Ancient Sumer: where writing began
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What you will learn
By the end, you can say where Sumer was, how its people wrote, and what they gave the world.
Over five thousand years ago, in the land between two rivers, people built the first great cities and pressed marks into clay to keep records. Those marks were the very first writing. The people were the Sumerians.
Read the explanation
Sumer grew between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia, in today’s Iraq, around 4000 BCE. The Sumerians built city-states with temples called ziggurats, farmed with canals, and invented cuneiform — wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay with a reed. They are also credited with the wheel, the sail, and a counting system based on 60, which is why an hour has 60 minutes.
- Sumer grew in Mesopotamia around 4000 BCE.
- They wrote cuneiform marks on clay.
- They invented the wheel and the sail.
- Their base-60 counting gave us the 60-minute hour.