What is Sumerian civilization?

The development of alluvial basins in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and the establishment of Sumerian civilization were in the previous chapter. We noticed that the invention of farming brought a problem, that is, how to find a way to settle down once the land cultivators broke through the restrictions of small oases scattered in southwest Asia. The residents in these oases have completed the transformation from gathering food to producing food under the condition of natural irrigation. In the wider area of the civilization center of the old continent, farmers can only rely on natural rainfall to irrigate their crops, but now there have been phased and gradual changes here. Once the cultivated land is exhausted, the wandering agriculture that is abandoned forever will be replaced by rotation agriculture. In rotation agriculture, after a piece of land is cultivated by slash-and-burn method, it must go through a fallow period before planting crops again. When enough wild trees grow in the field again, the once abandoned land can be cultivated again. In areas with abundant rainfall, people only learn a new way of life after many generations, perhaps centuries. They settled on a piece of land, which was enough for a peasant family to farm and make a living. In this way, people can leave their houses and land to future generations. Since then, this state of being fixed on a piece of cultivated land has become a symbol of easement in various societies, in which people could have chosen various economic opportunities. However, fundamentally speaking, people have reached a certain technical level through long-term efforts. Therefore, fixing the settled farmers on the land is also a social reward for this effort. After all, this kind of return is what people strive for. Some-perhaps most-immigrants from the Oasis of Southwest Asia have long since left the rain-rich areas in the center of civilization and scattered around until they learn to live in peace without relying on natural irrigation. Nevertheless, there is a very vast land in this area, which is very close to the agricultural cradle of Southwest Asia Oasis. Here, once people use artificial irrigation and drainage systems to conquer and develop this area, pioneers will get more benefits from it than their ancestors did from the oasis where they lived. This promising land is located in the jungle and swamp area in the lower reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates River basin, where fertile alluvial soil and fertile water sources are wonderfully mixed and have great agricultural potential. Conquering this jungle swamp is not only a technical achievement, but also a social achievement. Of course, all scientific and technological achievements of mankind are social achievements. Man is a gregarious animal. If our ape ancestors were not gregarious animals, they would not have survived and evolved into adults. Obviously, the finiteness of human society has always been the shackles of its infinite technical ability. Sociality is a necessary prerequisite for making and using even the simplest tools. Farmers living in a small oasis in southwest Asia may have found a way to artificially improve the irrigation conditions endowed by nature. In order to develop alluvial soil, this is a gift to the people in the two river basins. People must use the artificial irrigation technology they have learned in a wider range, so they need cooperation far beyond any previous cooperative undertakings. Compared with the past, the scope of such cooperation is quite different. And not only the scale is different, but also the nature of cooperation is different. Therefore, this is a social revolution, not just a technological revolution. There must be some leaders in the two river basins who participated in the planning activities of human conquest of alluvial basins. These leaders are imaginative, far-sighted and able to work consciously, although this ultimately profitable work can not bring immediate benefits to people. If leaders can't convince a large number of compatriots to pursue their goals, their grand plan can only be Conan's dream, because for most people, the slogan of struggle is incredible. The masses must trust their leaders, and the basis of this trust must be faith in the gods, because for leaders and their followers, the power and wisdom of the gods are real. An indispensable new tool-written language came into being. Leaders need this new tool in the process of organizing their work. Because of the vast area of water resources and land to be developed and the large number of participants, it is difficult to carry out fruitful work only by remembering oral agreements and instructions without recording them. Inventing Sumerian script is the masterpiece of creative genius. However, this earliest known writing system is complex and rough, and it is very old and difficult to read. It serves the needs of the whole society, while ensuring that literate leaders maintain their dominant position in illiteracy. In the process of developing the alluvial basin in the lower reaches of the Tigris-Euphrates River, Sumerians first created a new human society: regional civilization. The reason why this achievement is attributed to Sumerians is that at this stage of writing evolution, the language expressed in Sumerian literature has been understood by us. However, we can't confirm whether Sumerians were the earliest inventors of writing, or whether they were the first pioneers to turn jungle swamps into fertile fields. The Sumerians who conquered the jungle swamp could not be aborigines, because this wasteland was not suitable for human habitation before it was developed. Some of the earliest Sumerian settlements, Ur, uruk and Elidu, are located on the southwest edge of the country, adjacent to Arabia. However, it seems unlikely that Sumerians came from Arabia, and their language has nothing in common with Semitic people, while a large number of immigrants from Arabia poured into neighboring Asia and Africa spoke Semitic language. Sumerian civilization is the earliest regional civilization in history, and it is also the only civilization that directly originated from one or several pre-civilized societies. It is not a copy of any existing society of the same type, and it has not even received any enlightenment. (Central American civilization may also have originated directly from its pre-civilization ancestors, but the origin of Central American civilization is still controversial. The discovery of modern archaeology proves that Sumerian civilization has at least two remarkable features: first, its characters, which we can see, people created written characters from hieroglyphics (that is, the visual images of people, things, events and behaviors). More creative is the invention of ideographic symbols (such conventional symbols are not necessarily comprehensive or even incomplete. However, for all members of literate classes in Sumerian society, they have exactly the same meaning. In the last stage, phonemes (that is, cooperative symbols to express the sounds used in spoken English) were invented. Sumerians never completely turned to phonemes, and their writing was a mixture of vague and arbitrary phonemes and ideograms. Ideographic characters have an inevitable disadvantage, that is, a large number. However, compared with phonemes, they have the advantage that a meaning can always be associated with a symbol, and with the passage of time, in the evolution of spoken language, a sound and a symbol will lose their initial cooperative relationship. However, phonemes have an advantage over ideographs because their number is limited. The number of phonemes that humans can emit is limited. In fact, every language of human beings can only choose some phonemes from its potential voice