Fall of the Sumerians

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The dozen different sources from the period say something very strange.

They say basically that the sun disappeared.

Witness a world where nature reigned supreme and catastrophe rewrote the story of civilization.

Huge volcanic bombs are coming out of the sky, these great rocks about three feet across, crashing through the material.

In the ancient world, disaster was always lurking.

Earthquakes and volcanoes flattened and buried mighty cities in an instant.

Drought and plague wiped out civilizations without mercy.

So if you've got an empire, that too becomes immensely vulnerable and prone to collapse.

Life in the ancient world often hung by a thread.

Over the next four episodes, we'll discover that survival was never guaranteed.

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This is Great Disasters.

4,000 years ago, a great shift was happening in ancient Mesopotamia.

The Akkadian Empire, sometimes called the world's first empire, had collapsed.

And the prestigious cities of Sumer it had once ruled over, Uruk, Ur, Gursu, Lagash, had experienced a resurgence.

It was a time of splendorous Neo-Sumerian cities, ruled by powerful dynasties, defined by great ziggurats, centered around ancient Sumerian as the chosen written language of these states.

And yet, these new dynasties would soon also meet their own violent ends.

In this episode, we are going to talk through the story of these famous Sumerian cities at the turn of the second millennium BC.

A time of powerful early empires rising and falling.

A time often linked to when the Sumerian civilization collapsed.

We're going to explore just how far we should believe such a statement with our guest, Dr.

Paul Collins.

Paul, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the podcast.

Thrilled to be back.

Thank you.

It's almost like we've done this before quite a few times and in this room in the British Museum to talk all the things, the Sumerians and the Akkadians.

Very happy to be doing it again.

And we are keeping on that topic, but we are also doing an episode on, and I have it in, I don't know if quotation marks are the right word but with a little bit of hesitancy the fall of the sumerians to kick off this brand new series on the ancients about these disasters these big declines of ancient history when we talk about the fall of the sumerians do we mean the fall of some of the earliest known cities in the world well i think you could start thinking about it from that point of view for sure i mean it's one of the most interesting questions we need to address is really why certain ways of living come to an end.

And the civilization that the Sumerians were certainly part of

has come to an end.

Do we have much source material for this topic?

Because I'm presuming we're going back quite far in the story of ancient Mesopotamia.

Well I think it depends where you want to start the story really because of course rise and falls depending how you define that happens across numerous periods at different periods at different times.

So I think certainly where you want to start will define how much information we've got.

Well, before we get to that chronological date, I've got one in mind.

But where are we talking first and foremost with the Sumerians?

Where in the world?

So Sumer is effectively southern Iraq.

Today it's the area covered by retreating marshlands under enormous threat from climate change, but the area roughly from south of Baghdad down to the head of the Persian Gulf.

And was this right in the center?

Was this almost one of the birthplaces of farming in the Fertile Crescent?

Was this a key area for the emergence of these earlier cities?

So, cities we now know have their origins, if one's thinking about large populations concentrated in one place, much earlier than perhaps was previously thought.

And we see some of the earliest big urban centers emerging in places like Syria, but almost certainly in parallel with similar developments in what's now southern Iraq.

So across a broad sweep of the Middle East, we see from around 4000 BC these concentrations of populations.

And 4000 BC, is that the rough time period that we should be talking about with the Sumerians?

And how far forward can we go with their story?

I'd like to begin the story, if we're talking about the decline, as far back as around 2400, 2500 bc but that that's still quite a jump from 4000 bc that you've already mentioned well of course as early as 4000 bc the evidence we have becomes increasingly less so it becomes more difficult to work out exactly what was happening in those cities and then the causes of their decline But by the middle of the third millennium BC, the date you're interested in starting the conversation, we have a much clearer idea about the political world.

And of course, we can actually talk about Sumerians because they're writing their language.

And that allows us to really begin to think about groups of people, their identities, the ways in which they operated and work together.

And of course, the impact of change on those societies.

Well, you mentioned writing there, so it feels like we need to talk about this first of all.

What types of sources do we have surviving then from the Sumerians to learn more about their culture?

So we have from Mesopotamia some of the earliest writing in the world, of course.

And this is inscribed on clay tablets.

So little tablets of clay, about just large enough to fit neatly into the palm of your hand.

And then using a piece of sharpened reed or wood, impressed with signs which represented ideas, sound values, which could be built up into words and meaning.

So is it phonetic?

Is that what we should be thinking?

It's syllabic.

It's syllabic.

So, each of these little wedge-shaped cuneiform signs

represented sound values, which you could rearrange effectively in different orders to create words.

And we have lots of these tablets surviving, but do we also have active archaeology happening in the fields in southern Iraq today, learning more about the story of these people?

So, a huge amount of archaeological work going on, both by Iraqis and foreign teams.

