantheon. The temple stood on a raised platform that grew into the ziggurat, and its staff fed, clothed and housed the god's statue while managing estates, herds and workshops on the god's behalf.

The gods ran the cosmos as an assembly under An and Enlil, apportioning destinies; kingship, as the Sumerian King List puts it, descended from heaven and moved from city to city. Humanity existed to relieve the gods of labor, a bargain told in the myths with unsentimental clarity, and divination, omens and lament kept the relationship in repair.

The literature recovered from the scribal schools, translated in Jeremy Black and colleagues' Literature of Ancient Sumer and the online corpus that grew from it, is the oldest in the world: Inanna's descent to the underworld, the disputations of plough and hoe, temple hymns attributed to Enheduanna, priestess and first named author in history, and the poems of Gilgamesh of Uruk that Babylon later wove into its great epic.

Cuneiform: The Invention of Writing and Its Afterlife

Writing began as bookkeeping. In the temple economies of late fourth millennium Uruk, tokens and sealings for counting sheep and grain grew into signs pressed with a reed stylus into wet clay, and by about 3300 BCE the system could record language itself: cuneiform, wedge writing, the world's first script. With it came schools, contracts, letters, law and literature, and a scribal culture whose exercise tablets preserve the whole tradition.

Politically, Sumer was a quarrelsome family of city-states, united at intervals: by Sargon of Akkad, whose empire made Akkadian the language of rule around 2300 BCE and whose daughter Enheduanna served as high priestess of the moon at Ur; and by the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2100 BCE, whose kings built the great ziggurat of Ur and administered the land with famous bureaucratic thoroughness. When Ur fell to Elamites and Amorites around 2004 BCE, lamentation literature mourned the city as the gods' own decision, and spoken Sumerian faded within a few generations.

Its afterlife was extraordinary. For nearly two thousand years more, Babylonian and Assyrian scribes learned Sumerian as the language of liturgy and learning, copying hymns and lexical lists in it as European clergy would one day keep Latin; Stephanie Dalley's translations show how thoroughly Babylon inherited and reworked the Sumerian myths. Cuneiform's last dated tablet was written in the first century CE, and the decipherments of the nineteenth century recovered the whole tradition from the mounds of Iraq.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Sumerians directly: "Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses is a peer-reviewed open academic reference, part of the Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus project at the University of Pennsylvania, with entries..."

Source Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and GoddessesNicole Brisch (ed.)
Eridu, Sources

This source names Sumerians directly: "Fuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd conducted the excavation reported in this official volume from Iraq's State Organization of Antiquities and Heritage, documenting the ancient..."

Source EriduFuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd

Remembered by the Sumerians as the first city.

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous
Geshtinanna, Deities

This source names Sumerians directly: "A Sumerian goddess whose name is read "heavenly grapevine", sister of the shepherd god Dumuzi and, in several texts, a skilled interpreter of dreams, called on by Dumuzi himself to read the..."

Gilgamesh was a king of Uruk; Sumerian poems about him underlie the later Akkadian epic.

This source names Sumerians directly: "Jeremy Black and Anthony Green's dictionary works entry by entry from the excavated iconographic and textual record of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian religion, giving each deity, demon or symbol..."

This source names Sumerians directly: "The Gudsisu Festival was a Sumerian agricultural festival centred on the city of Nippur, marking the beginning of the plowing season and invoking divine sanction for the year's cultivation."

This source names Sumerians directly: "Betty De Shong Meador is a scholar and translator, and this University of Texas Press book is her scholarly translation and study of poems attributed to Enheduanna, the Sumerian high priestess..."

Inanna's descent to the underworld is preserved in Sumerian, the oldest full telling of the descent theme.

This source names Sumerians directly: "The opening formula of the Sumerian King List, "when kingship descended from heaven," asserting that the institution of kingship itself was a direct gift of the gods to earth, first at the city of..."

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous

Mesopotamian Religion begins in Sumer, whose gods and rites Babylon and Assyria inherited.

Ninshubur, Deities

This source names Sumerians directly: "The sukkal, or divine vizier, and messenger of the goddess Inanna, best known as the sole loyal servant in "Inanna's Descent to the Underworld", who obeys her mistress's instructions exactly, mourns..."

Nippur, Sacred Sites

Nippur, seat of Enlil's Ekur, was the religious capital where kingship was confirmed.

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous

This source names Sumerians directly: "This is the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology's own account, on its institutional website, of Nippur and the Penn Museum's own excavation expeditions to the site, one..."

Nisaba, Deities

This source names Sumerians directly: "The Sumerian goddess of writing, grain and accounting, patron of the scribal schools where cuneiform was taught, invoked at the close of many literary and administrative texts as the one who grants..."

Nusku, Deities

This source names Sumerians directly: "A Sumerian and Akkadian god of fire and light who serves as sukkal, or divine vizier, to Enlil, carrying messages and standing as witness to Enlil's decrees."

