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Sumer

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Sumerian Myths. Sumerian civilization originated in what is now southern Iraq, just upriver from the mouths of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. "Civilization" in this context means a settled town or city-dwelling people who possess a stable agricultural technology (including domesticated animals) and have developed a hierarchical system of social classes (peasants, laborers, slaves, craftsmen [smiths, masons, carpenters, potters, etc.], farmers, fishermen, merchants, doctors, architects, priests and temple attendants, bureaucrats, scribes, advisers, priest-kings). Since the climate of southern Iraq is hot and dry, agriculture requires an extensive irrigation system of canals and dikes.

Often, the Sumerians wrote as if their civilization (agricultural techniques, cities, classes of people) came first, and people later. (Why do you think they thought this way?) Map of Mesopotamian Archeological Sites (Oriental Institute, University of Chicago) The Creation of Humans Sumerian Creation Questions1. 2. 3. 4. Babylonian World Mythology.

Myth. There Were Giants Upon the Earth. The following is excerpted from There Were Giants Upon the Earth: Gods, Demigods, and Human Ancestry: The Evidence of Alien DNA, available from Bear and Company. If you would like to learn more about this book or buy a copy, please do so here. Introduction And It Came to Pass And it came to pass, When men began to multiply on the face of the Earth and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair, and they took them wives of all which they chose.

There were giants upon the Earth in those days and also thereafter too, When the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men and they bare children to them- the same Mighty Men of old, Men of Renown. The reader, if familiar with the King James English version of the Bible, will recognize these verses in chapter 6 of Genesis as the preamble to the story of the Deluge, the Great Flood in which Noah, huddled in an ark, was saved to repopulate the Earth. The schoolboy was I. Sumer: Where Civilization Began.

Sumerian Myths. Sumerians. Sumer. The irrigated farming together with annual replenishment of soil fertility and the surplus of storable food in temple granaries created by this economy allowed the population of this region to rise to levels never before seen, unlike those found in earlier cultures of shifting cultivators. This much greater population density in turn created and required an extensive labour force and division of labour with many specialised arts and crafts. At the same time, historic overuse of the irrigated soils led to progressive salinisation, and a Malthusian crisis which led to depopulation of the Sumerian region over time, leading to its progressive eclipse by the Akkadians of middle Mesopotamia.

Sumer was also the site of early development of writing, progressing from a stage of proto-writing in the mid 4th millennium BC to writing proper in the 3rd millennium BC (see Jemdet Nasr period). Origin of name[edit] City-states in Mesopotamia[edit] Map of Sumer Other principal cities: History[edit]