Term Paper on "Sumerian Civilization"

Term Paper 6 pages (1702 words) Sources: 3 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Sumerian Civilization

Approximately 4000 B.C., on the flood plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the Sumerians emerged, ruled by a priesthood with communities established around a temple (Watkins). David Fromkin, professor at Boston University, notes, "It was the Sumerians who invented civilization" (Conan). Although it is not known who exactly they were or where they came from, the Sumerians built their city states in the area now known as Iraq (Conan). Moreover, their language group is not one recognized from any other, yet they were immensely talented, looked and dressed much as people do today, and even drank and ate much the same things as today (Conan). Fromkin explains that the Sumerians possessed great skill in dealing with the rivers and irrigation, for they found the soil was immensely rich due to the accumulation of hundreds of years of silting (Conan). However the rivers were unpredictable, thus it took enormous skill and complexity on their part to devise systems for dealing with the water (Conan). Out of this society grew the world's first civilization, meaning it was a culture with cities, towns, villages, division of labor and all sorts of agriculture (Conan). It was their ability to create a huge agricultural surplus that enabled them to initiate trade, which resulted in wealth and in turn led to many inventions, for example many historians believe they invented the wheel (Conan). However, the most important thing the Sumerians invented was writing, thus written history began (Conan).

While the origin of the Sumerians is unknown, most scholars agree that they came south via the Persian Gulf (Watkins). Their literature speaks of Dilmun as being their homeland, yet no ruins comparable in age and complexity to the Sumerians have been found in that location (Watkins). Thayer Watkins of San Jose University notes that the Sumerians apparently practiced trading in their original homeland, and the "frequency of animal beings in the pantheon of their gods suggests some previous pastoral history," however their "language is unrelated to any other language in the world" (Watkins). Sometime around 2000 B.C., the Sumerians disappeared due to military domination by several Semitic peoples (Watkins).

Among the technical innovation attributed to the Sumerians are: writing (the cuneiform script on clay tablets) and systematic record keeping; the plow; social and economic organization; and units of time (the division of a day into 24 hours and one hour into 60 minutes) (Watkins). The Sumerians influenced other civilizations, especially Babylon and Egypt (Watkins). Watkins notes, "Upper Egypt would have been influenced through the sea routes from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea; Lower Egypt had contact by the same route or by the overland route along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean" (Watkins). It is likely that they also influenced the peoples of the Indus River Valley, and some scholars believe that the term 'Dilmun' in their literature does not refer to their homeland but rather to the Indus civilization as the land of opportunity (Watkins). It was through references to Sumer in writings found in the ruins of Babylon that the modern world came to know about the Sumerians, and these Babylonian writings referred to a civilization that was ancient even in Babylonian times (Watkins).

While the civilizations in the rest of the world developed writing as an aspect of the religious and political power of the royal persona, in Sumer, it was basically a form of bookkeeping (Wilkinson). Toby Wilkinson notes in the September 1995 issue of Antiquity that the largest body of archaic Sumerian writing comes from Uruk, "written on clay tablets in the pictographic signs which later developed into the cuneiform script," that date to around 3200-3000 B.C. (Wilkinson). These tablets serve as evidence for a series of three-dimensional symbols or tokens, some are numerals, while others are identified with animals or objects (Wilkinson). The content of the Uruk tablets is primarily "utilitarian, recording commodities, animals, persons and so on, presumably deriving from the bureaucracy of the temple within whose precincts the archives probably had been discarded" (Wilkinson). According to Wilkinson, approximately "15% of the texts are what is called by Mesopotamian experts 'lexical' - that is, lists of signs (which at this date also mean words) arranged in groups such as professions, trees, stones, etc." (Wilkinson). These are works of reference for the scribes as they learn and ply their craft, then later, around 2700-2600 B.C., texts begin to be used for non-utilitarian purpose (Wilkinson). Excavated settlements of this date are scarce in south Mesopotamia, and tablets bearing purely numerical texts, which have been found at widely separated sites outside Mesopotamia proper, indicate that this early version of the writing system was in use outside the walls of the temples by merchants (Wilkinson). There is no reason to assume that the people involved in temple administration were not equally integrated into secular society at the same time, and writing equally applicable to their secular needs (Wilkinson). The clay tablet texts in Mesopotamia demonstrate that wax-covered wooden writing boards were also used for administrative purposes from at least the 13th century B.C., however "the only examples that have survived archaeologically are a few library documents from the 1st millennium bearing literary texts and mostly of ivory" (Wilkinson).

