![]() ![]() © Nic McPhee from Morris (published under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons) 2600 BC) and now is curated by the British Museum. The seal belonged to Queen Puabi of Ur (approx. Impression of a Sumerian cylindrical seal representing a typical scene of a banquet. Both the Akkadians living in southern Mesopotamia since time immemorial and the Amorites, who took it over in the late 21st century BC and used Semitic languages, preserved the Sumerian language as a language of elites, just like Latin that was the language of elites in Europe not long ago. Nevertheless, the Sumerian language was still commonly used in writing at the beginning of the 2nd millennium, not only in religious texts (including the famous Epic of Gilgamesh ), but also in many economic documents. Probably from the very beginning, Sumerians shared southern Mesopotamia with Akkadians, who inhabited the area of later Babylonia (vicinity of modern Baghdad), and there is a number of arguments suggesting that already in the mid-3rd millennium BC most of the population of Sumer used the Akkadian language on a daily basis. Near_East_topographic_map-blank.svg: Sémhur (published under CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)įrom the very beginning the Sumerian civilization was attractive to its neighbours, which is reflected in the adaptation of the cuneiform script to other languages (Akkadian, Hittite, Elamite) and the diffusion of the Sumerian city-state system into other regions of the Near East. ![]() The map shows the range of the Persian Gulf in the late 3rd and early 2nd millennium BC Sumer stretches from Erid to Nippur, the region between Kish and Sippar was occupied by Akkadians, then in the 2nd millennium it was the core of the Babylonian state. The most important cities of Mesopotamia in the late 3rd millennium BC. They developed a network of irrigation channels that made it possible to cultivate cereals in desert areas of the Lower Euphrates, introduced an ideographic script, initially pictographic and then simplified to the form of cuneiform characters impressed in wet clay, built the biggest cities in the world at that time, with monumental temples and enormous palaces. Sumerians are known as the founders of the urban civilization that dominated in southern Mesopotamia in the 4th and 3rd millennia BC.
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