Sumerians

Hello! We are the Sumerians. We lived a very, very long time ago in a special place called Sumer. It was our home. Our land was warm and sunny, and it was right between two big rivers. The rivers made our home a wonderful place to live.

We loved to build. We were some of the very first people to build and live in big cities. For our houses, we used something we could find all around us: mud! We made bricks out of mud and let them dry in the hot sun. In the middle of our cities, we built tall, stepped temples called ziggurats. A ziggurat looked like a giant staircase reaching for the sky. We built them to be close to our gods.

We were great farmers. The rivers near our home gave us plenty of water for our plants. We learned how to use the river water to grow lots of food. We grew so much that we needed a way to remember it all. That is why we invented a new way to write! We used special sticks to press little wedge shapes into soft clay. When the clay dried, our writing became a permanent record that we could keep.

Even though we lived long, long ago, people today still know about our lives. They have found the clay tablets we wrote on and can see our special writing. Our ideas were very important. The idea of building big cities and the idea of writing things down helped many people who came after us. We are happy our stories can still be told.