The Sumerians

More than 5,000 years ago, in what is today southern Iraq, one of the world’s first civilisations emerged. A civilisation often credited with the invention of writing, the wheel and cities. The Sumerians. The Sumerians are a people that you have probably heard of, but might not know too much about. And in today’s episode of The Ancients, we are re-releasing our episode from a few years back where we finally delved into their story. We’re going to explore their cities, their language, their artefacts and so much more. This is the story of the Sumerians, with our guest. The Assyriologist and great friend of the podcast, Dr Paul Collins. Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan and the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. LIVE SHOW: Buy tickets for The Ancients at the London Podcast Festival here: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/the-ancients-2/ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 1:59Tristan Hughes?

  More than 5,000 years ago, in what is today southern Iraq, one of the world's first civilizations emerged.

• 2:07Tristan Hughes?

  A civilization often credited with the invention of writing, the wheel and cities, the Sumerians. The Sumerians are a people that you have probably heard of, but might not know too much about. And in today's episode of The Ancients, we are re-releasing our episode from a few years back, where we finally delved into their story. We're going to explore their cities, their language, their artefacts and so much more. This is the story of the Sumerians, with our guest, the Assyriologist and great friend of the podcast, Dr Paul Collins.

• 2:46Tristan Hughes?

  Paul, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  Thank you very much, delighted to be here.

• 2:50Tristan Hughes?

  And it's great to be doing it in person at the Ashmolean Museum. And this is an incredible place when talking about the Sumerians, isn't it, straight off the bat?

• 2:56Speaker 05

  We're extraordinarily lucky here. I mean, we've got such a rich collection, which means we can explore 10,000 years of ancient Middle Eastern history. And of course, within that, a great deal of material which relates to the Sumerians.

• 3:12Tristan Hughes?

  First of all, Paul, this is a really intriguing ancient Mesopotamian culture, isn't it? Because it feels almost, we mentioned it just before we started talking, it's like the Phoenicians and the Assyrians. The Sumerians is another name that I'm sure most people have heard of, but probably don't know actually too much about.

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Well, the Sumerians may seem familiar because of course they've been credited in lots of books, usually just the first few pages when exploring history, with the invention of writing, sometimes with the invention of the wheel, with the invention of cities. So they sit very much in people's minds, if they know anything at all, as the roots of our modern way of life.

• 3:54Tristan Hughes?

  And so who are the Sumerians? When and where are we talking?

• 3:59Speaker 05

  Well, traditionally, one thinks of the Sumerians as a people who occupied the southern region of modern Iraq. Ancient Mesopotamia at the head of the Persian Gulf. And in a period between roughly 3,500 and 2,000 B.C., they created some of the world's first cities.

• 4:21Tristan Hughes?

  So this is before the Assyrians, before the Akadians, before the Babylonians. This is going back, you say, millennia?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  So this is the moment we move from prehistory to history. Because again, it is that moment when writing is developed.

• 4:35Tristan Hughes?

  So what sorts of sources, I think I know the answer to this already then, Paul. What sorts of sources do we have when trying to learn more about the Sumerians?

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Well, there is our challenge, because of course we have lots of excavated sites dating to this period. But we see the emergence of technologies of writing, which begin to then express spoken languages. And by around 3,000 B.C., 2,800 B.C., scholars are able to read in that writing the Sumerian language.

• 5:12Tristan Hughes?

  We will delve into the language, but first of all, you mentioned the scholars figuring out the Sumerian language. So let's actually talk about the discovery of the Sumerians first of all, because this is interesting in itself. Because I guess in human history, our knowledge of the Sumerians, it comes quite late.

• 5:28Speaker 05

  It does. The Sumerians were unknown until about 150 years ago. So whereas people in the West could read about the Assyrians, they could read about the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the other peoples of the ancient Middle East, through both the classical sources, but also primarily the biblical texts, the Hebrew Bible recorded stories of these people. But the Sumerians are not mentioned. And so when the ancient texts of Mesopotamia began to be uncovered and read, what was first discovered were the languages of some of these familiar people. The languages of the Assyrians and the Babylonians.

• 6:11Speaker 05

  And it was only through close analysis of those texts that the Sumerians began to emerge.

• 6:18Tristan Hughes?

  So talk me through how these people and who these people were, who deciphered, who discovered the Sumerian language?

• 6:25Speaker 05

  Well, the work began really in the middle of the 19th century with big excavations in northern Iraq, at places like Nineveh and Nimrud. And there was revealed lots and lots of texts using the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia, this wedge-shaped writing system. And scholars began to investigate what these signs actually represented. Lots of scholars engaged in this activity in France and in England. And one scholar in particular made a fundamental breakthrough. And this was a man who gets very little credit in the literature, someone called Edward Hinks.

