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Sumerians where a people who lived in the southern portion of Mesopotamia from around 3500 B.C. to 1800 B.C.. The Sumerian people lived in twelve city states, famous among which are Sumer and Ur. They shared a common language, Sumerian. Sumerian has no modern day descendants, it seems to have disappeared from human history as a spoken language, but lived on in written language.

The Sumerians were an agricultural people, and they raised crops in three areas. Inside the city, highly cultivated gardens were kept. The main source of food and surplus came from fields outside of the cities, irrigated by a system of canals from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The third agricultural region was the large tracts of land away from water sources. These were used for grazing animals, hunting, and for collecting fuel. The date was an especially important food of the Sumerians, it was highly nutritious, it kept well, and it could be grown in salty or stagnant water. It only needed to be kept wet in order to produce fruit. Other important crops included corn and flax.

Orgin

The origin of the Sumerians is simply unknown. What is known is that they were non-Semitic. They didn’t originate from the region for which they are known. This presents some problems for archaeologists such as what were the pre-Sumerian cultures present in the region if the Sumerians are immigrants. And from where did the Sumerians originate. Linguistically speaking, Sumerian is an isolate. It has no known language family, making it even more difficult to pin down the origin of the culture.

One hypothesis is that the Sumerians were invaders at around the Ubaid or Uruk period, but this doesn’t follow since the archaeological record shows continuity from the early Ubaid through the Dynastic periods. Excavations at temple sites show occupation that is clearly Sumerian through lower levels where characteristically Sumerian features aren’t found. Identifiably Sumerian artifacts are found no earlier than the Jemdet Nasrperiod, but temples like the one at Eridu have levels that go back much further. The best evidence points to a type of acculturation occurring where a cultural exchange happened rather than an invasion.

But that still leaves the question of from where did the Sumerians come? One hypothesis that has fallen in and out of favor (mostly out as near as scientists can tell) is that the Sumerians arrived from the east via the Persian Gulf. Another is that they arrived from the north from mountainous regions. The latter might explain their affinity for “mountain-like” ziggurats as they attempted to recreate the conditions by which they worshipped in their homelands where shrines may have been constructed atop mountains. Their unique skills in metalworking might also offer a similar clue since ores for such trades would be more readily available in a mountainous homeland. Perhaps they are expatriates or refugees who fled the inundation of the Black Sea around 7150 years ago. This might even have provided an originating source of the flood myth prominent in the Atrahasis and Gilgamesh.

Modern Sumerians

There are some people in Southren Iraq wich claim to be the decentants of the acient Sumerians, like the Marsh Arabs and other "Arabs" in southern Iraq. In fact, geneticists Luca Cavalli-Sforza says that modern-day Kuwaitis have dna markers that might hint that they were the Sumerians.