Sumerians

Hello! We are the Sumerians. Our story begins a very, very long time ago, thousands of years before anyone you know was born. We want to tell you about our home, a special land called Mesopotamia. Imagine a warm, sunny place with two big, winding rivers flowing through it. Those were our rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. The land between them was where we built our lives, planted our food, and shared our ideas. It was a good place to live, with plenty of sunshine and fresh water from the rivers to help us grow and thrive.

We were some of the first people in the world to build large communities where thousands of us could live together. We built the world’s very first cities! To make our homes, we mixed mud from the riverbanks with straw, formed it into blocks, and let the hot sun bake them into hard bricks. With these bricks, we built our houses, street by street. Our cities, like the great city of Ur, became busy and exciting. In the center of our biggest cities, we built enormous temples called ziggurats. They were incredible structures, built with steps that rose high into the air, looking like giant stairways leading up to the sky. Our streets were always full of activity, with farmers bringing in food from the fields, builders carrying mud bricks, and people selling pottery and cloth in lively markets.

Because we lived so close to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, we became excellent farmers. The land was good, but we made it even better by digging small channels, called canals, to carry water from the rivers directly to our fields. This meant we could grow plenty of food for everyone in our big cities, especially grains like barley and wheat. We were also thinkers and inventors who came up with amazing new ideas. We were the first people to use the wheel! At first, it was for making pottery, but soon we figured out how to use it on carts to help us move heavy things. We also invented a special way of writing called cuneiform. We would press a reed into soft clay tablets to make wedge-shaped marks. We used cuneiform to keep track of our food and to write down our stories and songs.

Our civilization and our cities are now part of the distant past. But even though we lived so long ago, some of our ideas are still used today. Have you ever looked at a clock to see what time it is? You are using one of our ideas! We were the ones who first decided to divide an hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds. This way of telling time has traveled all the way from our cities to you. People today remember us for our clever inventions, like the wheel and writing, and for being the first people to build cities where many people learned how to live and work together.