• 7:06Speaker 05

  He's actually a vicar in Ireland, and he was a brilliant linguist. And in 1846, he realised that these cuneiform signs were actually syllabic. They were used to build up using sound values, words and meanings. And he recognised that the language encoded in that script was a Semitic language, like Arabic and Hebrew, which was the language of the Assyrians and Babylonians. But he also then recognised, about three years later, that some of these signs were being used in a rather peculiar way, which suggested that there was an underlying other language there.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  This is the language which we now recognise as Sumeria. At the time, of course, this was completely unknown and had a very different grammatical structure to Semitic. It was something new.

• 8:02Tristan Hughes?

  This is so interesting, Paul, because for a Joe Brogs, when looking at, let's say, cuneiform, I guess it's perhaps easy to think that cuneiform is just one sort of language, shall we say, which stays the same. But from what you're saying, for the scholars... Looking at cuneiform tablets, when you delve into the detail, you can see different cuneiform languages within the cuneiform tablets that survive.

• 8:26Speaker 05

  So cuneiform is an incredibly flexible system, actually, because, of course, it's the signs represent essentially sound values, so it can be used to write any language, it can be used to write English, essentially, but with using that system, you can use also signs to represent entire words or signs to represent a sense of meaning. Although the earliest languages recognised within this system were these Semitic languages, they were actually relatively late in terms of recording. And hidden within these late recorded languages were these elements which pointed to this earlier recorded language.

• 9:11Tristan Hughes?

  And just to clarify quickly, what do we mean by a Semitic language?

• 9:14Speaker 05

  Semitic is the way in which a language is formed grammatically, so the way in which it functions in terms of the structure of the verbs, the way in which it organises itself, essentially. And as I say, Semitic languages include modern day Arabic and modern day Hebrew, so they have basically the same grammatical structure. And that's what we find with these earlier Semitic languages like Assyrian and Babylonian. Now, the language that was being teased out from these ancient texts, which we now call Sumerian, had a very different structure. And so grammatically, it's unique.

• 9:55Speaker 05

  It doesn't belong to the Semitic family of languages, and in fact, may have belonged to a much wider family of languages, which is no longer spoken. And so it's often now described as an isolate, rather like modern day Basque, it has no connection with other spoken languages.

• 10:15Tristan Hughes?

  So how does this language get the name Sumerian? Did the people who were writing this thousands of years ago, do they not consider themselves Sumerians?

• 10:24Speaker 05

  The scholars who were discovering this language, of course, didn't know what to call it, because there was no word essentially in the text that helped them do that. And another scholar in the late 1860s came up with a suggestion which he offered to the scholarly community, which he based actually on a Semitic text. And this was a phrase which read "king of Sumer and Akkad". But this is Semitic, this is Babylonian. But because Sumerian was so poorly known, it was agreed among the scholars that they would use this term "Sumer and Sumerian" as the way forward.

• 11:09Speaker 05

  And so it sort of stuck. So we're actually left with a Semitic term to refer to this other language.

• 11:18Tristan Hughes?

  It's quite interesting, isn't it? A Semitic term to refer to a non-Semitic language. But Paul, that is really interesting, and I want to keep on the writing a bit longer because I want to delve more into this. So what sorts of writings have survived in the cuneiform tablets that are in Sumerian?

• 11:35Speaker 05

  So the earliest tablets in Sumerian that are readable are very bureaucratic. They are lists of things, they're created by administrators, designed to manage big agricultural estates. So it's about moving resources between storerooms or distributing things to workers. But among those very early texts, so around 2800 BC, are also contracts. So a record of the transfer of property or other goods between individuals.

• 12:15Speaker 05

  And those are very often carved on stone because they're intended to last as a legal document, whereas all the other documents, the administrative texts, are on clay, which were not intended to last. They're rather ephemeral post-it notes almost, which was just for business.

• 12:32Tristan Hughes?

  So are we quite lucky to have those clay tablets that do survive? I mean, are these ones which would have been excavated at particular sites and were under the ground and have been uncovered by archaeologists, let's say?

