Sumerian Civilization Essay

“The dawn of civilization sparked an age of discovery and nuance in the west. The earliest Neolithic people started as nomadic tribes that never stayed in one place for very long. They were hunters and gatherers and traveled in groups. This carried on until about 8000 b.c. When farming was developed, people could now enjoy the luxury of staying in one spot. This also led to the domestication of animals as livestock. Dating back to almost 3000 b.c., the Sumerian Civilization was the home of the earliest civilization. It was home to the first city, Ur, which was the center for worship of the Sumerian gods. Its largest city, Jericho, had 2,000 inhabitants. It is said that they created urban life through trading and taking part in public works.

One civilization we have to thank for these accomplishments is the Sumerian Civilization. The first of many arts developed by the Sumerians that affect us today is their form of writing and the alphabet. The earliest form of writing was called cuneiform. It was a system of pictograms and signs that represented numbers that were written on tablets with a red stylus to represent an idea. Writing also helped develop the foundation of schools where sons of the upperclass were trained in the art of cuneiform. The teachers who taught these students prepared textbooks of word lists and math problems with the answers with them. It was the development of the first dictionary. Writing also helped in the development of poetry and creative writing. With the ability to write, poets such as Enheduanna, the worlds oldest poet, was able to write down beautiful hymns and poems to temple deities. Writing allowed for us to see int the mind of those living back in the ancient civilizations. For example, Enheduanna wrote hymns to a goddess named Ianna. They depicted her as a fierce warrior, an overseer of the home and the last one was Emnheduanna asking her for help in regaining status in the temple. This form of writing is still used today. In religious scripts and prayers, we see different saints or deities being asked for help or just

The Sumerians were able to create multiplication and division tables, cubes, and cube roots. Furthermore they were able to figure out the area of a right triangle, a rectangle and divide a circle into 360 degrees. Later on they would put together some of the ideas that make up the Pythagorean Theorem and quadratic equations.” ¹ “Sumerian mathematics were based on a system of sexagesimal or 60 numeric system which could be counted physically using the five fingers and 12 knuckles on one hand. In addition, the system used place values where digits were written in the left column represented larger values. They had two distinct symbols to represent units and tens as well. This system was based on 60 because it was saw as the number with the most divisors. This idea has since then been dropped for the numerical system. We have, on the other hand, kept the 60 divisor in keeping time. For example, there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and so forth. Later Babylonian tablets dating from about 1800 to 1600 BCE have been found and they cover the topics of fractions, algebra, ways to solve quadratic equations, and cubic equations. Square digits and quadratic equations came about naturally when measurements were trying to be made. It is said that these tablets give us the first look at quadratic equations. They way they solved these was an unconventional game of slicing up the shapes and rearranging them. Today we use all