Gregory B. Waymire explains in the September 2006 issue of Accounting Horizons that the basic recordkeeping function embodied in the modern journal entry lies at the core of all accounting systems, and the internal controls and verification by auditors transform transactional records into hard information that later makes it "difficult for people to disagree," thus the transactional record institutionalizes memory of past exchanges and allows third-party verification of previous events and obligations to resolve ex-post disputes (Waymire). Verifiable records are needed to sustain the trust and respect that enables complex economic cooperation between strangers over a period of time, and these opportunities for exchange aid the extensive division of labor and the larger, more complex societies that are the main causes of modern wealth generation (Waymire). In other words, recordkeeping and accounting co-evolve with the scale of exchange and the complexity in the division of labor (Waymire).

The earliest known use of systematic transaction records is found around 8000 B.C. among the Sumerian civilization (Waymire). They created ways to permanently record transactions several thousand years before they invented writing (Waymire). The Sumerians began using stone and baked clay tokens sometime between 8000 and 7500 B.C. To symbolically represent agricultural commodities that had been physically transferred, and by 4000 B.C., they were using complex incised tokens to signify manufactured goods (Waymire). These records allowed information to be stored and later interpreted, "which can expand the scope and scale of economic activity even when a written language and number system are not universally understood," notes Waymire (Waymire). This form of recordkeeping coincided with the beginning of agriculture, urban centers, and complex organizational structures, and cuneiform writing coincided with the beginning of business contracts between Sumerian families (Waymire). By 1800 B.C., the Assyrians had developed complex partnership agreements that are similar to a modern venture capital fund (Waymire).

The earliest tokens date to 8000 B.C., and appear to be part of a hierarchical society characterized by the redistribution of agricultural surplus (Waymire). Waymire explains that used tokens were destroyed in the season of plenty and feats following the harvest, and that one interpretation of this pattern is that the larger cooperative groups ventures organized by a charismatic leader required individual contributions for community storage of grains or for feasts the helped establish good partnerships with neighboring groups (Waymire).

Agriculture requires that resources be committed long before crops are harvested, therefore the yield is dependent upon human labor inputs, and the harvest requires processing, distribution, and storage prior to consumption (Waymire). Such cooperation usually relies on sharecropping, an exchange of manual labor for a share of the harvest (Waymire). Waymire explains, agriculture involves complex trade overtime, "rather than a simple contemporaneous barter of goods, and requires that up-front labor and capital inputs be tracked and that the harvest be subsequently divided as stipulated in an initial agreement" (Waymire). In order for this system to work effectively, a transaction history that recorded what the parties had provided and their remaining obligations was necessary (Waymire). Moreover, a system of laws was needed to deal with matters of property, contracts, and trade (Waymire).

Waymire notes, that even simple exchange requires the need to work out "basic matters like money, timekeeping, arithmetic, weights and measures, and means of dispute resolution when promises are not kept" (Waymire). Such issues are generally resolved through the trail-and-error process that characterizes 'man's continual search for a better mousetrap," and this process typically occurs in several technologies simultaneously (Waymire). In other words, details of one institution are not worked out before moving on to the next, therefore "innovation in exchange-enabling institutions probably coincides with expanded trade, urban development, specialized production, and improved information technologies" (Waymire).

According to archeological remains, the Sumerians were the first civilization that used a complex system of bookkeeping that allowed… READ MORE

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