• 12:43Speaker 05

  We're very lucky. In digging sites within ancient Iraq, because the clay tablets survive. Even the sun-dried tablets survive extraordinarily well. In other cultures, say for example in Egypt, where they're using perishable materials, you have to rely on other factors to preserve the papyrus or the parchment. But clay survives remarkably well, and so we've got these very, very early records surviving in their thousands. And clay, of course, is cheap. It's everywhere in southern Iraq. That's the world that it's based on. You're building your houses from it, you're making your pottery from it, and you're using

• 13:28Speaker 05

  it to write on. So it's an incredibly flexible material. And because it's cheap and flexible, and you have a system which is sufficiently complex to record a spoken language, and all the ideas that come out of that, it lasts for thousands of years.

• 13:43Tristan Hughes?

  Do we have any idea if there were any other languages that were being spoken alongside Sumerian during this Sumerian period?

• 13:51Speaker 05

  Almost certainly, and we get hints of that in the texts themselves. So within texts that are written in Sumerian, there are grammatical elements which suggest that there are Semitic languages in the background, as it were. And it may well be that the scribes of Mesopotamia in this period were taught to write Sumerian, even if their spoken language in the street was Semitic or another language. And so it was the tool of administration and that you had to learn Sumerian essentially, just to function as an administrator.

• 14:33Tristan Hughes?

  So as we wrap up writing there, from the latest archaeological evidence that we have, can we still say that we believe that the Sumerians, these people, are the first people that we know of who developed writing?

• 14:47Speaker 05

  I think we can be relatively confident that the person who developed writing spoke Sumerian.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  That, however, is an assumption because the earliest texts can't, we can't read the language behind the signs. They are simply recording information, which could essentially be written by anybody, speaking any language. But after several centuries of using those techniques of recording, we find the Sumerian language as the first one to be expressed grammatically. So that, most scholars, I think, agree that the likelihood is that the majority of the population in southern Iraq in the late fourth millennium, early third millennium, are speaking Sumerian. And it was one of them who came up with this idea.

• 15:41Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned southern Iraq. So what does this area of Mesopotamia, what does it look like at the time of the Sumerians?

• 15:51Speaker 05

  Certainly in the late fourth millennium, through much of the third millennium B.C., it's an incredibly watery place. The waters of the Persian Gulf were much further north than they are today. And so cities that are very familiar in the Sumerian world like Ur and Eridu and Uruk would have been almost maritime worlds, looking out to the Persian Gulf on one side, but then looking inland to an incredibly rich agricultural world of lagoons and waterways and marshland. And it's in that marshy environment of which pockets

• 16:31Speaker 05

  survived in modern Iraq that this Sumerian culture emerged. So where transport was easy along all the river streams, and of course, the alluvial soil that the rivers had been depositing over millennia was incredibly rich for agricultural produce.

• 16:50Tristan Hughes?

  That's interesting when you mentioned the Sumerian culture emerging. So I'm guessing this is really shrouded in the mystery of the origins of the Sumerians, but I'm guessing it's more to be think that they are the population of that area and then they become the Sumerian civilization, or that they came from elsewhere and settled there?

• 17:05Speaker 05

  Well, it's a difficult question because of course we talk about the Sumerians, but only from the point of view really when we can understand their language. So before, we're in prehistory and then we don't know about population groups or the languages indeed that they're speaking. But there's sufficient archaeological continuity from deep prehistory actually to suggest that large parts of the population are simply there and not changing. So it's possible that they're already speaking as a Sumerian in those places. And we have good evidence now for the sort of watery worlds where areas of land which

• 17:47Speaker 05

  were above the floodwaters became the focus for these early settlements. And the style of architecture, for example, continues then through into the historic period. So we don't need to necessarily look for people coming from outside. However, early scholars from the mid 19th century assumed from the beginning that they could talk about people as groups of mobile groups that moved as one. And they came, according to their theories, from outside, bringing Sumerian civilization with them.

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• 20:00Tristan Hughes?

  Over, as you said, it's only been 150 years or so since the Sumerians have been discovered. But over that time, there's been a lot of development of ideas, of theories, and I think that's probably a great example of one of those, isn't it?

• 20:13Speaker 05

  It is, and the Sumerians were caught up very much with 19th and early 20th century ideas around race, which came with the understanding that people belonged to certain groups by their physical characteristics, by the way in which they thought, the way in which they worked together, the way in which they spoke, their languages. So you had these groups of people emerging in different parts of the world and then were placed on a sliding scale of how they compared to essentially Western civilization. So you could move along that sliding scale, both in the contemporary world, but also in the past.

• 20:57Speaker 05

  And the Sumerians, because they were envisaged as having this language, different than the Semitic people of the Middle East, were thought to come from outside the region, bringing with them this extraordinary developments of cities and writing. So you had a model that was being imposed essentially on the evidence, one that, of course, we now completely reject.

