THE WORLD ATLAS

Empire · 3500–2004 BCE · Middle East & South Asia

Sumerian city-states

Also known as Ur

Sumer, in the marshy south of Mesopotamia (modern Iraq), was home to the world's first cities. Between about 3500 and 3000 BCE towns such as Uruk grew into cities of tens of thousands, organised around temples that managed irrigation, grain and trade.

To keep records, Sumerian scribes invented cuneiform writing on clay tablets around 3200 BCE. Sumer was never one country: a dozen rival city-states, each with its own patron god and king, fought over water and fields. Sargon of Akkad conquered them around 2334 BCE, but after Akkad's fall the Third Dynasty of Ur reunited the region and built a centralised state with a vast bureaucracy. Ur fell to Elamite invaders in 2004 BCE, and Sumerian gradually died out as a spoken language.

Follow its story on the map

The “War” panel of the Standard of Ur, a shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone mosaic from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, c. 2600–2400 BCE (British Museum)
The “War” panel of the Standard of Ur, a shell, lapis lazuli and red limestone mosaic from the Royal Cemetery at Ur, c. 2600–2400 BCE (British Museum) Unknown author · Public domain
Years
3500–2004 BCE
Capital
No single capital; leading cities included Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish and Nippur
Greatest extent
2050 BCE, about 100,000 km²
Region
Middle East & South Asia

Third Dynasty of Ur under Shulgi, ruling Mesopotamia and parts of western Iran; Taagepera (1978) puts the Neo-Sumerian state at only c. 0.1M km², so 250,000 km² assumes the tributary periphery; c. 0.1M km² (Taagepera 1978)

Legacy

Sumer pioneered writing, early wheeled vehicles, the base-sixty counting behind our hours and minutes, and the first stories of Gilgamesh.

Timeline of Sumerian city-states

  1. Late Uruk period: Uruk is the leading city of southern Mesopotamia

    In the fourth millennium BCE, farming villages on the irrigated plains of southern Mesopotamia grew into the first true cities, and Uruk outgrew them all. In the Late Uruk period it covered roughly 230–250 hectares, with monumental buildings in its Eanna district and perhaps 25,000–50,000 inhabitants, far more than any rival settlement. Uruk-style outposts and colonies, such as the walled town of Habuba Kabira, spread up the Euphrates into Syria. This 'Uruk expansion' made southern Mesopotamia, the heart of the map's Sumerian territory, the most urban and influential region of the Near East.

  2. Earliest unequivocal written documents (proto-cuneiform) appear at Uruk

    Running a city of thousands meant keeping track of grain, livestock, labour and rations, and for a long time clay tokens had been used for counting. From about 3300 BCE, in the phase archaeologists call Uruk IV, scribes at Uruk began drawing signs and numbers on clay tablets with a reed stylus: the earliest unequivocal written documents. Almost all of them are administrative records, not stories or laws. Writing gave Sumer's temples and rulers a powerful tool for managing people and goods, and its descendant, cuneiform, would be used across the Near East for more than 3,000 years.

  3. Jemdet Nasr period: writing becomes more abstract; cities run central administrations

    After the Uruk expansion faded, the period named after the site of Jemdet Nasr (c. 3100–2900 BCE) saw southern culture continue on a more local scale, limited to south-central Iraq. Writing kept developing: pictures gave way to simpler, more abstract signs, and the script began to take on its wedge-shaped look. Tablets, cylinder seals and large central buildings suggest that a central administration rationed food and organised crafts and farming. A seal impression listing cities such as Ur, Uruk and Larsa hints at close ties between them, the network from which Sumer's city-states would emerge.

  4. Early Dynastic period begins: rival city-states ruled by kings (lugal)

    From about 2900 BCE southern Mesopotamia was divided among independent city-states, each a large city controlling the surrounding villages, fields and canals, and each protected by its own god. The most important included Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Adab and Umma, while Kish in the north may have led a larger territorial state. Rulers bore titles such as ensi (governor) or lugal (literally 'big man', meaning king). Because these rival states competed for land and irrigation water, the map shows Sumer as a cluster of cities rather than a single kingdom for the next five centuries.

