‘The achievements of this culture,’ explains Getty curator Tim Potts, ‘influenced not just life in Mesopotamia, but are with us still today.’ These include writing, measurement, arithmetic, geometry, time-keeping, and money. And it created the basis for a cultural explosion. Records for Lagash – city and countryside – imply a population of about 36,000 adult males, so perhaps 100,000 people in total.īut by comparison with everything that had gone before, this was a veritable ‘urban revolution’, a massive qualitative leap in the scale and complexity of human social organisation. Sumer as a whole was about the size of modern Denmark, and even the larger cities might extend across only one or two square miles. Such bounty – such great surpluses of produce – allowed a further transition to be made: from the Copper Age villages of the fourth millennium BC to the Bronze Age cities of the third.īy later standards, Sumerian civilisation was small in scale. Documents from 2500 BC record that the average yield on a field of barley was 86 times the sowing. It required continuing massed labour to maintain – to dredge channels, restore banks, repair flood damage.īut the result was unprecedented agricultural wealth. It required massed labour to achieve – to straighten and deepen channels, to build protective banks, to divert and manage the waters. This was the transition carried out in the final centuries of the fourth millennium. But let it once be tamed, let the waters be canalised and the swamps drained, and the result would be fields of alluvial soil of such exceptional richness that Sumer might become a veritable Garden of Eden. In the Early Copper Age (or Chalcolithic), the mid fourth millennium BC, it was a region of vast swamps, of slow, sluggish, muddy rivers and streams, of towering reeds and date palms it teemed with fish, foul, and other wild game.Ĭompared with the desert wastes on either side, this watery jungle was a paradise for hunters. Ancient Sumer – the Biblical land of Shinar – lay astride the Tigris and Euphrates river system of Lower Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq). Statue of Prince Gudea, City-Governor of Lagash, wearing the flat hat of a priest, and holding as vase of flowing water, associating him with irrigation works and the Sumerian water god Enki. What chiefly characterised a man like Gudea was the extraordinary combination of roles combined in one person. But Sumerian city-state rulers cannot be equated with the kings and princes of later ages.
He had married into the royal house of Lagash, and in due course succeeded to the supreme position. Gudea adopted the title ensi, which might be translated ‘city-king’ or ‘city-governor’. His name was Gudea, and because we know a surprising amount about him, he looms large in the new Getty Villa Museum exhibition Mesopotamia: civilisation begins. He was war leader, high priest, hydraulic engineer, and first minister – all rolled into one – of the Sumerian city-state of Lagash from 2144 to 2124 BC. He lived more than 4,000 years ago, at the dawn of civilisation. Copyright: RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY. The object was for ritual use, the scene depicted is mythological, and the inscription reads ‘To the god Ningishzida, his god, Gudea, Ensi of Lagash, for the prolongation of his life, has dedicated this.’ Neil Faulkner reports on a new Getty Villa Museum exhibition focused on the huge cultural contribution of the world’s oldest civilisation.
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