Sumer y Sumerios. Donde empezó la historia | Eva Tobalina

I am going to start talking to you a little bit about this civilization of the Sumerians and to start talking about anything about history we always have to start with a little bit of geography and in this case in a particular way because the Sumerian civilization developed in the southern end of a wonderful and fascinating place that is the valley between the two rivers, the land of Mesopotamia and normally when we think of the great civilizations of antiquity we think of the civilizations of Mesopotamia, the civilizations that arose around the Tigris and the Euphrates and the civilization Egyptian civilization and we imagine that the two civilizations, the Mesopotamian civilizations and the Egyptian civilization are similar because they arose around large rivers, and we imagine that the Nile and the Tigris and the Euphrates behave in a similar way but in reality and This is essential to start talking about the Sumerians.

The Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates are river courses that have a very different behavior. The Nile, as you all know, owes its floods to the action of the Monsoon to the Monsoon rains on the Ethiopian massif. When the Nile overflows it does so in the summer after the harvest, it does so calmly, gently, it leaves a fertilizing slime that covers the entire Earth and the Egyptian peasants, exaggerating a little, said it was enough for them to throw their seeds into that colored mud. black so that the chairs would bear fruit and be able to harvest the harvest a few months later, however, the behavior of the Tigris and the Euphrates was completely different, especially the Euphrates, which is the river around which the Sumerian cities arose, the two rivers as you see in the slide They have their origin in the eastern half of the Taurus massif of the Taurus mountains.

The rivers are therefore fed by the melting of the winter snows and have tremendous floods, both the Tigris and the Euphrates, plus the Tigris, the Euphrates is a slightly larger river. Don't worry, that's why the Sumerian civilization arose around the Euphrates. They have very strong floods in spring just after the end of the month and the heat of the month in which we find ourselves in the month of March of the month of April begins. The floods of the Euphrates and the Tigris occurred in the spring before the harvest, and in addition, as they were floods from the thaw, they were floods that every not long time, every 10 to 15 years, presented a completely destructive form, the river overflowed with enormous violence and devastated everything around it in such a way that the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, in order to take advantage of all this fresh water that arrived and to be able to irrigate the fields and fertilize them, had to spend their lives digging canals to bring the fresh water to the lands, they had to dig huge reservoirs to absorb the flood because the flood took place before the harvest, so the Euphrates flood had to be carefully channeled into enormous reservoirs of water so as not to flood the fields as I have told you from time to time the flood would overflow destructive, it completely devastated the canals, it devastated the reservoirs, it flooded the cities and the inhabitants of Mesopotamia had to laboriously go back to excavating the canals and reservoirs once again, so what for the Egyptian peasant was simply to throw the seeds into the mud and let it reach the new harvest for the Mesopotamian peasant in our case the Sumerian meant endless work in the canals, conduits and water bores.

It is not surprising that when the Sumerians recounted the origin of man they said that the gods had created men strictly for not to work and that was the function that was reserved for us as human beings. In addition, it is true that Mesopotamia, the land between the two rivers was abundant in fresh water and arable land, which gave it enormous agricultural potential, including livestock, but Mesopotamia lacked everything else in Mesopotamia there were no forests the wood had to be brought from outside in Mesopotamia there were no metals the metals at this time the copper and tin that maintained the civilization had to be brought from outside and in Mesopotamia there was no stone either basically because it is a immense plain crossed by these two rivers, so everything necessary to sustain any civilization had to be brought from outside in such a way that if we put these two factors together, on the one hand, a lot of labor is necessary, a lot of work in the canals, water reservoirs, hordes of population. dedicated to maintaining the pipelines and on the other hand we find that we need to have long-distance trade we need to acquire wood abroad we need to acquire copper, tin, stone in other places we find that the Mesopotamians were one of the first groups of people on the face of the earth that they needed to organize to take advantage of the resources that nature had given them, fresh water and arable land in abundance and compensate for the shortcomings of the place where they lived, we believe that it was the combination of these two circumstances, we need a lot of hands. of work and organize ourselves very well To take advantage of the gifts that the gods have given us, which led to around well as you see here the beginning of the fourth Millennium BC in the plain of Mesopotamia in the southern end of Mesopotamia around the course of the Euphrates, which was the calmest of the two Mesopotamian rivers, some of the oldest cities on earth began to emerge, which arose as a response to the need to organize and have a lot of labor to maintain the canals and carry out carried out long-distance trade And it was like this, as I tell you, In the middle of the fourth Millennium BC when a series of independent cities and states were born quis nipur lagas uruc Ur and eridu around the flow of the Euphrates River in these cities that are some of the oldest cities on earth where we began to see the first states of the world emerge, the first complex organizations with which human beings have been endowed, we believe that the first source of power, the first center around which labor was organized and the accumulation of surpluses and long-distance trade we believe that the first center of power was the temples and that the first place from which the authority emanated to be able to put all these people to work and trade came from the temples It is no coincidence that in the ancient Sumerian cities the most spectacular, largest and most imposing constructions that we have found were precisely the temples that had in their center the famous Mesopotamian figurat but that around them had a series of rooms, warehouses, archives, residences where all the workers worked. a veritable army of temple servants, these temples had at their center because some of the oldest religious constructions that we preserve on the face of the earth, which are the famous figurat and ziggurats, transmit to us an absolutely fascinating religious idea, the idea that there are magical places on the face of the earth in which the Sphere of the gods and the Sphere of men can touch; places in which the gods can leave the Heavens in which they dwell Eternally and descend and walk among us as if they were human beings That is why the ziggurats have this distinctive pyramidal shape.

