Either way, it’s clear that they were using written communication by 2800 B.C. Jones says that it’s likely, though not 100 percent certain, that the Sumerians were the first to develop a writing system. Here are some of the areas where the Sumerians left their mark.Īn early writing sample from Mesopotamia using pictographs to create a record of food supplies. The Sumerians’ innovations gradually spread and led to the development of the modern technologically advanced world that we live in today. “Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige, honor and recognition,” he explains. This way they could mass-produce goods such as textiles and pottery that they could then trade with other people.Īs Kramer writes, there was something in the Sumerian identity that drove them to dream big and think ingeniously. They had the ability to take inventions that had been developed elsewhere and apply them on a much bigger scale. They used it to make everything from bricks to pottery to tablets for writing.īut the Sumerians’ real genius may have been organizational. That forced them to make ingenious use of materials such as clay-the plastic of the ancient world. “They had few trees, almost no stone or metal,” he explains.

The Sumerians’ creativity was driven to an extent by their land’s lack of natural resources, according to Philip Jones, associate curator and keeper of the Babylonian section at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.

In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept track of information and time. In what the Greeks later called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large-scale use of existing ones. As the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, “The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention.” The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilization that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley.

Plow the bones