The Sumerians were an ancient people who formed independent city-states ruled by a king and had a theocratic society. They believed in multiple gods, including local gods who represented people. The Sumerians developed the first writing system, cuneiform, and produced a large body of literature and visual art. Their mythology greatly influenced other civilizations in the Near East.
The Sumerians were a group of people believed to have migrated to the area known as Sumer in southern Mesopotamia before 4000 BC. They formed multiple city-states, which were independent cities ruled by a king. The Sumerians thrived for much of the same period as Egyptian civilization, but they did not share the Egyptian focus on life after death. Unlike Egypt, which was ruled by a king, the Sumerians also had a theocratic society: they believed the ultimate rulers of their society were the deities they worshipped, and each city-state had a local god. The main elements of Sumerian mythology include their story of the creation of the world and other stories about various Sumerian gods.
In Sumerian mythology, the local god represented people and was expected to speak on their behalf to other gods who controlled nature. The Sumerian temple was the political and religious center of every city-state. These temples are called ziggurats and some were as tall as the Egyptian pyramids. Houses, workshops and warehouses surrounded the ziggurats. The most famous ziggurat was the biblical Tower of Babel.
The ziggurats of Sumer looked like mountains and their appearance refers to the Sumerian mythology about the creation of the world. The Sumerians believed in a primordial sea that gave birth to a cosmic mountain containing both heaven and earth. An, the sky god, was male and ki, the earth goddess, was female. Enlil, the god of the air, was their son, and one story says that Enlil separated heaven and earth. Other notable deities in Sumerian mythology include Ninlil, an air goddess and wife of Enlil; Enki, the god of fresh water and male fertility; Inanna, the goddess of love and female fertility; and Ninurta, the god of war and agriculture.
The Sumerian language is unlike any other language. The Sumerians developed the first writing system, called cuneiform, around 3000 BC. They produced a large body of poetic literature which records much of the narrative of their religion. The Epic of Gilgamesh is probably the best known Sumerian legend. Before the development of cuneiform, religious stories existed as folklore that was communicated orally.
The remains of Sumerian culture are scant compared to those of Egyptian culture, but thousands of clay literary tablets were excavated before 1900. Translating these tablets is a difficult process, but these writings have contributed much to the understanding of Sumerian mythology. The Sumerians also produced a rich amount of visual art, including statues representing various deities. They believed that gods were present in those statues.
The Sumerians had contacts with other major civilizations, including the Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks. They greatly influenced these civilizations, as well as others in the Near East. Most Near Eastern cultures adopted the cuneiform writing system, and some ideas from Sumerian mythology found their way into other religions.
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