• 21:25Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. But let's move on back on to the Sumerians, because you did mention something else that I know a lot of us will be keen, I'd love to ask that now, and that is, of course, cities. And so we know from this area of southern Iraq, we know of... Many, shall we say, many cities or city-states linked to the Sumerians.

• 21:44Speaker 05

  Well, cities is a difficult term in a way because how do you define a city? So that's open to debate. And it was assumed from the early excavations in the late 19th, early 20th century that southern Iraq, this great alluvial floodplain of the region, was the place where the world's first cities emerged, tied very much to this idea of the Sumerian population. And of course, there are enormous settlements there. Around 3,000 B.C., the city of Uruk is about one square mile, which makes it probably the largest settlement on the planet at that date with tens of thousands of people.

• 22:24Speaker 05

  We now know, however, since those excavations began in the early 20th century, that the idea of urban centres is actually much older. And we can look to sites further up the river Euphrates in modern day Syria, to places like Tell Brak, way north of the alluvial plains of Iraq, where about 4,000 B.C., so a thousand years earlier, we have a large urban centre with monumental architecture and some of the technologies that would eventually need to administrative ideas like writing. So we can now trace back some of those ideas much, much earlier,

• 23:09Speaker 05

  beyond the world, usually associated with the Sumerians.

• 23:13Tristan Hughes?

  From research such as that at other places like Tell Brak, is it giving people like yourself more an idea of how cities, well, I'll put cities in dead marks, in the Sumerian area, settlements interacted with other settlements perhaps further away, perhaps trade or resources that were available? And of course, just relations in general? Are we learning a bit more about that too?

• 23:35Speaker 05

  Oh, incredible new evidence coming to light and very often the result of new areas being explored by archaeology simply because they haven't looked, they haven't found it. And and you're finding examples of not just urban complexity, large peoples, large numbers of people coming together. But also dispersed settlements, which are effectively doing the same things as cities. And these smaller communities are all working together and cities are effect just clumping together. And types of of living uh i- in a more sort of compact arrangement, which you can find in other patterns elsewhere.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  So different ways of people sharing ideas, sharing materials, but over long, long distances.

• 24:21Tristan Hughes?

  It's absolutely remarkable. I love that we're learning more about that too. And I guess one thing I'd also like to ask about, and I kind of hinted at it with the city-states idea. Do we think there's one Sumerian overlord in southern Iraq during this period? Or is it divided between the various settlements with like a powerful local figure ruling over that particular area?

• 24:41Speaker 05

  It's very difficult to determine what's happening in the early third millennium. So from around three thousand to two thousand six hundred, that sort of period. The evidence just isn't sufficient. And of course, they're not actually telling us very much in our, in their writing, it's largely bureaucratic. But by around two thousand five hundred B C, the texts begin to be used to document the achievements of kings. And you then start to be able to identify, not just in the text, but in the architecture of palaces and and larger buildings. The emergence of powerful centres and you get a clearer picture of a divided world of city-states.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  Rather like classical Greece or Renaissance Italy, competing centres, sharing a common culture.

• 25:32Tristan Hughes?

  Uh versus Aruq could be like Thebes versus Athens or something like that, if you want a parallel.

• 25:37Speaker 05

  Correct, yes.

• 25:39Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I would like, therefore, you mentioned the art and architecture. I'd love to focus in. Let's look at a case study of one of these cities that has been excavated. And look at the art and architecture from it. And I've got top of my list, I've got a rook, but first I want to get to Ur. Because this is a very, very interesting one, isn't it? Talk to me about the excavations at Ur, it was during the 20th, was it the 19th century? Which it seems to be really significant in the uncovering of archaeology at this centre.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, Ur had always been the focus for exploration and and visitors in the 19th century. Europeans passing through the region as merchants or diplomats were always intrigued by the ancient mound at this site, which is known as the mound of Pichtel al-Mukya in Arabic. And it was from that site that some of the first bricks inscribed in cuneiform were recovered and brought back to Europe. So it was always well known. And early explorations in the 19th century began to uncover some other monuments from the site.

• 26:41Speaker 05

  But it really only began to be excavated in an extensive way with hundreds of workers digging enormous holes in the soil. When a joint excavation was undertaken between the British Museum and the University Museum of Pennsylvania. And that joint excavation was led by Leonard Woolley, who was an experienced archaeologist and was chosen by the two museums to lead the digs from 1922.

• 27:11Tristan Hughes?