Of course, many are focussed on much earlier or later periods, but there's certainly really exciting work going on for the third millennium BC when we're seeing some of these big urban centers.

We mentioned they're big urban centres.

So can you paint a picture of the Sumerian world in, let's say, the middle of the third millennium BC?

What did the Sumerian world look like by that time?

Well, southern Mesopotamia, we know, was divided between a series of city-states.

So there would be a capital city with surrounding towns and villages, which were understood as belonging, as it were, to a fixed political area.

And these city-states would be governed, at least theoretically, by a divine figure.

A divine figure.

A god or a goddess sat at the heart of each community.

And of course, they had temples where they were worshipped.

But those temples were built by dynasties of kings.

So you had mortal rulers serving the gods, usually passing on their power from father to son.

But inevitably, as with all political powers, there was a rivalry and dynasties came and went.

And did these kings, these rulers, did they see themselves as more than mortals?

Did they see themselves as the prime people who communicated with the gods?

Did they see themselves as priests as well?

So there's certainly a sense in these early cities that the kings, the rulers, were responsible ultimately for mediating between the people of the city-states and their gods.

And we see images of them, we have texts written by the kings on their behalf, talking about building temples, feeding the gods, clothing the gods, and then inevitably receiving the gods' blessings.

So we have these sophisticated city-states, you you know, controlling the urban centers and then the surrounding countryside for their food, but also, as you say, their contact with each other and beyond the borders of the Sumerian lands, but also these growing rivalries between them as well.

What main city should we be thinking of?

Because I would think straight away of a city like Uruk.

So Uruk is a very good example.

I mean, certainly Uruk is one of the most ancient large urban centers in Mesopotamia, and by the middle of the third millennium was one of the largest.

So a vast sprawling network of canals and houses and agricultural lands, perhaps with many tens of thousands of people living together.

But there were other great centers as well, places like Ur and Eridu, Nippur, Lagash.

There are about 20 or 30

great cities that were dividing the alluvial plains of southern Iraq between them.

And so we get to the latter half of the third millennium BC.

What is this big event that happens at that time that really shakes up the political order of, well, the Sumerian city-states?

What happens?

Well, it's an event which really repeats what had been going on earlier.

and that's rivalry between city-states.

So around 2350 BC, more or less, we we see the emergence of one powerful ruler in a city called Agaday or Akkad.

He's a ruler that calls himself a ruler who calls himself Sargon,

which means the king is true, or the legitimate king.

So it's obviously a title that he's taken on coming to the throne.

And he doesn't speak Sumerian, or at least his inscriptions suggest otherwise, and he speaks a Semitic language, a language related to modern-day Arabic and Hebrew, and which has completely different grammatical structure to Sumerian.

And it's clear that the region of southern Mesopotamia was a very mixed population, with some people speaking Sumerian, perhaps closest to the Gulf.

whereas others, perhaps further north, largely spoke the Semitic language, which we call Akkadian, after Sargon's capital.

And one can think of this not as two distinct populations in opposition, but rather the result of mixed populations sharing the same cultural outlook, but simply recording that in different languages.

And Sargon, the Semitic speaker, marches out with his army and does what earlier kings some of whom spoke Sumerian, had been doing, and defeating rival city-states, building from their city-states larger kingdoms.

And Sargon is simply more successful than others.

He defeats his rivals across the alluvial plain, claims control of the entire region, and then marches, according to inscriptions, beyond the alluvial plain.

So beyond ancient Sumer.

and the region that we could call Akkad,

up the river Euphrates, up the river Tigris, or down the Persian Gulf, extending his authority.

So, does he conquer all of the Sumerian people then?

All of Sumer, all of these city-states that we've mentioned, like Uruk, Ur, and so on?

He claims to do so, and that seems to have been the case.

I mean, I say some of these earlier city-states, places like Ur and Lagash, had also been extending their control by defeating their rivals.

But nobody had taken it quite as far as Sargon.

He managed to consolidate control across the entire alluvial plane.

We have dedicated an entire episode to Sargon not too long ago, and we really focused on his character and his expansion and so on.

But we didn't focus as much on what happens in those cities that he conquers.

So let's focus on that now, on these Sumerian city-states.

Because how does this new Akkadian overlordship?

of places like Uruk and Ur, does it really affect their prominence?

Does it affect the day-to-day runnings of these cities?

Do we know how they fared?

So in many respects, again, as far as we can tell from the rather limited evidence, and we've got lots of tablets talking about the economies of these cities, life probably continued to some extent as before.

So some of the rulers were left in charge.

The way in which they organized their lives wouldn't have changed dramatically.

So material would have been brought in from the countryside and offered to the gods.

There would have been an exchange of

goods across the alluvial plain.

But of course, Sargon would have expected taxation to have come into the centre.

