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Ancient Sumerians created the first writing system


“In Uruk he built walls, a great rampart, and the temple of blessed Eanna for the god of the firmament Anu, and for Ishtar the goddess of love. Look at it still today: the outer wall where the corn…

They gave the West its founding stories: the opposition of darkness and light at the Beginning; the Flood, with its ark and dove and surviving patriarch; the tower of Babel; the distant ancestors of Odysseus and Hercules. At Ur in Sumer’s far south, the great archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley, digging in 1929, discovered a layer of “perfectly clean clay” more than eight feet thick separating the remains—pottery and much more—of two distinct cultures from some time before 3000 BC. Trade with the far-off source-lands of raw materials—for tin and copper to alloy into bronze for weapons, for gold and silver to please the rich and the divine, for hardwood timbers for the roof beams of palaces and temples—required the pooling of resources.

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