  What did he uncover? Did he start in one of the main areas? Because I know he goes to the cemeteries, which we're kind of hinting at as well. But what leads him, therefore, to? Talk us through his excavations. What do we know about him uncovering so much incredible archaeology from this area of the world?

• 27:27Speaker 05

  Well, the site is enormous and there's very much that's visible on the ground, as a word. The remains of decayed mud brick structures. And dominating the site is an enormous mound, which is the decayed remains of so-called ziggurat. The stepped tower, which was a feature of all Mesopotamian cities, part of the religious complex, built from thousands of bricks, which piled up to create effectively a step pyramid.

• 28:02Speaker 05

  Almost certainly with a little shrine at the summit and led up by staircase. Most of that had disappeared, but nonetheless you had this mound of decayed brick. So that was the focus for Woolley. Surrounding temples around at the foot of the Ziggurat mound and palace complex. So he was really digging the sacred heart of the city where royalty and religion came together.

• 28:29Tristan Hughes?

  Was the Ziggurat, the Ziggurat, was that in use in Sumerian times or slightly later? And as you say, was this, because you can see the reconstructed version today, can't you? And but was this the focal point of the ancient Sumerian city of Ur?

• 28:45Speaker 05

  Yes, and temples were built on raised platforms from the fourth millennium B.C. So much earlier and almost certainly at Ur as well as at other sites. Your house of your god, relatively small building, was raised up above the level of everybody else's houses on a brick platform. And those gradually got higher through time. And by the end of the third millennium B.C., so around two thousand one hundred B.C. The idea of creating these massive stepped towers really became a feature of the kings that were dominating the region. And so lots of cities had been built.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  And the one at Ur was at that time the capital city and was almost certainly the grandest and most obvious marker in the landscape.

• 29:35Tristan Hughes?

  This is absolutely stunning building. I mean, were they, if we don't know absolutely, let just say, but were these excavators, were they able to get into the Ziggurat itself? Or was there like an inside chamber or, I mean, what did they really find from it?

• 29:49Speaker 05

  So the Ziggurat is solid.

• 29:51Tristan Hughes?

  Solid.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  Yes, it's very, it's unlike an Egyptian pyramid, for example, it's not designed to to hold anything. It's a solid mountain brick. And the idea was very much to raise up a monument. And one has to remember that southern Iraq is immensely flat. It's a landscape which is an alluvial plain. And so if travelling from a distance, you'd be able to see this effective mountain in the distance over the city walls. And it may well be that the Ziggurat is an attempt to bring the mountains where the gods were believed to to live. Out there to the east in the mountains of Iran, down onto the plain and bring their home into the centre of the city.

• 30:37Tristan Hughes?

  I'm delighted to be able to talk about that monumental ziggurat because it is an incredible structure, but I would also like to go to something else. We go back to Woolley's excavations, which seems to be really remarkable. Talk me through how they discover these royal tombs, these cemeteries.

• 30:53Speaker 05

  Woolley has workmen all over the site, digging various parts, and some of his workmen begin very early on, in nineteen twenty five, twenty six, to uncover burials within this religious complex. It's actually just to the edge of the Ziggurat area. But he realises that his workmen aren't sufficiently skilled in digging graves. These are very complex things to dig because although they're pits in the ground, the soil, decayed soil has fallen in and there's very little surviving of the bodies. The soil is very acidic, so there's very little skeletal remains. So they come with challenges. But little beads

• 31:38Speaker 05

  of lapis lazuli and carnelian and gold were revealed, and he paused the excavations in that area until he felt his workforce was sufficiently skilled. So by nineteen twenty seven, twenty eight, he returned to that area of the site and began to uncover thousands of graves. Now, these were generally ordinary pits in the ground, as it were, just simple pits in which an individual has laid out, either in a coffin or wrapped up in a reed mat with a few of their possessions. But within the cemetery of thousands of individuals,

• 32:18Speaker 05

  there were sixteen graves he uncovered, which were completely different in scale, enormous in scale, and contained extraordinary material. And so talk me a bit more about these sixteen particular graves. What sorts of materials were uncovered and what did they believe that they were associated with? So these are enormous pits in the ground, and sometimes sort of ten metres deep. And at the bottom of the pits, which was generally accessed by a shaft from above, would be a stone tomb. Now, the stone tomb contained various different shapes and sizes. Some contained little rooms, some were just simply almost like little huts,

• 33:02Speaker 05

  single one-room creations. And inside those stone buildings, what Woolley took to be the primary burial, the king or the queen in his interpretation, was buried there, surrounded by the most extraordinary material: metal, copper, but also silver and gold. And remember, there is no metal in Iraq. This all has to be imported. So this again, express wealth just by virtue of bringing the stuff to or let alone the material itself. Beads of lapis lazuli and carnelian, again, all imported from vast distances,

