THE SUMERIAN'S MYSTERIES

I want to thank Mr. Clark for giving me this opportunity also Mr. Crow for sharing the idea of writing about history because it's beauty is that it takes you in a journey through time when mankind out of nothing established civilizations that contributed to humanity till today and it repeats its self every once in a while if the circumstances are the same, and to understand where did knowledge derive from and how did it develop. So it is best to start by defining civilization because there were human settlements in China, and Europe evident from their tools and houses but not considered as civilizations which is:    " An advanced state of human society in which high level of culture, science, industry and government has been reached'. And what better place to start with but the Sumerians, the first civilization in the history of mankind and the most intriguing because of its mysteries that could not be solved till today.

Located in south of today's Iraq and made up of 12 different cities each with its own high walls, deity and governing system.(7 major cities shown on the map)

The first settlement was 4000 BC in Eurido and slowly with the migrations of people from the north of Iraq whom had experience in farming and irrigation, and people from the south meaning the Gulf area whom where called the black heads in the Sumerian tablets. Sumer as a civilization reached its peak at the Bronze Age 3200 BC, with astrology, math, music, art and literature, but we cannot cover the whole thing so I will concentrate on 3 elements and show their unexplained advances in those fields.

Writing: the first ever recorded writing was by the Sumerians using symbols on a clay tablets then letting those clay tablets dry to preserve them, and to accomplish that they started making cylindrical seals made from semi precious stone and roll it over the clay to imprint it.

Those seals where about an inch in size, and the unexplained is how they engraved these symbols precisely with the tools available at the time on a hard stone, how did they shape that cylinder and the symbols had to be reversed or negative on the cylinder to imprint positively on the clay and finally let us not forget that this was 5500 years ago. Later the cuneiform writing was used in 3100 BC up until the old Persian civilization in 520 BC.

The most mysterious among all the cylinder seals where these two

                                         FIG. 1

                                         FIG. 2

These 2 seals will take us to the second element in the Sumerian civilization

ASTROLOGY: Although this was the first civilization yet their knowledge in astrology are mind boggling, they kept records of planets locations, the high and low tide, and made the year into 30 or 29 days establishing the Lunar calendar. And if we go back to fig.1 and study the encircled figure, it shows clearly our solar system , now here is an exploded view to the study made by the famous Prof. Sitchin

I increased the font for the planet names to be seen and added the asteroid belt shown as a planet in the Sumerian cylinder seal which by the way called seal VA243

One would ask how we figured that out. Let us look at fig 2 you will see Saturn with its famous ring. Jupiter, the Asteroid belt, Mars then on top Earth and moon. The exact location we know it today. So far so good, but these people flourished 5500 years ago and the 4 last planets to be discovered where

1 - Uranus was discovered by Sir William Herschel in 1781.

2 - Neptune was discovered by John Couch Adams in 1846.

3 - Pluto was discovered by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930

4 - Asteroid belt was discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801

We know for sure they were good in math in fact they reached the knowledge of a quadratic equations , but still that does not tell us how they calculated the planets positions since these planets requires a telescope to see even if they had high rise buildings, which is our subject.

Ziggurat:

Also called temple towers is basically a stepped pyramid and the most famous is the ziggurat of UR built by the king UR-NAMMU in honor for the sun god in the year 2100 BC.

And it was used as a temple, court , observatory and a symbol of power. 

But the oldest was located in Erido and is estimated to be built in 2900 BC and its ruins was found in 2011 and it resembles the UR ziggurat yet much smaller as the archaeologists reconstructed the ziggurat on computers from the size of the ruins shown below

The Egyptians were fascinated by it and built the first pyramid in Sakkara which was an imitation of the Sumerian ziggurat but for a different purpose, it was used as a tomb for Pharaoh Djoser in the year 2630 BC as seen in the fig. below

You notice clearly that it looks like it is made from bricks, but really it is made from carved stone to brick size as Egypt is not short of stones available on both sides of the Nile, but whoever copied the ziggurat could not help but copy the smallest details. Another similarity is the stepped pyramid and it is the only one like this in Egypt, and the later ones in Giza were all made from big size stones with no steps

In conclusion: there are a lot more to talk about this great civilization, especially their knowledge of math, dividing the hour into 60 minutes and the minute into 60 seconds and more of what was given to humanity to use it as a base for further advancement.