what tools did sumerians use to write with

The ancient Sumerians, who flourished thousands of years ago between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what today is southern Iraq, built a civilisation that in some ways was the ancient equivalent of Silicon Valley. Every bit the late historian Samuel Noah Kramer wrote, "The people of Sumer had an unusual flair for technological invention."

In what the Greeks afterward called Mesopotamia, Sumerians invented new technologies and perfected the large-scale use of existing ones. In the process, they transformed how humans cultivated food, built dwellings, communicated and kept rail of information and time.

The Sumerians' inventiveness 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.

"They had few trees, virtually no stone or metal," he explains. That forced them to make ingenious employ of materials such every bit clay—the plastic of the ancient world. They used it to make everything from bricks to pottery to tablets for writing.

But the Sumerians' existent genius may have been organizational. They had the ability to take inventions that had been developed elsewhere and apply them on a much bigger calibration. This manner they could mass-produce appurtenances such every bit textiles and pottery that they could then merchandise with other people.

As Kramer writes, there was something in the Sumerian identity that collection them to dream large and call up ingeniously. "Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, preeminence and prestige, honor and recognition," he explains.

The Sumerians' innovations gradually spread and led to the development of the mod technologically avant-garde world that we live in today. Here are some of the areas where the Sumerians left their marker.

Mass-Produced Pottery

Basin from the aboriginal civilizations of Mesopotamia.

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Other ancient people made pottery by hand, merely the Sumerians were the starting time to develop the turning bike, a device which allowed them to mass-produce information technology, according to Reed Goodman, a doctoral candidate in the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean at the University of Pennsylvania. That enabled them to churn out large numbers of items such every bit containers for workers' rations, sort of the aboriginal forerunner of Tupperware.

Writing

An early on writing sample fromMesopotamia using pictographs to create a tape of food supplies.

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Jones says that it's likely, though not 100 per centum certain, that the Sumerians were the starting time to develop a writing system. Either fashion, information technology'south clear that they were using written communication past 2800 B.C. Simply they didn't set out to write great literature or record their history, but rather to keep track of the goods that they were making and selling.

"Their very first texts are just numbers and commodities," Jones explains. They did that with a system of pictographs, which essentially were drawings of various objects. Eventually, though, they began to combine pictographs to express ideas and actions. The pictographs evolved into symbols that stood for words and sounds.

Scribes used sharpened reeds to scratch the symbols into wet clay, which dried to class tablets. The system of writing became known as cuneiform, and as Kramer noted, it was borrowed by subsequent civilizations and used across the Middle Eastward for 2,000 years.

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Hydraulic Applied science

A Mesopotamian relief showing the agronomical importance of the rivers.

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The Sumerians figured out how to collect and channel the overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers—and the rich silt that information technology independent—then use information technology to water and fertilize their subcontract fields. They designed complex systems of canals, with dams constructed of reeds, palm trunks and mud whose gates could exist opened or airtight to regulate the catamenia of water.

The Chariot

Scale model of a elementary2-wheeledchariot which was invented past the Sumerians in Mesopotamia.

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The Sumerians didn't invent wheeled vehicles, but they probably developed the first two-wheeled chariot in which a driver drove a team of animals, writes Richard Due west. Bulliet in The Bicycle: Inventions and Reinventions . Goodman says that at that place's prove the Sumerians had such carts for transportation in the 3000s B.C., but they were probably used for ceremonies or by the military, rather than as a means to get effectually the countryside, where the rough terrain would have made wheeled travel hard.

The Turn

Fake of a Sumerian plow.

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According to Kramer, the Sumerians invented the plow, a vital technology in farming. They even produced a transmission that gave farmers detailed instructions on how to utilize various types of plows. And they specified the prayer that should be recited to pay homage to Ninkilim, the goddess of field rodents, in order to protect the grain from beingness eaten.

Textile Mills

A Mesopotamian adult female weaving.

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While other cultures in the Eye East gathered wool and used it to weave fabric for clothing, the Sumerians were the beginning to exercise it on an industrial calibration.

"The Sumerians' innovation was to turn their temples into huge factories," Goodman explains. He notes that the Sumerians were the showtime to cross kin lines and form larger working organizations for making textiles—the predecessors of mod manufacturing companies.

Mass-Produced Bricks

An archaeological site in Mari, Syrian arab republic (modern Tell Hariri) that was an ancient Sumerian urban center on the western bank of Euphrates river.

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To brand upward for a shortage of stones and timber for building houses and temples, the Sumerians created molds for making bricks out of clay, co-ordinate to Kramer. While they weren't the first to use clay every bit a building cloth, "the innovation is the ability to produce bricks in large amounts, and put them together on a large calibration," Jones explains. Their buildings might not have been as durable as stone ones, but they were able to build more of them, and create larger cities.

Metallurgy

The lion-headed eagle fabricated of copper, gilt, and lapis lazuli past Sumerian civilization.

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The Sumerians were some of the primeval people to use copper to brand useful items, ranging from spearheads to chisels and razors, according to the Copper Development Association. They also made art with copper, including dramatic panels depicting fantastical animals such as an eagle with a lion's head. According to Kramer, Sumerian metallurgists used furnaces heated by reeds and controlled the temperature with a bellows that could exist worked with their hands or feet.

Mathematics

Cuneiform script, developed by the Sumerians.

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Primitive people counted using simple methods, such equally putting notches on bones, merely it was the Sumerians who developed a formal numbering arrangement based on units of sixty, according to Robert E. and Carolyn Krebs' book, Groundbreaking Scientific Experiments, Inventions, and Discoveries of the Aboriginal Earth. At first, they used reeds to keep track of the units, but somewhen, with the development of cuneiform, they used vertical marks on the dirt tablets. Their system helped lay the background for the mathematical calculations of civilizations that followed.

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