The Sumerian Firsts

In 1956 Professor Samuel N. Kramer, one of the great Sumerologists of our time, reviewed the literary legacy found beneath the mounds of Sumer.

The table of contents of From the Tablets of Sumer has 25 chapters described a Sumerian “first”:

• the first schools
• the first bicameral congress
• the first historian
• the first pharmacopoeia
• the first “farmer’s almanac”
• the first cosmogony and cosmology
• the first “Job”
• the first proverbs and sayings
• the first literary debates
• the first “Noah”
• the first library catalogue
• Man’s first Heroic Age
• his first law codes and social reforms
• his first medicine, agriculture, and search for world peace and harmony.

The first schools were established in Sumer as a direct outgrowth of the invention and introduction of writing.

The evidence (both archaeological, such as actual school buildings, and written, such as exercise tablets) indicates the existence of a formal system of education by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC.

There were literally thousands of scribes in Sumer, ranging from junior scribes to high scribes, royal scribes, temple scribes, and scribes who assumed high state office.

Some acted as teachers at the schools. We can still read:

• their essays on the schools
• their aims and goals
• their curriculum and teaching methods.

The schools taught language and writing, sciences of the day—botany, zoology, geography, mathematics, and theology.

Literary works of the past were studied and copied, and new ones were composed.

The schools were headed by the ummia (“expert professor”), and the faculty invariably included not only a “man in charge of drawing” and a “man in charge of Sumerian,” but also a “man in charge of the whip.”

Apparently, discipline was strict; one school alumnus described on a clay tablet how he had been flogged for missing school, for insufficient neatness, for loitering, for not keeping silent, for misbehaving, and even for not having neat handwriting.

An epic poem dealing with the history of Erech concerns itself with the rivalry between Erech and the city-state of Kish. The epic text relates how the envoys of Kish proceeded to Erech, offering a peaceful settlement of their dispute.

But the ruler of Erech at the time, Gilgamesh, preferred to fight rather than negotiate.

What is interesting is that he had to put the matter to a vote in the Assembly of the Elders, the local “Senate”:

The lord Gilgamesh, Before the elders of his city put the matter,

Seeks out the decision:

“Let us not submit to the house of Kish, let us smite it with weapons.”

The Assembly of the Elders was, however, for negotiations.

Undaunted, Gilgamesh took the matter to the younger people, the Assembly of the Fighting Men, who voted for war. The significance of the tale lies in its disclosure that a Sumerian ruler had to submit the question of war or peace to the first bicameral congress, some 5,000 years ago.

The title of First Historian was bestowed by Kramer on Entemena, king of Lagash, who recorded on clay cylinders his war with neighboring Umma. While other texts were literary works or epic poems whose themes were historical events, the inscriptions by Entemena were straight prose, written solely as a factual record of history.

Because the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia were deciphered well before the Sumerian records, it was long believed that the first code of laws was compiled and decreed by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, circa 1900 B.C. But as Sumer’s civilization was uncovered, it became clear that the “firsts” for a system of laws, for concepts of social order, and for the fair administration of justice belonged to Sumer.

Well before Hammurabi, a Sumerian ruler of the city-state of Eshnunna (northeast of Babylon) encoded laws that set maximum prices for foodstuffs and for the rental of wagons and boats so that the poor could not be oppressed. There were also laws dealing with offenses against person and property, and regulations pertaining to family matters and to master-servant relations.

Even earlier, a code was promulgated by Lipit-Ishtar, a ruler of Isin. The thirtyeight laws that remain legible on the partly preserved tablet (a copy of an original that was engraved on a stone stela) deal with real estate, slaves and servants, marriage and inheritance, the hiring of boats, the rental of oxen, and defaults on taxes.

As was done by Hammurabi after him, Lipit-Ishtar explained in the prologue to his code that he acted on the instructions of “the great gods,” who had ordered him “to bring well-being to the Sumerians and the Akkadians.”

Yet even Lipit-Ishtar was not the first Sumerian law encoder. Fragments of clay tablets that have been found contain copies of laws encoded by Urnammu, a ruler of Ur circa 2350 B.C.—more than half a millennium before Hammurabi.