  5. Era of Gilgamesh of Uruk and Enmebaragesi of Kish, kings of later legend

    The early centuries of the Early Dynastic period left almost no contemporary texts, so they are known mainly through later legend. Enmebaragesi of Kish is the earliest king on the Sumerian King List whose name has been found in inscriptions; scholars date him to c. 2700–2600 BCE. Gilgamesh of Uruk was probably a real king of roughly the same era, and a Sumerian poem tells of his revolt against Enmebaragesi's son Agga of Kish. Later generations made Gilgamesh a god and the hero of a famous epic, but the real political map of this 'heroic age' cannot be reconstructed.

  6. Royal Cemetery of Ur: rich burials with goods traded from the Indus

    By the 26th century BCE Ur was among the richest cities of Sumer. Its cemetery, excavated by Leonard Woolley in the 1920s, held about 2,000 burials, including sixteen 'royal' tombs in which rulers such as Queen Puabi were buried with attendants, sometimes seventy or more. The graves were filled with gold, silver, lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and carnelian beads that point to trade with the Indus Valley. These treasures show that Sumer, which had to import all its metals, sat at the centre of a trade network reaching from the Gulf to Afghanistan and India.

  7. Mesilim of Kish arbitrates the border war between Lagash and Umma

    Lagash and its neighbour Umma were locked in a long quarrel over the Gu-Edin, a fertile irrigated plain on their shared border. Around the middle of the third millennium (c. 2550 BCE by one estimate), Mesilim, king of Kish, who seems to have held some authority over Lagash and Adab, stepped in as arbiter. Claiming the guidance of the god Ishtaran, he fixed a new boundary and set up an inscribed pillar to mark it. The settlement did not last: a later king of Umma, Ush, tore the pillar down, and the border war flared again for generations.

  8. Eannatum of Lagash defeats Umma; Stele of the Vultures

    Eannatum of Lagash, grandson of the dynasty's founder Ur-Nanshe, renewed the war for the Gu-Edin. Around 2450 BCE he defeated Ush of Umma, whose army, according to Eannatum's inscription, left 3,600 dead, and then imposed a boundary treaty and grain payments on Umma's next ruler, Enakalle. He celebrated the victory on the Stele of the Vultures, named after the birds shown carrying off enemy heads; its fragments are now in the Louvre. Eannatum also fought Ur, Uruk, Kish, Mari and parts of Elam, making Lagash briefly the strongest power in Sumer, though revolts soon followed.

  9. Urukagina rules Lagash; Lugalzagesi of Umma conquers Uruk

    Urukagina (also read Uruinimgina) became ruler of Lagash after Lugalanda and is famous for inscriptions listing changes he made, such as cutting the fees officials charged for burials. Historians now doubt there was one coherent 'reform', and many lines of the texts are hard to interpret. Meanwhile Umma, Lagash's old rival, expanded under Lugalzagesi, who took Uruk in the seventh year of his reign. Lugalzagesi then ravaged Lagash and its temples, leaving Urukagina to rule only from Girsu, and the balance of power in Sumer shifted to Umma and Uruk.

  10. Lugalzagesi rules all Sumer from Uruk, the first such kingdom on record

    Having crushed Lagash, Lugalzagesi overthrew the king of Kish and took Ur, Nippur and Larsa, making Uruk his capital. His inscriptions call him 'king of the Land' and claim that the god Enlil gave him all the lands from the Lower Sea (the Gulf) to the Upper Sea (the Mediterranean), though his westward reach may have been little more than a raid. He is the first ruler reliably documented to have united all of Sumer in one kingdom, which the Sumerian King List says lasted 25 years. For a generation the map's many city-states became a single realm centred on Uruk.

  11. Sargon of Akkad comes to power; Lugalzagesi's kingdom falls to him

    Sargon built his power at Akkad, a city in central Mesopotamia whose site has never been found; later legend says he had begun as cupbearer to the king of Kish. Lugalzagesi's kingdom now faced this new northern rival. According to Sargon's own inscriptions, three battles were needed to defeat Lugalzagesi; Sargon tore down Uruk's walls and led the captured king in a neck-stock to Enlil's temple at Nippur. The date is debated: Sargon's reign is usually placed from c. 2334 BCE, but the conquest of Sumer is often dated nearer 2300. Sumer's age of independent city-states was over.

Periods and reigns

Rulers

Realms on the map

Chapters

Sources