And so through his control, his dominance of these great trading networks and the agricultural wealth of the region, he was able to grow immensely wealthy.

And we can see that to some extent under his successors, where they invested in extraordinary art and architecture to reflect their power.

And do they build that art and architecture in the cities that they conquered or their predecessors had conquered like Saga?

We certainly see buildings of the Agaday period reflecting their dominance and they of course talk about that dominance through inscriptions.

and they continue to use the Sumerian language to express power and authority.

And in many ways, the Sumerian language begins to emerge as the language of kingship and of the language associated with the gods.

Whereas the Semitic language, Akkadian, is used increasingly for economic documents.

So again, a separation in the use of these different languages to define themselves in terms of their own time, but also that of the past.

And how long does this this Akkadian overlordship of the Sumerian city-states, how long do we think it lasts?

Well, of course, Sargon begins a process which then is expanded by his successors over about a century and a half, two hundred years at most.

And then under his grandson Naram Sin,

the empire probably reaches its greatest extent, reaching into modern day Syria and down the Persian Gulf.

But it's always vulnerable because the

Akkadian kings are dependent on local rulers to maintain their relationships with the center.

And, of course, on numerous occasions, those local rulers would come together in coalitions and rebel against that overlordship.

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Hi there, it's Dan Snow, host of the Dan Snow's History Hit Podcast.

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We'll get more into those rebellions in a bit, but I wanted to focus on this particular period first of all, because when we think of city-states being conquered, you usually think that that symbolises a fall of that city-state from power and prominence.

And yet, as you've stated there, Paul, from the limited evidence we have surviving, it seems that many of these city-states continued as they had before.

The Sumerian language remains really important and arguably increases in importance.

So how far can we say that the Sumerian people, the Sumerian city-states, endured a decline during this period when the Akkadians were dominant?

So I think we need to be thinking about then Sumerian as a language rather than necessarily a people.

There's very little evidence to suggest that the people on the ground, as it were, in the street, thought of themselves necessarily as Sumerian, as opposed to being the residents of particular city-states.

And identity was very much with the city.

and the god that or goddess that looked after that city and the fact that some people spoke Sumerian and some people spoke Akkadian may not have been defining in terms of their local identities.

So if we think about the Akkadian conquests, they are very much about repeating a pattern we've seen from much earlier, when more of the written documents were in Sumerian than they were in Akkadian.

But nonetheless, politically, there really wasn't a great deal of difference.

But the Akkadian consolidation of control over the alluvial plain created a new way of thinking about the region.

And it was that that perhaps was its greatest impact, was that future generations of kings, regardless of the language that they spoke in Mesopotamia, looked back to the Akkadian period as a time of great power and prestige that they wanted to emulate.

And so

creating a control over the alluvium became the desirable thing to do for future kings.

This is almost, dare I say, the origins of empire imperial thinking in Mesopotamia?

It was a shift of thinking, for sure.

Smaller kingdoms had always been created and then collapsed politically.

And of course, what we tend to be looking at is just the inscriptions of the elite and of kings.

So we're getting a rather small snapshot of the reality on the ground.

And as kings and princes

fell and rose,

life in the streets may not have altered very much at all, regardless of the language you spoke.

Absolutely.

And these city-states do seem to be still doing pretty well at that time, but also, as you hinted at,

also sometimes not being very

loyal to the Akkadians.

They want to rise up.

So talk to me about these rebellions that start to erupt in many of these city-states as the Akkadian Empire as time goes on?

Well, you see this through the Akkadian period.

There are moments when there are coalitions of the city-states that retain their original identities as independent cities and they come together in opposition to this idea of an overlordship.

Obviously, there are kings, there are rulers who want to emulate the Akkadian kings and replace them, but others simply that want to free themselves of the obligations to the centre and benefit from the enormous agricultural wealth and the trading connections that are bringing extraordinary materials into their centers that they want to control.

And so Naram Sin, our greatest Akkadian emperor perhaps, is faced by a major rebellion, which takes him a number of years to quell.

He claims in his inscriptions to do it, but it's literally an uprising of the entire alluvial plane against him.

Wow.

And he mentioned he's an emperor there.

Do we know that for sure?

Well, that's a modern term, of course, in a way.

Then, whether we want to think of

this Akkadian period as an empire in the sense that its control stretches beyond the traditional boundaries of this sort of cultural world or not is up for debate.

I think probably

many scholars would look for much later for the first true empire.

It's with the Assyrians and so on, isn't it?

And that's for another day entirely.

But it was interesting what you were highlighting there.

So the reign of Naram-Sim, so Sargon's grandson,

and this big rebellion against him, is he able to quell that rebellion?

But is it at the same time, even though he is successful, is it a symbol of things to come?

