The Penguin History of the World

Sumerian marriage had much about it which would have been familiar to later societies. The crux of the matter was the consent of the bride’s family. Once arranged to their satisfaction, a new monogamous family unit was established by the marriage which was recorded in a sealed contract. Its head was the patriarchal husband, who presided over both his relatives and his slaves. It is a pattern which was until very recently observable in most parts of the world. Yet there are interesting nuances. Legal and literary evidence suggest that even in early times Sumerian women were less downtrodden than their sisters in many later Middle Eastern societies. Semitic and non-Semitic traditions may diverge in this. Sumerian stories of their gods suggest a society very conscious of the dangerous and even awe-inspiring power of female sexuality; the Sumerians were the first people to write about passion. It is not easy to relate such things to institutions, but Sumerian law did not regard women as mere chattels. It gave them important rights; even the slave mother of a free man’s children had a certain protection at law. Divorce arrangements provided for women as well as men to seek separations and for the equitable treatment of divorced wives. Though a wife’s adultery was punishable by death, while a husband’s was not, this difference is to be understood in the light of concern over inheritance and property. It was not until long after Sumerian times that Mesopotamian law begins to emphasize the importance of virginity and to impose the veil on respectable women. Both were signs of a hardening attitude and more cramping role for them.

The Sumerians also demonstrated great technical inventiveness. Other peoples would be much in their debt. The influence of the Sumerians’ laws can be traced well into post-Sumerian times. Sumerians, too, laid the foundations of mathematics, establishing the technique of expressing number by position as well as by sign (as we, for example, can reckon the figure 1 as one, one-tenth, ten or several other values, according to its relation to the decimal point), and they arrived at a method of dividing the circle into six equal segments. They knew about the decimal system too, though they did not exploit it, and we first encounter the seven-day week in the Gilgamesh Epic.

By the end of their history as an independent civilization Sumerians had learnt to live in big groups; one city alone is said to have had 36,000 males. This made big demands on building skill, and even more were made by the large monumental structures. Lacking stone, southern Mesopotamians had first built in reeds plastered with mud, then with bricks made from the mud and dried in the sun. Their brick technology was advanced enough by the end of the Sumerian period to make possible very large buildings with columns and terraces; the greatest of its monuments, the Ziggurat of Ur, had an upper stage over 100 feet high and a base 200 feet by 150. The earliest surviving potter’s wheel was found at Ur; this was the first way in which man made use of rotary motion. On it rested the large-scale production of pottery which made it a man’s trade and not, like earlier pottery, a woman’s. Soon, by 3000 BC, the wheel was being used for transport. Another invention of the Sumerians was glass, and specialized craftsmen were casting in bronze early in the third millennium BC.

This innovation raises further questions: where did the raw material come from? There is no metal in southern Mesopotamia. Moreover, even in earlier times, during the Neolithic, the region must have obtained from elsewhere the flint and obsidian it needed for the first agricultural implements. Clearly a widespread network of contacts abroad is in the background, above all with the Levant and Syria, huge distances away, but also with Iran and Bahrain, down the Persian Gulf. Before 2000 BC Mesopotamia was obtaining goods – though possibly indirectly – from the Indus valley. Together with the evidence of documentation (which reveals contacts with India before 2000 BC), it makes an impression of a dimly emerging international trading system already creating important patterns of interdependence. When, in the middle of the third millennium, supplies of tin from the Middle East dried up, Mesopotamian bronze weapons had to give way to unalloyed copper ones.