In the southern part of Mesopotamia, one of the earliest known civilizations in the world was the Sumerians. In case you’re wondering where the term “Sumerian” originated from it was the common name given to the ancient inhabitants of southern Mesopotamia by their successors.
Sumerians referred to themselves as the sag-giga, which literally meant “the black-headed people. The cities of Sumer were the first to practice rigorous, year-round agriculture. The extra amount of storable goods created by this economy allowed the population to settle in one place instead of being nomads. It also allowed for the population density and in turn required an extensive labor force and division of labor. This organization led to the necessity of record keeping and the development of writing.
The most important archaeological discoveries were in Sumerian large number of tablets written in Sumerian. The Sumerian language is usually regarded as a language isolate in linguistics since it belongs to no known language family. Something important that the Sumerians invented were the picture-hieroglyphs that later developed into cuneiform.
Sumer was a polytheistic society. Their lives were spent serving the gods in the form of man-made statues. It’s believed that the Sumerians were possibly the first to write down their beliefs, which were the inspiration for much of later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology. Sumerian temples (Ziggurats) consisted of a forecourt, with a central pond for purification. The temple itself had a central nave with aisles along either side. After some time the Sumerians began to place the temples on top of multi-layered square constructions built as a series of rising terraces, giving rise to the later Ziggurat style.
The Sumerians developed a complex system of metrology in 4000 BCE, this system resulted in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. From 2600 BCE and on the Sumerians wrote multiplication tables on clay tablets and dealt with geometrical exercises and division problems.
Lexii and Mimi's Blast From The Past 