This source names Sumerians directly: "The eight-pointed star belongs to Inanna in Sumerian and Ishtar in Akkadian, and it is a planetary sign before it is a personal one: the goddess is identified with Venus, the morning and evening star."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sumer, Regions

The Sumerians.

This source names Sumerians directly: "Erica Reiner's Surpu, published in the Archiv fur Orientforschung series in Graz in 1958, is the standard critical edition of the Sumerian and Akkadian incantation series used in ancient..."

This source names Sumerians directly: "The Mesopotamian temple functioned not merely as a shrine but as the economic and administrative household of its resident god, called simply e in Sumerian, literally house."

This source names Sumerians directly: "The 12th Planet, Zecharia Sitchin's 1976 book from Stein and Day, is the founding statement of the ancient-astronaut reading of the Anunnaki as visitors from a supposed twelfth planet, based on..."

Source The 12th PlanetZecharia Sitchin

This source names Sumerians directly: "Andrew George's edition is the standard critical scholarly edition of the Gilgamesh epic, working directly from the cuneiform tablets themselves to set out the documented relationship between the..."

This source names Sumerians directly: "This is a scholarly online corpus built by a named team of specialist Assyriologists at Oxford, offering transliterations and translations of the Sumerian literary corpus, the Descent of Inanna..."

Source The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian LiteratureJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson, Gabor Zolyomi and others

This source names Sumerians directly: "William W."

Source The Exaltation of InannaWilliam W. Hallo and J. J. A. van Dijk

This source names Sumerians directly: "The kar.kid/harimtu, Prostitute or Single Woman?"

This source names Sumerians directly: "Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi are Assyriologists and Sumerologists, and this academic book, published by Oxford University Press, surveys the surviving literature..."

Source The Literature of Ancient SumerJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi

This source names Sumerians directly: "The Sumerian King List is an ancient Mesopotamian text, composed in its surviving early second millennium BCE form, that names Gilgamesh among the rulers of the first dynasty of Uruk."

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous

This source names Sumerians directly: "Thorkild Jacobsen's 1939 critical edition of the Sumerian King List, presenting the cuneiform text with transliteration, translation and notes, and establishing the reading of the list as a..."

Source The Sumerian King List (Jacobsen, 1939)Thorkild Jacobsen

This source names Sumerians directly: "Marie-Louise Thomsen was a Sumerologist, and this Akademisk Forlag book is her scholarly introduction to the history and grammatical structure of the Sumerian language."

Ur, Sacred Sites

Ur, city of the moon god Nanna, holds the best preserved ziggurat and the royal tombs.

Source The Sumerian King ListAnonymous

Uruk is the defining city of the Sumerian south.

This source names Sumerians directly: "Utukku Lemnutu, "Evil Utukku Demons" (Sumerian Udug-hul), is a sixteen-tablet Akkadian exorcistic incantation series directed against a wide range of evil demons, ghosts and other malefactors held..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Originated In

Iraq, Countries

Southern Iraq holds the mounds of Uruk, Ur, Eridu and Nippur.

Source The Literature of Ancient SumerJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi
Mesopotamia, Regions

Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, begins its recorded history in Sumer.

Source The Literature of Ancient SumerJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi

Originates in Language

Sumerian, Languages

Sumerian is the civilization's own tongue and the world's first written language.

Source The Literature of Ancient SumerJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi

Related To

Worship Of

Anu, Deities

An, the sky father, is the remote head of the Sumerian pantheon and source of the highest authority.

Dumuzi, Deities

Dumuzi, the shepherd god of fertility, was Inanna's consort at Uruk and one of the oldest attested figures of the Sumerian pantheon.

Enki, Deities

Enki, lord of the sweet waters and of cunning, kept the divine ordinances at Eridu.

Enlil, Deities

Enlil, lord of the air, ruled the divine assembly from the Ekur at Nippur.

Inanna, Deities

Inanna, goddess of love and war, the morning and evening star, shared Uruk with An.

Ninhursag, Deities

Ninhursag, the mother goddess who shapes bodies, was praised at her temple at Kesh in one of the oldest surviving Sumerian hymns.

Ninkasi, Deities

Ninkasi, goddess of beer and brewing, is attested in Sumerian god lists and offering texts from early in the Mesopotamian record.

Source The Literature of Ancient SumerJeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi
Utu, Deities

Utu, the sun, saw everything and judged accordingly, patron of justice at Sippar and Larsa.

Sources
1. The Literature of Ancient Sumer
Jeremy Black, Graham Cunningham, Eleanor Robson and Gabor Zolyomi, Oxford University Press, 2004View the Source
2. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary
Jeremy Black and Anthony Green, British Museum Press, 1992
The Sumerian King List
Anonymous
Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others
Stephanie Dalley, Oxford University Press, 2000View the Source
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