• 33:47Speaker 05

  reflecting the wealth of these individuals. Spectacular stuff in themselves, but on the floor of some of these pits, outside the stone tomb, lay the bodies of individuals who appear to be sacrificial victims. And this was a unique phenomenon, indeed, it remains the same for Mesopotamia. One of these pits, the so-called Great Death Pit, had sixty-nine individuals lying in neat rows, covered in extraordinary jewellery, mirroring that found on the principal burial in the stone chamber, but reproduced in vast amounts. So sixty-nine bodies were found in there?

• 34:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. And these, from analysis, and again, remember the skeletons were preserved very, very poorly, but they appear to be all women. There are six apparent soldiers, again, based on what they're wearing, at the foot of the shaft leading down into the pit. And so they're presumably guarding the entrance in some way, but the bodies, the rest of the bodies are all female. And so they appear to be, in some sense, the servants of the queen perhaps, courtiers perhaps in life. Killed for the purpose in death.

• 35:09Tristan Hughes?

  Well, that's absolutely remarkable. Do we have any idea from the archaeology that survived of how they died? Is there evidence of trauma? I mean, as you said, there's probably poor conditions that they survived, but do we have any ideas?

• 35:20Speaker 05

  We do now, again, thanks to modern techniques. I mean, Woolley himself came up with a sort of rather romantic tradition. Again, he's imagining the Sumerians as terribly civilized and therefore, you know, wouldn't indulge in anything too barbaric. So he imagines that everybody willingly takes poison and lays down to die to journey into the next world with their king or queen. And indeed, little cups were found next to some of the bodies. But we now know from analysis of the few skulls that were recovered, at least those individuals that were analyzed, died horribly. Their skulls were smashed in with

• 36:01Speaker 05

  axes, essentially. Their bodies were then embalmed by being heated and they were treated with mercury. Now, this may have been an attempt to preserve the body, as these individuals having been killed, preserve the body for the length of time it would take to then lay them out and decorate them with this extraordinary jewelry before the entire tomb was closed.

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• 38:03Tristan Hughes?

  Let's keep moving on, but keeping actually talking about women in these tombs, because there is this one particular tomb, and I've got my notes here, the Queen's Tomb. Now, what is this? It does seem to be one of the most extraordinary of all of them.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Extraordinary really because it was one of the few that survived intact. Most of these graves have either been looted in the past, probably soon after they were buried potentially. And so Woolley was able to reconstruct what he thought the whole rituals behind the interment were from just a few surviving tombs. And this Queen's Tomb was one of the best surviving examples, where the floor of the pit again contained sacrificial victims, these individuals. And then the Queen herself was buried in a stone tomb in one corner of the pit.

• 38:55Tristan Hughes?

  Do we have any idea who this particular woman was?

• 39:00Speaker 05

  There's huge debates around who these individuals were in terms of, as were their profession. Were they queens or were they high priestesses? Probably there's the difficult to separate those out. These are clearly important individuals in the city of Ur. We do, however, know this individual's name. And that's because associated with her body, actually lying close to her body, was a cylinder seal, a cylinder made of lapis lazuli carved with an image of a banquet.

• 39:34Speaker 05

  And a cuneiform inscription, which was read when it was excavated in nineteen twenty eight, the signs, the cuneiform signs were read as Shu Ad. So Queen Shu Ad was suddenly revealed to the public as a Sumerian queen, because it was assumed that the signs should be read as Sumerian, because it was assumed she must be a Sumerian queen in this great city.

• 40:01Tristan Hughes?

  And this is an interesting time, you mentioned that being announced to the press, because of course, this is, well, it's a few years later, but still, I say, hot on the heels of Tutankhamun, or even the Trippea treasure in Scotland, but there's the discovery of all these incredible new archaeological finds, and it feels like, you know, the announcing to the press of this, it's that interesting time of archaeological discovery, isn't it? And you then have this Sumerian discovery being announced, this woman, this particular woman also being announced to the press too.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  Yes, and of course, at this time, it was imagined, from the chronology that was being reconstructed as the excavations continued, these tombs dated much earlier than the first earliest tombs in Egypt. And it was tied in very much with this idea of the Sumerians as being at the roots of civilization, so they must be much earlier, but also tied in with the notion that the Sumerians were somehow connected to people in the West, that they weren't Semitic, they potentially could be actually the ancestors, as Leonard Woolley himself would say in print, perhaps even of the Neolithic Barrow builders of Wessex.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  So there was a sense of ownership from the West over the Sumerians, and here was this queen decked out in the most extraordinary jewellery with this apparent Sumerian name, which made that connection all the more explicit.

