It has been said that 'war spurs Man to scientific and material breakthroughs. In ancient Sumer, it seems, temple construction spurred the people and their rulers into greater technological achievements. The ability to carry out major construction work according to prepared architectural plans, to organize and feed a huge labor force, to flatten land and raise mounds, to mold bricks and transport stones, to bring rare metals and other materials from afar, to east metal and shape utensils and ornaments - all. clearly speak of a high civilization, already in full bloom in the third millennium B.C.
As masterful as even the earliest Sumerian temples were, they represented but the tip of the iceberg of the scope and richness of the material achievements of the first great civilization known to Man.
In addition to the invention and development of writing, without which a high civilization could not have come about, the Sumerians should also be credited with the invention of printing. Millennia before Johann Gutenberg "invented" printing by using movable type, Sumerian scribes used ready-made "type" of the various pictographic signs, which they used as we now use rubber stamps to impress the desired sequence of signs in the wet clay.
They also invented the forerunner of our rotary presses - the cylinder seal. Made of extremely hard stone, it was a small cylinder into which the message or design had been engraved in reverse; whenever the seal was rolled on the wet clay, the imprint created a "positive" impression on the clay. The seal also enabled one to assure the authenticity of documents; a new impression could be made at once to compare it with the old impression on the document.
Many Sumerian and Mesopotamian written records concerned themselves not necessarily with the divine or spiritual but with such daily tasks as recording crops, measuring fields, and calculating prices. Indeed, no high civilization would have been possible without a parallel advanced system of mathematics.
The Sumerian system, called sexagesimal, combined a mundane 10 with a "celestial" 6 to obtain the base figure 60. This system is in some respects superior to our present one; in any case, it is unquestionably superior to later Greek and Roman systems. It enabled the Sumerians to divide into fractions and multiply into the millions, to calculate roots or raise numbers several powers. This was not only the first-known mathematical system but also one that gave us the "place" concept: Just as, in the decimal system, 2 can be 2 or 20 or 200, depending on the digit's place, so could a Sumerian 2 mean 2 or 120 (2 x 60), and so on, depending on the "place."
The 360-degree circle, the foot and its 12 inches, and the "dozen" as a unit are but a few examples of the vestiges of Sumerian mathematics still evident in our daily life. Their concomitant achievements in astronomy, the establishment of a calendar, and similar mathematical-celestial feats will receive much closer study in coming chapters.
Just as our own economic and social system - our books, court and tax records, commercial contracts, marriage certificates, and so on - depends on paper, Sumerian/ Mesopotamian life depended on clay. Temples, courts, and trading houses had their scribes ready with tablets of wet clay on which to inscribe decisions, agreements, letters, or calculate prices, wages, the area of a field, or the number of bricks required in a construction.
Clay was also a crucial raw material for the manufacture of utensils for daily use and containers for storage and transportation of goods. It was also used to make bricks - another Sumerian "first," which made possible the building of houses for the people, palaces for the kings, and imposing temples for the gods.
The Sumerians are credited with two technological breakthroughs that made it possible to combine lightness with tensile strength for all clay products: reinforcing and firing. Modern architects have discovered that reinforced concrete, an extremely strong building material, can be created by pouring cement into molds containing iron rods; long ago, the Sumerians gave their bricks great strength by mixing the wet clay with chopped reeds or straw. They also knew that clay products could be given tensile strength and durability by firing them in a kiln. The world's first high-rise buildings and archways, as well as durable ceramic wares, were made possible by these technological breakthroughs.
The invention of the kiln - a furnace in which intense but controllable temperatures could be attained without the risk of contaminating products with dust or ashes - made possible an even greater technological advance: the Age of Metals. It has been assumed that man discovered that he could hammer "soft stones" - naturally occurring nuggets of gold as well as copper and silver compounds - into useful or pleasing shapes, sometime about 6000 B.C. The first hammered-metal artifacts were found in the highlands of the Zagros and Taurus mountains. However, as R. J. Forbes (The Birthplace of Old World Metallurgy) pointed out, "in the ancient Near East, the supply of native copper was quickly exhausted, and the miner had to turn to ores." This required the knowledge and ability to find and extract the ores, crush them, then smelt and refine them - processes that could not have been carried out without kiln-type furnaces and a generally advanced technology.
The art of metallurgy soon encompassed the ability to alloy copper with other metals, resulting in a castable, hard, but malleable metal we call bronze. The Bronze Age,, our first metallurgical age, was also a Mesopotamian contribution to modern civilization. Much of ancient commerce was devoted to the metals trade; it also formed the basis for the development in Mesopotamia of
banking and the first money - the silver shekel ("weighed ingot").
The many varieties of metals and alloys for which Sumerian and Akkadian names have been found and the extensive technological terminology attest to the high level of metallurgy in ancient Mesopotamia. For a while this puzzled the scholars because Sumer, as such, was devoid of metal ores, yet metallurgy most definitely began there.
The answer is energy. Smelting, refining, and alloying, as well as casting, could not be done without ample supplies of fuels to fire the kilns, crucibles, and furnaces. Mesopotamia may have lacked ores, but it had fuels in abundance. So the ores were brought to the fuels, which explains many early inscriptions describing the bringing of metal ores from afar. The fuels that made Sumer technologically supreme were bitumens and asphalts, petroleum products that naturally seeped up to the surface in many places in Mesopotamia. R. J. Forbes (Bitumen and Petroleum in Antiquity) shows that the surface deposits of Mesopotamia were the ancient world's prime source of fuels from the earliest times to the Roman era. His conclusion is that the technological use of these petroleum products began in Sumer circa 3500 B.C.; indeed, he shows that the use and knowledge of the fuels and their properties were greater in Sumerian times than in later civilizations. So extensive was the Sumerian use of these petroleum products - not only as fuel but also as road-building materials, for waterproofing, caulking, painting, cementing, and molding - that when archaeologists searched for ancient Ur they found it buried in a mound that the local Arabs called "Mound of Bitumen." Forbes shows that the Sumerian language had terms for every genus and variant of the bituminous substances found in Mesopotamia. Indeed, the names of bituminous and petroleum materials in other languages - Akkadian, Hebrew, Egyptian, Coptic, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit - can clearly be traced to the Sumerian origins; for example, the most common word for petroleum - naphta - derives from napatu ("stones that flare up"). The Sumerian use of petroleum products was also basic to an advanced chemistry. We can judge the high level of Sumerian knowledge not only by the variety of paints and pigments used and such processes as glazing but also by the remarkable artificial production of semiprecious stones, including a substitute for lapis lazuli.