How these various city-states, Uruk, Ur, and so on, they are still prominent and they are still

pretty troublesome and they will come back?

Yes, and that's the structure that's in place, that's embedded in the system, independent city-states.

And inevitably, unless you can find a way of breaking down that traditional way of organizing things, this will happen in the future.

Effectively, a country of Babylonia will be created in the second millennium BC.

But it takes a long long time to overcome that traditional fragmentation of the alluvium.

And so built into any expansive kingdom in the third millennium BC is this underlying problem that the independent cities will reassert their authority and want to throw off your authority.

So these cities are still very much prominent and certainly don't seem to be in decline at this time.

So let's move on then, Paul, to the big event that then almost inevitably happens, which is the fall of the Akkadian Empire.

So what happens?

The fall of the Akkadian Empire, in many ways, is again one of those great debates in scholarship because it almost certainly involved a number of different factors.

We see in the inscriptions pressure on the centre from obviously the rival city-states as they take advantage of weakness at the centre, but also pressure from outside.

Other groups, not least the Elamites from southwest Iran, dominating the mountains to the east of Mesopotamia, they are always looking for an opportunity to take advantage of weakness and ultimately it is their invasions, the inscriptions tell us, that bring the Akkadian Empire to its knees.

But nonetheless, other factors were at work and it now seems as if the end of the Akkadian period, so around 2200, 2150 BC, was a period of climatic change.

Drought affected the region dramatically.

Now these are city-states that are dependent on a world of agriculture sustained by irrigation.

And the decline in water in the rivers or the advance of sea waters up those rivers from the Persian Gulf affects the agricultural potential of the land.

And even if it's just for a few years, this makes these city-states very, very vulnerable.

It disrupts, obviously, the supply of agricultural goods, but also means that it's no longer possible to acquire traded material coming in from outside.

So the whole system

becomes very vulnerable and prone to collapse.

And so if you've got an empire or an extensive control over these city-states, that too becomes immensely vulnerable.

And this seems to be a major contributing factor to the ultimate control over that region by the kings of Agaday.

So it becomes vulnerable because all of the links become strained.

It's not just Agadai suffers from the famine, it's that they all suffer from the famine.

And then the whole fledgling, if I can even say the fledgling bureaucracy, the structure of this control, it falls apart.

And it just shows the fragility, doesn't it?

Absolutely.

And I think this has been a recurring theme throughout Mesopotamian history and was almost certainly happening, of course, much, much earlier.

And we have less evidence for that surviving.

But the rise and fall of these cities, their political and economic structures, are all dependent on this extraordinary environment, but a very fragile one.

Well, I think we can talk about the fall of a particular city here then, in the case of Agadai.

But you mentioned the Elamites earlier.

Are these also the people that equate with the so-called Ghouti?

So the Gouti are, again, difficult to define precisely, but they're peoples that seem to be located somewhere in those mountains to the east of Iraq, the mountains that now divide Iraq from Iran, the so-called Zagros mountains.

And the people of those mountains are always attracted by the agricultural wealth and the resources of the alluvial plain.

It's this repeating idea, isn't it?

These kind of montane pastoral herdsmen or so on, a bit more warlike descending on the fertile plains in the valleys below.

You see that again and again across the ancient world.

You see it again and again, but you also, of course, it's repeated in the inscriptions of the alluvial plain as a sort of repeating motif.

So it's perhaps an easy explanation if you're living on the flatlands of southern Iraq to blame those uncivilized barbarious people up in the mountains.

The Highlanders descending.

How much reality behind that, of course, is much more difficult to determine.

This is just a way of explaining why your great civilization eventually declines.

But almost certainly the decline politically, economically of these centers would attract other people in to take advantage of a situation, whether brought in as mercenaries or as workers or as invading armies.

Again, probably a mixture of all those.

So famine could have weakened one of these city-states and then the hammer blow,

the destructive hammer blow could be outside external invaders coming in and destroying a city and looting it.

Correct, exactly.

And that may have happened from city to city or one big moment, which was the ultimate death knail, as it were, to the empire.

Do we think that happens?

That does happen to any cities at this time?

Because is it the case with Agadeh that we don't know where it was?

One of the theories is that it was just so brutally destroyed.

Well, Agadeh hasn't been located.

We have a sense of where it might have been, and it may well now lie under a suburb of modern Baghdad.

It's certainly positioned very strategically.

on the river Tigris or close to the Tigris to benefit from the trade with the mountains of Iran and the alluvial plain to the south.

But it's never been yet located.

No doubt when it is, if anything survives after modern building, it will no doubt show some of the most spectacular material from this period.

But at the same time, the Akkadian Empire falls, but the city-states that we've already talked about, Aruch, Ur, and so on, endure past the fall of the Akkadian Empire.

