I've always wondered whether the Sumerians knew they were the first. Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us. The first museum emerges is Mesopotamia around 530 BC; the Egyptian obelisk installed next to the brand-new Colosseum in Rome was older then than the Colosseum is now; legends of giants and heroes of bygone ages are literary universals. We hunger for the past.
But the Sumerians were first. There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it.
Now consider that humanity is likely the first in the Milky Way galaxy. We too have to figure things out for the first time, but on a grander scale. What will history think of us?
The Epic of Gilgamesh references him gloriously restoring ancient cities destroyed by the Flood. Of course, by the time is was written, Sumerian civilisation was already ~2,500-3,000 years old, so it's hard to tell if Sumerians thought those cities were theirs, or someone else's.
The ever-scholarly answerers on r/AskHistorians think that yes, they believed they were the first: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8oskfv/did_a...
I love this question! I got curious about how ancient people interpreted stone tools. When did humanity first realize “cavemen” had come before?
I saw this guy on youtube talking specifically about this topic. Im no historian but i felt like he gave it a serious grounded exploration (no ancient aliens!)
They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods. According to them they were not the first, they were just the next in line after the Gods.
Sure. They had a creation mythos like everyone else. What they didn't have is evidence of a real precursor civilization to ground those myths. The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
Not as many as later civilizations but there are buildings that likely pre-date the Sumerian civilization like the desert kites. And in Syria and Turkey there are megaliths and ruins which are older than Sumer which builders the Sumerians might have know of from oral history.
> The classical Greeks could see Mycenaean ruins.
Apparently, they Minoans had plumbing in the 1800s BC, so I'm sure the Greeks would have been surprised at what had preceded them by a long time.
> They believed their writing was gifted to them by the Gods.
This is an essentially universal belief in the past, and not just about writing. People are able to notice that their lifestyle depends on technologies, and that the only way to learn those technologies is for someone else to teach you. So they decide that the technologies on which their lives depend - pressing olives, farming grain, writing, harvesting wool*... - were taught to their ancestors by the gods.
In the case of writing specifically, the ancient Greeks attributed it to Cadmus, who was not personally a god. But (1) he was a hero with descent from Poseidon, (2) Greek heroes receive prayers and sacrifices and grant supernatural blessings just the same way gods do, and (3) they credited him with introducing writing from Phoenicia, not inventing it out of whole cloth.
* In early records, sheep are not yet sheared - they're plucked. The sheep we have today aren't the sheep they had then.
... were the Sumerians the first? The first what? The article discusses the Uruk period, of maybe 4000 - 3000 BC.
In the middle east, there had been millennia of settlement and agriculture by this point. Gobekli Tepe is apparently ~9000 BC. The Tower of Jericho was built around 8000 BC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_prehistory
Circa 7500 BC there were a bunch of significant sites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Ghazal_(archaeological_sit...
Did Sumerians not know about any of those preexisting sites in the broader region? Maybe they built bigger cities, but I don't think they lacked for evidence of older civilizations and sites.
The first to have a writing system, as mentioned in the article.
But quotemstr seems interested in something else, not specific to writing.
> Past empires, lost civilizations, and ancient artifacts have always fascinated us.
> There was no glorious but crumbled past empire to inspire them. They figured out everything for the first time, and we know little about what they thought about it.
I think the Sumerians were not without crumbled past ruins of civilizations that covered broad swathes of territory, though they may not have been "empires". But also, to us "the Sumerians" can seem like a brief period in time. But the Uruk period is almost a millennia in duration. For each individual, it may have seemed that the world changed very little over the course of their lifespan, and by 3100 BC, each city would have felt very old to its inhabitants.
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