Sumerian History

"Among the earliest civilizations were the diverse peoples living in the fertile valleys lying between the Tigris and Euphrates valley, or Mesopotamia, which in Greek means, "between the rivers." In the south of this region, in an area now in Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a mysterious group of people, speaking a language unrelated to any other human language we know of, began to live in cities, which were ruled by some sort of monarch, and began to write. These were the Sumerians, and around 3000 BC they began to form large city-states in southern Mesopotamia that controlled areas of several hundred square miles. The names of these cities speak from a distant and foggy past: Ur, Lagash, Eridu. These Sumerians were constantly at war with one another and other peoples, for water was a scarce and valuable resource. The result over time of these wars was the growth of larger city-states as the more powerful swallowed up the smaller city-states. Eventually, the Sumerians would have to battle another peoples, the Akkadians, who migrated up from the Arabian Peninsula. The Akkadians were a Semitic people, that is, they spoke a Semitic language related to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic. When the two peoples clashed, the Sumerians gradually lost control over the city-states they had so brilliantly created and fell under the hegemony of the Akkadian kingdom which was based in Akkad, the city that was later to become Babylon.

But that was not the end of the Sumerians. The Akkadians abandoned much of their culture and absorbed vast amounts of Sumerian culture, including their religion, writing, government structure, literature, and law. But the Sumerians retained nominal control over many of their defeated city-states, and in 2125, the Sumerian city of Ur rose up against the Akkadians and gained for their daring control over the city-states of southern Mesopotamia. But the revival of Sumerian fortune was to be short-lived, for after a short century, another wave of Semitic migrations signed the end of the original creators of Mesopotamian culture.

But history sometimes plays paradoxical games and human cultures sometimes persist in strange ways. For the great experiment of the Sumerians was civilization, a culture transformed by the practical effects of urbanization, writing, and monarchy. While the Sumerians disappear from the human story around 2000 BC, the invaders that overthrew them adopted their culture and became, more or less, Sumerian. They adopted the government, economy, city-living, writing, law, religion, and stories of the original peoples. Why? What would inspire a people to deliberately adopt foreign ways?"

http://www.wsu.edu/~dee//MESO/SUMER.HTM