And normally after the fall of an empire, or if you can call it an empire, you see periods of chaos, you know, kind of confusion, not really knowing what's going to happen next, almost a power vacuum.

Do we know how these city-states fared in the years following the fall of the Akkadian Empire?

So the Akkadian Empire certainly seems to have brought an idea of chaos.

Later inscriptions in Mesopotamia look back to that period, the end of the Agadai Empire, and actually ask the question, who was king?

Who was not king?

I mean, it was unclear who was actually in control.

So that

system of a single dynasty dominating the region had collapsed.

So what was the new way that in response to a new world as being imagined?

And of course, the city-state structure remained.

And so it was back to individual cities and their rulers attempting now to restore the Agadai Empire.

And of course, within that moment of chaos, there were the Gouti, the Elamites, and the local rulers all vying to claim the Agadai mantle.

So they're all still in the area of Lower Mesopotamia, of Sumer at that time.

The Guti and the Elamites, they haven't gone back to their mountains.

They've decided to kind of stay in the region, have they?

So they,

again, were dependent, of course, on later later inscriptions which describe this period of chaos and then the emergence of new centers of power but could we then say that actually these city-states they are weaker at that time if i said from the surviving evidence may well be that there was a famine that contributed to the fall of the acadian empire these other city-states they do endure

But can we see potentially in this time, it's a time of rebuilding, of regaining their strength, of recovering from things like

Again, it's difficult to know how much we should take literally these literary descriptions of later

about this period of decline of the Agaday political control.

Because, of course, for many of these city-states, it was a sense of being liberated to do their own thing once again.

And yes, no doubt, the period of drought and upheaval would have affected things very widely.

But after a couple of years, the agricultural resources returned and then cities could once again start flourishing as they had always.

And so what time period should we be focusing in on now, Paul?

How far ahead have we gone from where we began in the mid-third millennium BC?

So the Agadai Empire has collapsed around 2150 BC, something like that.

Again, the the chronology slightly imprecise, but we begin to see some city-states reasserting their

independence, their identities.

And one of the best known of those city-states for this particular period is one called Lagash,

which is located on the alluvial plain, relatively close to the mountains of Iran.

So it's able to benefit enormously from close links to the Elamites and the rich resources of the mountains, the woods, the stones, the metals.

And is this the first sense, real sense of stability then from our surviving sources post-the fall of this empire's decline?

So what we see probably is a continuity in a way that the dynasties at Lagash had always benefited from its geographical position, its control over those trade routes and been wealthy as a result.

And there are enormous temple buildings from the earlier third millennium at Lagash and its cult center of Girusu, for example.

So it's always an important centre.

But now with the fall of the Agadei control over the region, we see a dynasty of kings emerge in Lagash that reassert that control over the wealth.

And is this the figure I have in my notes?

Is it King Gudea or Gadea?

I'm probably saying it butchering the pronunciation.

Yes, so Gudea is

certainly the most famous of the kings of this period, who is a ruler of the city-state of Lagash

and

uses his new independence and control of all this wealth that the city-state is able to dominate, trade, bringing in metals and stones from the mountains of Iran and elsewhere, that he's able to create a sense of a new start,

a new beginning, which he's in control of.

It shows, doesn't it, so these city-states, they're still very much thriving, or at least Lagash is.

But Lagash doesn't remain the only one that we see in the surviving sources that does seem to have a resurgence.

Because, Paul, talk to me about the rise.

the rise again of Ur in particular, because this city-state experiences a brand new life at this time, it feels.

well again is it about a revival or is it rather continuity but suddenly we're able to see it right it's no longer blanketed by this agade overlordship but rather able to exert its independence but of course all these city states whether it's lagash and ur that emerges to then dominate the region, they are in a new world in the sense that that their rulers are building on the traditions of the Agaday period.

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Because later you have like the Neo-Assyrians versus the older Assyrians.

Is this described as the Neo-Sumerian period?

So it's called that really because

the rulers of these city-states

start to use the Sumerian language in a much more elaborate way than previously.

So yes, they continue to create monuments with Sumerian inscriptions, but Sumerian increasingly is made the language of administration.

And it's at a time probably when the spoken language is dying.

And this

happens to languages across the globe that they have a lifespan, they can be absorbed into other cultures and disappear from the spoken language.

But is the spoken language then also Sumerian?

So it's still remaining prominent in writing but not being spoken?

Correct.

So it's actually a political decision.

So if one takes Latin as a sort of better known example, after the Roman Empire,

Latin ceases to become a spoken language, would be eventually replaced, of course, with Italian in the heartland, but Latin continues as a written language of authority, of learning and administration, even though people in the street are no longer speaking it.

And the same seems to have been the case with Sumerian.

It's gradually replaced by the Semitic language, Akkadian, and its relations.

This isn't about conquest.

This is just about cultural change.

The majority of people start speaking that language.

