World 5000 Years History Stories

Author: Yin Han
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: When it comes to ancient civilizations of the world, people can name them off the top of their heads: China, India, Egypt, and Babylon. In fact, Babylonian civilization is only a part of Mesopotamian civilization, and before the Babylonian era, there was the Sumerian era. So, the famous American historian Edward Burns said, "History begins with Sumer." History is divided into two categories: written records and archaeological research. And modern people's understanding of human life for the first 35,000 years relies entirely on archaeological records, because before a little more than 5,000 years ago, although humans left behind many artifacts, there was no written proof. However, around 3200 BCE, in a region called Sumer in Mesopotamia, people invented writing. With writing, speech could be recorded, and contemporary scholars could thus understand the deeds of ancient men and women. In this sense, "history began."
Between 3500 and 3200 BCE, Mesopotamia was situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Its social and cultural life was based on city-states, making it one of the first civilized regions on Earth. We can call the period from 3200 to 2000 BCE the "Sumerian Era," because the most advanced region in Mesopotamia was the Sumerian region in its south. Sumer was a marshy area, roughly the size of Massachusetts in the United States. For the first 900 years of the Sumerian era, Sumer did not have a unified government but was dotted with many independent city-states, the most important of which included Uruk, Ur, and Lagash. Around 2320 BCE, the entire Sumerian region was conquered by a powerful warrior from Akkad, located to the north of Mesopotamia. This warrior had the title of "Sargon" (meaning "true king"), and his contemporaries called him "the Great Sargon." The Mesopotamian records state that he controlled Sumer after winning 34 battles and later marched victoriously to the "lower sea" (Persian Gulf), where he washed his weapons with seawater to signify the end of the war. For nearly 200 years thereafter, the dynasty founded by the Great Sargon ruled an empire composed of Akkad and Sumer.
One of the inventions of the Sumerians was the wheel, which was invented around 3200 BCE. Comparatively, it shows how advanced this invention was: the Egyptians did not know about wheeled transport until around 1700 BCE, and the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere had no idea what it was before the Europeans introduced the wheel (except for the wheeled toys of Peruvian children). The Sumerians, who used a circular device with an axle to transport goods, may have been inspired by pottery wheels, as wheels were already used in pottery production in Iran around 4000 BCE and were introduced to Sumer about 500 years later. The Sumerians, who attached wheels to sledges to create a better transport tool, can be justly ranked among the earliest inventors in human history. The earliest wheeled transport tools of the Sumerians were two-wheeled chariots and four-wheeled carts.