• 41:29Tristan Hughes?

  You mentioned that apparent Sumerian name, there's more of a story to this, isn't there?

• 41:36Speaker 05

  There is because the reading of those signs on that cylinder seal is now much better understood. And in the decades since the excavations, our understanding of these ancient languages, the way that the cuneiform script worked has, of course, improved dramatically. And so Queen Shubhad, her name is now understood to be read, in fact, as Pu Abi. Very different readings of those two signs, but actually with much more meaning. Shubhad is meaningless, but Pu Abi actually is a Semitic way of writing a name,

• 42:18Speaker 05

  which means it relates her to her father, essentially. And so we now know her as Queen Pu Abi. But the point is, of course, that if language and perhaps names associates you with group identity, then Pu Abi is no longer Sumerian, but actually is Semitic.

• 42:37Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. See, that's an interesting twist in the whole story. Let's talk about art for a bit, because you've mentioned all these incredible objects that show like the connections that these people have, the Sumerians. I know that you've got examples of these incredible statues of vases from Arook and so many other places. I like to focus on one particular example, which also comes from these particular cemeteries. It is quite an iconic example, and this is the standard of Ur. Now, Paul, what is this?

• 43:06Speaker 05

  I wish I could tell you. This is, this is, remains something of a mystery. It's an object which came to the British Museum as part of the so-called Division of Finds, when the material excavated at Ur was shared between the museum in Baghdad, the Iraq Museum, and the University Museum in Pennsylvania and the British Museum. A division of finds which was practiced at the times, but is no longer the current way of doing things. But the British Museum got the standard of Ur as part of that. And what it is was reconstructed really by Woolley's ideas that this is some sort of box.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  You have two rectilinear panels of some size, which are inlaid with scenes of procession of material and animals being led up towards a king in the top register. And on the other panel, you have a scene of banqueting, again, the movement of material towards that. Two images of kingship, one in which the king is shown as the warrior and one in which he's shown in a sort of peaceful banqueting scene. Well, these two panels, the inlay originally on wood which had decayed, Woolley thought must have belonged to some sort of object which had been carried on the top of a pole as a standard.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Why did he think that? Well, the inlay was found next to the shoulder of the body in the tomb. And so we have this idea of a box, a sort of truncated arrangement with no obvious purpose. Some people have thought, well, maybe it's the sounding box of a musical instrument and just lost the elements above. Not many people, I think, accept that as meaningful. And I wonder myself whether what you're looking at is actually a series of panels which would have decorated a wall. And this we know from other examples where squares, rectangles of wood inlaid with precious materials and carved scenes were set up in palaces and temples,

• 45:19Speaker 05

  really as images of kingship or of religion. And these may have been stacked up against a wall, perhaps in this tomb, the idea being that the tomb would be the palace for eternity for the individual. But when the tomb collapsed, the bricks from the top of the tomb Fell down smashing a lot of this inlay work. And so Woolley found two panels, one on top of each other, separated by a thin layer of dust, which he then assumed had been a box that had been crushed. In fact, I suspect they may well have been just separate panels. But you visit it now in the British Museum

• 46:02Speaker 05

  as a single object, as this mysterious box.

• 46:06Tristan Hughes?

  But it is still an extraordinary piece of art, isn't it? Thousands of years old. And the detail that it shows, as you say, that peaceful scene and that more military scene too.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  Yes, and comprised again of this extraordinary blue lapis lazuli stone, which would have reached southern Iraq from Afghanistan. The only source we know of, many thousands of miles to the east. Such a precious material that the Sumerians really valued it as evoking notions of the gods and that mysterious world to the east.

• 46:40Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. Now, quickly, before we just quickly move on to, I'll ask a small question about the military king list and then we'll wrap up. But as hinted at earlier, we've got so many other examples of art from the Sumerian period, don't we? I mean, what sorts of examples and what shapes and forms do we have other examples of art from the ancient Sumer?

• 47:01Speaker 05

  So we're talking about at least a thousand years, of course, when the Sumerian language is being recorded in cuneiform. And so the material ranges from the sorts of things found in temples. Votif figurines is one particular class of art, which is very familiar to this world. Images of both men and women made of stone, thirty centimetres or so high in general, carved to represent those individuals with their hands clasped before them in prayer perhaps, so intended to be taken into the temple to be in the presence of the god for all time.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  Sumerian temples were small spaces. These are homes of the gods. So only the priests could probably gain access. So if you were wealthy enough, if you had sufficient status or a position in society, you could have an image made of yourself. Men, men or women and carried into the presence of the god.