inventory. At the initial stage when we knew that there were pictures and written records, Sumerian civilization showed the characteristics of other members of the same type of society, and it was only the oldest specimen. Sumerian society took the lead in producing surplus products in the civilized center of the old continent while developing alluvial basins to make them suitable for farming, that is, the output of products exceeded the minimum demand for survival every year. However, this surplus product is not evenly distributed among all social workers, although they have contributed to social production activities in different ways and to different degrees. If the surplus products are evenly distributed, everyone's share is negligible, because this surplus is very small compared with the total amount needed for survival. Nevertheless, the production of surplus products is the starting point of a revolution. In fact, the surplus products are left and occupied by a few privileged people. Their time and energy are not spent on grain production, which is the labor that most people engage in all their lives. Distributing surplus products to a few people is the economic basis of class differentiation. Although this is a necessary condition for the ruling class to enjoy the privilege, if the masses do not believe that the ruling class has obtained this privilege because of serving the whole society, this privilege will be disgusted by the masses and will not be tolerated by the masses. The service provided by the ruling class is real. This kind of service is really essential if society wants to survive in an artificially created environment and benefit everyone. The development and conquest of alluvial basin created such a good living environment. In a word, a few rulers have economically occupied the agricultural surplus products in the alluvial basin. They not only provide services to the public, but also spend their leisure time enjoying luxurious private life. The primary task of serving the public is to manage the whole community with a city as the core. Compared with it, in terms of the scale and complexity of its system, it dwarfs the ancestors of the Neolithic Age. Contrary to Neolithic farmers, Sumerian farmers were not responsible for organizing farming. The necessary condition for the survival of the whole community is to maintain the irrigation system. Therefore, ensuring that dams and canals are intact, just like farming farmland, has become a part of farmers' obligation. All actions of farmers must be carried out under the guidance of public authority, because the allocation of a certain amount of irrigation water in special seasons is a matter of life and death and must be decided by the authority with supreme power. We noticed that the ruler's power on the earth was praised by supernatural forces. For people who work and live in alluvial basins, managing irrigation system is the primary public function of rulers. In addition, the ruler is the middleman between the community and the gods. Although a city-state has a large population and is divided into different classes, the belief in divine power and wisdom is the spiritual force to promote the coordinated action of all the people in Sumerian city-state, and the rulers also use part of their wealth and leisure for personal enjoyment, such as being served by servants and enjoying handicrafts. With the appearance of metal tools, metal handicrafts are constantly coming out, but most of the stone tools used by farmers for farming are made by themselves. Another new feature of Sumerian civilization is that people who are fed by agricultural surplus products produced by most people and who account for a minority of the population are concentrated in cities. Perhaps these cities were just sacrificial centers of ceremonies at first. People from the whole community gather here regularly to hold religious ceremonies or organize public welfare projects closely related to everyone. At first, this kind of sacrifice center may have only a few long-term residents, with the increase of a small number of non-agricultural population. Especially after the division of labor between priests and secular managers came into being among these people (there was no division of labor between them at first), these people lived in houses around the altar with their scribes, servants and craftsmen, and the sacrifice center gradually developed into a city. Class differentiation is the first social evil. It is also the price people paid for the birth of Sumerian civilization. The geographical isolation between urban and rural areas has accelerated the process of class differentiation. The second evil consequence of Sumerian civilization is war. The premise of these two evils is the production of surplus products. In a community, every able-bodied worker must spend all his working time producing food, and they don't even have extra time to be a part-time administrator, priest, craftsman or soldier. What are the basic characteristics of this new social type established by Sumerians? Surplus products, class division, writing, immortal buildings, urban settlements and wars are all new remarkable features, but the most crucial thing is the change of God's nature and function. People can only infer religions that have become prehistoric societies in the past from visual arts: cave murals in the late Paleolithic period, such as the three-dimensional portraits in Le Panski-Weil caves, that is, some figurines symbolizing prolific mothers in the Neolithic period. We can only guess the etiquette and myths related to it through them. The documents left by Sumerians provide a lot of information about Sumerian coefficient and other aspects of life, because the earliest documents written in Sumerian have been read by people. In these documents, we saw a temple of Sumerian gods. We find that these gods have entered the second stage of their historical development. When Sumerian civilization was just born, its gods partly represented the forces of nature. At first, this may be the only function of the gods. However, some of these gods now play a dual role. Each of them should represent the collective strength of human beings in a specific Sumerian city-state. This dual role of Sumerian God reflects a revolution in the relationship between man and nature. At first, when Sumerian gods appeared in people's minds, human beings still had to bow to nature; When mankind conquers with collective strength. After the alluvial basin was developed and settled here, the balance of power between human beings and nature fell to the human side. As a social animal, man has proved that he can add his will to a corner of the natural kingdom, which seemed unconquerable in the past. While continuing to worship the inhuman forces that were regarded as omnipotent in the past, people began to worship their collective strength, which shows that they admit their inspiring victory. Sumerians who conquered the alluvial basin turned their ancestors' gods into sacred protectors or sacred servants of the sovereign state of mankind, and recorded the changes of this fate. As a representative of natural forces, Sumerian gods are still an inseparable part of the entire Sumerian social and cultural heritage. As representatives of the city-states, they respectively embodied the Sumerian will with conflicting interests. These gods are politically divided and no longer mixed up. The new function of this god has been recorded in the earliest existing Sumerian literature, which is an ominous sign for the future of Sumerian civilization. If people not only use powerful collective power to conquer and develop inhuman nature, but also use it in internecine wars between well-organized and well-equipped human forces everywhere, then the achievements of human beings in defeating nature will be destroyed once.