And Sumerian becomes less and less spoken in the street.

But at that very moment, the new authorities in power see this language as ancient, as connected to their land, but is specialized.

It's so special that their administrators, their scribes, their scholars can use it, just like Latin would be used in the medieval period.

And as a result, modern scholars reading all these texts, which are now in Sumerian, have recreated, have created a notion that this is a revival of a people.

I think it's not.

It's the use of a dying language as the script of of power and authority.

So could you say then, getting my head around this, that the city-states that are often called Sumerian today, like Uruk, Ur, Lagash, and so on, they're still very prominent at this time.

The people who are often labeled today as Sumerians who lived in those places, they're still prominent at the time.

And as you say, post-Akkadian dynasty, the fall of the Akkadians, there's the resurgence in some of these cities and would explore the rulers as well.

But if we take the Sumerians or Sumerian as meaning the language itself, at this time of resurgence for the city, and potentially a people, you argue it's not,

the language itself, can we say, has experienced a decline at this time.

It remains important, but it's not.

the spoken language anymore.

So in terms of as a spoken language, Sumerian is declining and will eventually cease to be spoken.

But it's being used now, is being written much, much more extensively.

And it

becomes the language of the state and therefore its identity.

So one could argue, indeed, that these are Sumerian states by virtue of

the Sumerian language being at its heart.

But in terms of people

on the street, they're almost certainly not speaking it.

Well, we'll keep that in mind is we'll keep, we'll call these Sumerian states for the meantime then, just to make it as easy and streamlined as possible.

So they are experiencing a resurgence at this time.

Who are the figures, let's say as Ur, because this seems a prime example.

Do we know much about the rulers who oversee this prominence of this city at that time?

Yes, we have a lot of information increasingly about this particular period, which is often described as the third dynasty of Ur or the Ur three state.

According to later Mesopotamian tradition, it's the third time that Ur has dominated the alluvial plain, but that's something of a construct.

But the third dynasty of Ur, we have a great deal of written material, of course, largely in Sumerian.

And we can talk about the dynasty of kings.

Originally, the dynasty is emerging at the city of Uruk,

a city just the north of Ur, but then it's the dynasty from Ur itself that takes control.

And Ur-Nama is credited with being the first king of this third dynasty.

And he's very famous because He not only consolidates his control over many of the what had become independent city-states, again an attempt to reassert control of the alluvium, but he builds in those city-states some great monuments, most famously ziggurat towers, these decked solid mudbrick structures for the focus of the worship of the gods who control these cities.

And is this still a great ziggurat of Ur today?

And was that built then by Ur-Nama some 4,000 years ago?

Yes, so the Ziggurat at Ur is one of the best surviving examples in the city-states, so you can go and visit it today.

It has its origins under Uanama, he

was the king who had it constructed.

Subsequent dynasties of kings, of course, refurbished it and rebuilt it, not least Nabonidus, much, much further on in the 6th century.

BC.

So it's a monument that's been rebuilt on a number of occasions, but it's largely the result of Uanama.

Given his expansion on the alluvial plane, is it possible to argue, if we call her a Sumerian city because of the prominence of Sumerian as the written language, does he actually form a Sumerian empire at that time?

So he, like the Agadi kings, Menerisvex, creates a dynasty that expands their control over the alluvium.

It takes a different shape than the Akkadian Empire.

That's because of course politics has changed and there are different powers in the region.

And the Ur three kings look largely towards the east, towards those rich mountains of Iran to control those.

And so the third dynasty of Ur creates kingdom or larger empire that expands into what is today modern-day Iran.

Doesn't seem to be near any sort of decline at this moment, I must admit.

But keeping on Unama a bit more, he's famous for his law code.

Can you tell us about this?

Because I feel we have to talk about it.

So we have attempts to show the king as the ruler of justice,

that the ultimate source of justice in the land was the king.

We have earlier examples of that in Mesopotamia.

But Unama has indeed a so-called law code, which is an expression of examples of how justice would prevail.

So they're examples, effectively, of good kingship.

But they become the models of more famous law codes, not least, of course, that of Hammurabi of the 18th century BCE.

some 400 years later, which becomes the ultimate model of the expression of the king of justice.

And you mentioned how he is the founder of this dynasty, the third dynasty of Ur?

Correct.

So how long does Ur remain prominent in this post-Akkadian time and arguably

being the prime Sumerian city at that time and ruling over many other city-states in the area?

So the Third Dynasty lasts about a century.

So in the scheme of human life, it's quite a long time, but in the overall scheme of Mesopotamia, of course, it's it's yet another example of the rise of political power, centralization across the alluvial plane.

But ultimately, as with the Agaday Empire, it too collapses.

And so what happens?

Why does it collapse?

What are the theories behind why this Sumerian city collapses?