• 48:09Tristan Hughes?

  They are absolutely extraordinary and you know, people can learn more about it looking at up the Sumerians, for instance, at your book and so on and so forth. But we will keep going on because I'd like to talk about one other thing before we talk about wrapping up and that is quickly, very quickly on the military. Do we have any idea from the, I believe I remember seeing something about this, but do we have a slight idea of how the Sumerian military functioned?

• 48:32Speaker 05

  We have representations of armies on some of these royal images. The standard of, of course, is is one good example where on this battles that side you have images of carts essentially, which are often described as chariots, but they're four wheeled vehicles being pulled by donkeys trundling across this flat landscape. And inside you have a spear thrower and sometimes an archer. So you have effectively heavy, heavy weapons of war alongside infantry.

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Where rows of soldiers decked out in leather garments, we assume from the images, again, carrying spears. Those appear also on monuments of stone. Where again, we see kings in chariots leading forward his infantry with their spears, ready to attack the enemy.

• 49:34Tristan Hughes?

  So what do you think ultimately happens to the Sumerians?

• 49:38Speaker 05

  Well, remember the Sumerians as far as we know them are only through their language. So we don't have to envisage a single group of people. There's no texts that talk about, I am a Sumerian. There are only texts that record their language. And it becomes clear that by the end of the third millennium, that language is dying out as a spoken language. And this is a phenomenon that happens with languages around the globe over time. And indeed with globalization, languages are disappearing today at a, at a fast rate. As other languages like English, for example, become, become more dominant.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  So for, for reasons that are difficult to determine, Sumerian gradually declines as a spoken language in the street.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  The language, however, is preserved by those bureaucrats, by the scribes and by the intellectuals who associate the language with the ancient past and the heritage of the region. So it continues to be learnt in scholarly communities and in the temple, as scribal communities. But in the street, most people are now speaking a Semitic language. Come the Babylonian language essentially, and Sumerian ceases to be present. So we don't see people disappearing, we just see the language disappearing.

• 51:10Tristan Hughes?

  Interestingly, as you say, looking at the Sumerians, you know, through the language and then you do see it being removed as time goes on. I mean, with all of that knowledge that we therefore now have from the archaeology and the surviving cuneiform literature about the Sumerian language, how should we now look at the Sumerians today? I mean, how should we view the Sumerians?

• 51:36Speaker 05

  I think we can certainly talk about a civilisation of Sumer. Sumer was a term and we started the conversation around how that term was so influential. Sumer was a place, it was thought of as a real place by the ancient scribes. So we have the civilisation of Sumer, but within Sumer, there was almost certainly a multilingual population. The scribal tradition, perhaps the wealthy parts of the community may have spoken Sumerian as they wanted that that language as the first to be recorded in the script they developed.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  But gradually over time, other parts of the population came to the fore in terms of their language. But that melding of different linguistic traditions created a single unified cultural tradition that we now describe as the Sumerian world.

• 52:38Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Paul, this has been amazing. We've only just scratched the surface, there's so much more we could have talked about. We've got to end it there, I'm afraid. Maybe we'll get you back over a second podcast in due course. But it does also, it's really exciting for the future. I'm guessing in the archaeology field of ancient Sumer and learning more about it, I'm guessing there's still so much more to find in the years ahead.

• 52:57Speaker 05

  Almost certainly. I mean, Iraq is extraordinarily rich archaeologically, and there are abandoned settlement mounds out there waiting to be uncovered. I also think it allows us to rethink our assumptions and presumptions based on our own more recent scholarship and revisit that.

• 53:18Tristan Hughes?

  Right, right, indeed. And last but not least, your book, you've written a book on this topic, which is called?

• 53:23Speaker 05

  It's called The Sumerians, it's part of the so-called Lost Civilisations series, and explores many of the things we've been discussing today.

• 53:33Tristan Hughes?

  Well, Paul. Absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  My great pleasure. Thank you very much.

• 53:42Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Paul Collins talking through the story, giving you an overview of the ancient Sumerians. I hope you enjoyed the episode. That was the first ever interview I did with the wonderful Paul Collins, when he was still working at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. He is now at the British Museum in London and has since done several more interviews with us on everything from Baruch and the first cities, to Sargon of Akkad, to Nineveh, and more to come.

• 54:13Tristan Hughes?

  Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com/subscribe.