Key Stage 2 history · World history

KS2 Ancient Sumer: cuneiform, ziggurats and city-states

Ancient Sumer was one of the world’s first civilisations, in southern Mesopotamia, in what is now Iraq. It is one of four depth-study options in the National Curriculum, so only some schools choose it. Children learn about its city-states, its farming and irrigation, its temples, and above all its cuneiform writing, and they learn how our knowledge of such a distant time is built from sources.

Ancient Sumer, explained

Sumer lay between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in the southern part of Mesopotamia. From about 3500 BC people there built some of the first cities in the world, such as Uruk, Ur, Lagash and Eridu. Each city-state had its own ruler, walls and temple, and the cities sometimes cooperated, traded and went to war. Children are taught that Sumer was not one country with a single ruler and capital, but a group of rival and partner cities that shared a language and many customs.

The land was hot and dry, but the rivers flooded and the Sumerians built canals and ditches to bring water to their fields. This irrigation produced more barley, dates and other food than people needed to eat. A surplus meant that not everyone had to farm, so Sumer had craftworkers, merchants, priests, soldiers and scribes. The city’s most important building was usually a ziggurat, a tall stepped platform with a temple on top, which Sumerians thought of as the home of the city’s god. The ziggurat at Ur, built around 2100 BC, can still be visited today, partly rebuilt in modern times.

The Sumerians are most famous for writing. Around 3300 BC, or a little later, they began pressing marks into wet clay with a cut reed. The wedge-shaped signs are called cuneiform, from the Latin word for wedge. The first writing recorded practical things such as grain, sheep, beer and tax, and later it was used for laws, letters, hymns and stories, including the poems of Gilgamesh, a king of Uruk. Scribes trained for years in a school to learn the hundreds of signs. Cuneiform was used by later peoples for about 3,000 years, and was only read again by scholars in the 1800s.

Because the Sumerians left so much writing and so many buildings, historians can ask good questions about them. Children use the curriculum’s focus on sources: clay tablets, seals, statues, tools, the ruins of cities and the objects found in royal graves at Ur. They learn that sources can show a lot but not everything: tablets were written by the educated few, and many tablets are broken or lost. Sumerian ideas have lasted too. We still divide an hour into 60 minutes and a circle into 360 degrees, a system that goes back to Mesopotamian counting in sixties.

Words your child will hear

Mesopotamia: The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Sumer was in its south.
City-state: A city with its own ruler and laws that controls the land around it.
Cuneiform: Wedge-shaped writing made by pressing a reed into wet clay.
Scribe: A person trained to read, write and keep records.
Ziggurat: A tall stepped tower with a temple at the top.
Irrigation: Bringing water to the fields through canals and ditches.
Artefact: An object made by people in the past, which historians study as evidence.

What the National Curriculum says

The programme of study for Key Stage 2 says:

Pupils should be taught about the achievements of the earliest civilizations – an overview of where and when the first civilizations appeared and a depth study of one of the following: Ancient Sumer, The Indus Valley, Ancient Egypt, The Shang Dynasty of Ancient China
Pupils should construct informed responses that involve thoughtful selection and organisation of relevant historical information.
Pupils should understand how our knowledge of the past is constructed from a range of sources.

Objectives from the National Curriculum in England, © Crown copyright, used under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

A worked example: learning from a clay tablet

A museum shows a small clay tablet marked with cuneiform and a drawing of the signs. Translators say it records barley handed out to workers. What can this source tell us about Sumer, and what can’t it tell us?

Describe the source. It is a small piece of baked or dried clay with wedge-shaped signs pressed in. This is a primary source, made by a Sumerian scribe at the time.
Work out what it says. The tablet is a record of barley. So there must have been people in charge who gave out food and wanted to keep careful accounts of it.
Infer what that suggests. The community was organised enough to keep records, which means they had specialists who could write, and enough farming to produce a surplus to share out.
Say what we cannot tell. One tablet does not show how everyone lived, who the workers were, or whether they were free. Scribes wrote mainly about what their employers wanted recorded.
Say how to find out more. Compare with other tablets, the ruins of storehouses and canals, and objects from graves, so that each source can check the others.

The tablet shows that Sumerian society was organised enough to keep written records of food, which points to farming, specialist scribes and people in authority. It cannot tell us about everyday life for everyone, so historians combine it with other sources.

Common mistakes and how to help

Thinking cuneiform is the same as Egyptian hieroglyphs

Both are ancient, strange-looking scripts, and both began with small pictures, so they get confused. Over time Sumerian signs became groups of wedge-shaped marks that stand for words and sounds and no longer look like pictures.

What helps: Look at a picture of cuneiform and one of hieroglyphs side by side. Cuneiform is all wedges and is pressed into clay, while hieroglyphs are detailed drawings, often carved or painted.

Believing Sumer was a single country with one king

Children often imagine one capital, as with modern nations or Egypt’s pharaohs, but Sumer was made up of independent city-states.

What helps: Draw a map with Ur, Uruk, Lagash and Eridu as separate dots, each with its own temple, and talk about how they traded and sometimes fought.

Confusing Sumer with Egypt or thinking it was in Egypt

Both are ancient, desert-edged, river-based and appear in the same lessons. The Tigris and Euphrates are not the Nile.

What helps: Mark them on a world map. Sumer’s land is in modern Iraq, not Africa, and has ziggurats rather than pyramids.

Thinking everyone could read and write

Children assume that because writing existed, everyone used it. In fact, learning cuneiform took years of training and only a small group became scribes.

What helps: Ask how many people in your family could read an unknown script. It makes the role of scribes clear and shows why written sources show only part of the story.

How to help at home

Write cuneiform in clay. Flatten a piece of air-drying clay or salt dough with an adult and press the end of a pencil or a lolly stick into it to make wedge shapes. Invent your own code for a few words and see if someone else can read it.
Count in sixties. Look at a clock and talk about why there are 60 minutes in an hour. Count round the clock face in fives together. Then find all the ways 60 can be shared equally (into 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 or 30 groups), which made it a handy number for dividing up grain and land, and talk about how a counting system from thousands of years ago still shapes our day.
Build a ziggurat. Stack boxes or blocks of decreasing size to make a stepped tower. Talk about why people might build a temple high up, and how many workers it would take.
Be a historian. Choose an everyday object from your home, such as a receipt or a shopping list, and ask what a historian in 5,000 years could learn from it and what they might wrongly guess.

Leads on to

Key Stage 3: A significant society in world history