So the reasons, again,

can probably be a mixture of factors as they were with the Agadai Empire.

And we read in the contemporary sources, in the administrative documents of the Ur 3 state, evidence of pressure from harvests, so the collapse of harvests, the feeding of populations, the movement of grain in order to cope with challenges, whether that's around drought or other forms of climate change is actually unclear.

But also evidence from those texts of pressure from outside.

We read about walls being built between some of the major rivers to ward off groups that are identified as Amorites.

So tribal groups or other groups, again,

probably defined in some sense as these barbarians from the mountains in the traditional way of describing the enemies, they are exerting pressure.

And that may well be again in response to a weakened center.

The Ur3 state was very, very bureaucratic.

It controlled the taxation flowing in from the provinces to the centre in enormous detail.

And we have literally tens of thousands

of cuneiform tablets which detail this taxation system.

And are they almost all in Sumerian?

They're all in Sumerian.

the scribes, the administrators trained at the center in the language of administration, which was Sumerian, and then manage the resources coming in from across this extensive kingdom.

And

that

also offers opportunities for disruption.

So if some areas are prone to agricultural collapse or the movement of peoples, then it threatens the entire system.

And so a very complicated picture is probably undermining that centralized control.

And we see only glimpses of that in the contemporary records.

And with the end of the dynasty, do we then think it is, if Ur has been weakened, is it a violent end?

Do we think that Ur was sacked?

So that's what we get from the later Inscotians, from the Mesopotamians of that region looking back to this period and composing what are described as lamentations.

These are long literary accounts of the terrible events that happened in their minds to the end of the Ur 3 Empire.

So like the Agaday kings, like the Agadai Empire, the third dynasty would be viewed as a splendid period.

Again, a period for...

to be repeated, to be emulated.

Of like the greatest city that had ever been created or to that point in history, do we think?

Indeed.

I mean, this is, you know, this is really what later kings look back on, even if they're creating it as a myth in their own making rather than as a reality.

But certainly, we know that the dynasty of Uanama and

his successors, not least the great ruler Shulgi, who created an idea of what the greatest ruler should be writing in Sumerian, his inscriptions would be looked back as the model by which all future kings should rule.

So later kings would look back, write lamentations on the decline of the Ur 3 state, and in those descriptions, it's all about a violent end.

And it's again those pesky Elamites from Iran sweeping in from the mountains, taking over, and taking the last king of Ur 3, Ibi-Sin, in chains up to the mountains of Iran, where he disappears from history.

And is there a sense in those written records that, as you mentioned, we do need to take with a pinch of salt, maybe a barrel full of salt, that they also sacked external invaders, also sacked other cities in the area, like Uruk or Girsu and so on?

Well, we get a sense that that is the case, that

dynasties of new rulers

take up residence in these cities, even if it's briefly, and we see we're back to a period of chaos.

Now, that's, of course, chaos politically, but it doesn't mean to say necessarily that it's the collapse of all other systems, that people's lives, perhaps at the lowest levels of society, may not even been aware of some of these big changes.

It's very difficult.

So there's not the complete devastation.

It's not like the sack of Carthage, or at least we don't know from our surviving records, where there is brutal executions of people in these cities, population replacements, or the taking of people from a city and placing them elsewhere in the world.

We just don't know stuff like that.

It's not as if the people are changing completely in these cities.

So I suspect very much, and we have evidence from different periods, as well as these literary accounts, that terrible things were going on.

that there were, of course, invading armies, there was great slaughter, there would have been major disruption.

This, again, a recurring theme, not just, of course, in this part of the world.

But then again, after that, those terrible events, then life returns, and those old systems of

bringing canals to the fields and the agriculture is revived.

And that sense of independent city-states at their center, their gods,

that continuity is very clear.

What about the Sumerian language?

Does its fate really intertwine with that of the third dynasty of Ur?

So when that dynasty comes to a violent end, does that also affect the survival of the Sumerian language?

So the

writing of the Sumerian language continues.

And it is embedded in the training of administrators, of scribes.

It becomes an important part of a very complex way of defining and describing the world by these not just

administrators, but also scholars, where the Akkadian language, the Semitic language, is combined with the Sumerian language to give a very complex and extremely rich way of describing the universe.

And Sumerian, in that sense, is never lost because it continues to be used by these scribes, by these scholars, right the way down to the end of cuneiform culture in the early centuries of the Common Era.

So is it the case that after the fall of the third dynasty of Ur, that although Sumerian continues, it never is as prominent as it was during that time?

That's correct, because the language of the street, as it were, the Semitic languages, the Akkadian, is much more convenient in terms of administration because so many other people speak it.

And so you continue to get Sumerian used for royal inscriptions.

Again, it speaks of antiquity and power and authority and harks back to the Agade and Orthri

periods of brilliance.

But for administration, now it's the the language spoken in the street, the Babylonian, Assyrian languages, dialects of Akkadian, which come to dominate.

And is that epitomised by when you see the rise of Babylon soon after, is it Hammurabi and so on, that the language that they are using is Akkadian.

Sumerian is still there, but to a lesser extent is more as an intellectual pursuit?

That's right.

And I think that's what's given the impression that the Sumerians as a people have been defeated and has disappeared.

but in fact, it's just a change in the use of language by the state.

And they've been speaking Akkadian anyway for some time up to that point.

They've been speaking Akkadian for forever.

So the people endure, so that the Sumerian language changes at that time.

Correct.

So when can we really say, I mean, it's a fascinating topic to explore.

When can we really say

Sumerian has reached its end?

When can we say that these Sumerian cities, as in cities where Sumerian was still written, does

evidently experience a decline?

These cities do fall.

So Sumerian has an echo

long after

the last person has spoken it, for thousands of years.

But it doesn't define, as it were, a group of people or a particular culture.

It is part of the rebuilding and the remodelling and the reshaping of Mesopotamian culture over the millennia as new peoples take power and

bring in their own traditions and we see new forms of economic and political organization.

But Sumerian is there within that framework.

So that legacy lives on.

But do we have an idea I mean, will the likes of Ur and Uruk when you get to the second millennium BC, will they ever reach the heights that they had in previous centuries?

Do we see a clear decline in importance of these cities now as time has moved on?

In many respects, no.

The major changes to many of these cities are largely a result of the movement of the major rivers.

And so the shift of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their tributaries and

the streams that flow from them across the alluvial plain, they shift in their bed.

But that is very often a gradual process,

or when it's more violent change, then cities are left abandoned in the desert.

But for places like Ur and Uruk,

that doesn't happen until much later.

the last centuries of the first millennium BC.

And so we're looking way into the future for the decline of those cities.

And many of them continue to survive even as the rivers shift courses, because kings from other cities, recognizing their great antiquity and their importance and the home of great gods, continue to build there even when their populations are no longer a major component of their existence.

So he's almost asking about, might have to retitle this maybe with a question mark, Full of the Sumerians question mark at the end.

Can we even say that there is a clear cut-off point for the fall of Sumer, for the fall of these cities, for the fall of the Sumerian language?

If they manage to endure in these other forms, if when we mention the word Sumerian, you actually have to be more careful with how you say it because the people didn't identify themselves as Sumerian, you realize as an interviewer, it's much more complicated than simply fool of the Sumerians.

I think it's much more interesting.

I think it's much more complex real worlds that we're dealing with.

And very often all we're seeing is that top elite royal level, where of course there are changes of dynasties and changes of identities.

But fundamentally,

these mixed populations connected very much their identity with their cities.

And that's something one finds in Iraq to this day.

And with the Sumerian language, so can we still imagine that there would have been people who knew how to write it, how to interpret it, all the way down to, let's say, the Neo-Assyrians in the first millennium BC in the great library of Ashurbanipal, for instance, at Nineveh, or maybe even then transported into the Greco-Roman world?

Do we know much about that, that longevity of Sumerian as a language?

So Sumerian is, continues to be

written and, I mean, to some extent, of course, spoken in the same way that Latin would be spoken.

But it's very much about a literary elite.

It's the scribes who are trained in the system of writing and have the intellectual knowledge to be thinking about this.

And they, too, were stumped by the tablets that were coming out of the ground recording some of these earlier attempts to record Sumerian.

And so we see in the new Assyrian period, in the first millennium BC,

cuneiform tablets where the scribes are writing some of the more archaic forms of the signs and trying to work out their original meaning in the Sumerian language.

So it's an intellectual endeavor.

And it's that

intellectual world.

that really comes to an end when the cuneiform system of writing ends in the early centuries of the Common Era, because Sumerian is embedded in the script.

And once the script is replaced by alphabetic systems, then Sumerian disappears.

Sumerian as a language endures all the way through the cuneiform tradition.

That is extraordinary, and yes, as you say, almost the equivalent of Greek, ancient Greek, and Latin today as an intellectual pursuit.

Paul, this has been eye-opening.

I didn't know much about this topic at all.

And you've highlighted so much about these cities and the people and of course the language of Sumerian and how it endured over millennia.

It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast.

Thank you very much.

Well, there you go.

There was fan favourite of the podcast, the British Museum's Dr.

Paul Collins, for this, our second episode in our Great Disasters mini-series this September, all about the Sumerian cities some 4,000 years ago, and how we probably shouldn't be looking at the fall of a Sumerian people but rather the fall of the Sumerian language as a spoken language quite like Latin today becoming an intellectual pursuit.

It's all really interesting.

We'd love to hear your thoughts about the episode in the comments.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

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