The ziggurats are not designed so that the faithful can climb to the top or walk along its floors. The ziggurats are designed to rise to the sky to ascend to have a chapel at the top of the construction and that this chapel becomes the abode of the divinity and that from time to time the divinity leaves the plane of the Spirits, inhabits the Statue of God that is in the central chapel and dwells among us, also giving us its gifts in passing. and above all, protecting us from the terrifying floods of the rivers of Mesopotamia. In fact, if you look at this ideal design of a ziggurat, you will see that at the bottom we have a series of holes, we can see them.

Here also in one of the best preserved ziggurats, which is the figurat of Ur, notice that at the bottom we have a series of rectangular-looking openings that served to let the flood water out because despite the water reservoirs, despite the canals, despite the hydraulic works, I have already It was said that periodically the Tigris and the Euphrates overflowed in such a way that there was no one to stop them, they flooded the cities themselves and those holes because they had to let the flood water out, it is not surprising therefore given that one of the first sources of authority The temple was the house of the God, the place where the divinity dwelt, that the first Kings, the first rulers that we have documented in the Sumerian world, had the status of King Yes, but also a priest and were at the same time sovereigns of the Sumerian cities and also high priests. of the divinity that was worshiped in that city.

Not here, for example, I have brought you the image of a Sumerian ruler and I don't know if it looks very good, but he is about to enter a space delimited by two large columns that is the entrance of a temple because here the king also appears represented to us in his capacity as high priest. This idea that the kings were high priests and should govern the city from a political and administrative point of view but also spiritually is naturally based on the city itself. Sumerian mythology The stories of the Sumerian gods already tell us that royalty is not something that emanates from men but has been ordered by the gods to have intermediaries between human beings and divinity.

Here I have brought you a small summarychronicle cosmogony

sumer

ia of what is the

sumer

ian vision of the universe the sumerians did not believe in a creator god they believed that the gods were computers who what they did was put order in a reality that was originally chaotic the primordial chaos of the sumerian world was defined as seen on the slide as a mixture between fresh waters and salt waters, the waters of the Persian Gulf and the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates and that everything was gathered in a mixture where life was not possible because of the extreme disorder and like many civilizations From ancient times, the Sumerians believed that the world had begun to move at the moment when the gods had decided to put order in this primordial chaos and the fresh water had separated from the salt water and the Earth had begun to flower on the humid mass. not about the liquid mass But it is also interesting that, as in many other cultures of antiquity, the Sumerians believed that there had been several generations of gods and that the primitive gods, the old gods, who are also described as almost irrational wild Indomitable creatures, had There was a second generation of young gods of new gods endowed with greater reasoning and they believed that the new gods had killed the old gods, they had first killed absu, the god of fresh water, and then tiamat, the monstrous being who embodied the salt waters and this new generation of gods presided over by the god of the storm The God of Wind The God of weather and the Goddess of fertility had been the ones who had somehow finished putting order in the world and this finished putting order in the world, putting the icing on the cake for creation had consisted of providing each of them with a protective God and also providing it with a king who would therefore be a figure created by divinity to serve as an intermediary between the gods and men supported in this way by the creator myth of the entire world, the figure of the king and priest must have been surrounded by enormous authority in the world, his environment, however, from this starting point that we observe in the fourth Millennium before Christ, the king who is also the high priest, the temple as the center of political and administrative organization of the city, slowly in the Third Millennium BC we observe a certain secularization, we observe a separation of the King and the high priest and the appearance of the palace as an independent administrative center of the temple and while this happens we see how the names with which the Sumerians refer to their Kings change.

At first the king was the priest king, then he becomes the lugal, which is a warrior king, a conquering king, a king who He leads the troops And finally we have at the end of this whole stage when the Sumerian civilization is in full decline at the end of the Third Millennium BC Aleni who is simply a secular ruler of the city here well look what Gudea, one of the most well-known figures in Sumerian art, was the ruler of the city of Lagash. However, during the Third Millennium BC, even though these Sumerian Kings had been depriving him and his power had gone little by little, as I say, secularized, that does not mean that his power was not absolute over the city and also terrifying over its inhabitants.

Here we have the royal necropolis of Ur, the necropolis where the rulers of the city of Ur were buried, one of the most important Sumerian cities throughout the first half of the Third Millennium BC at the height of the Sumerian civilization this necropolis of Ur was excavated at the beginning of the 20th century by a famous archaeologist named Leonard Buley and in this necropolis they have tombs of Kings and queens or priestesses like this puabi appeared, equipped with impressive funerary trousseau. The excavation of the royal tombs of Ur was contemporary, well close in time to that of the tomb oftutancamon and was completely obscured by the incredible finds in Egypt, no, but the truth is that what they found in Ur has nothing to envy of what Howard Carter found in Thebes in the Valley of the Kings.

Here, for example, I have brought you this Puabi queen or priestess who must have been a very powerful woman at the time. Look at the trousseau with which we have found her, the necklaces, the beads, that Crown adorned with flowers. It is here in the royal tombs of Ur where we have found one of the most famous objects. of the Sumerian culture, which is the famous royal banner of Ur, which is a beautiful piece in which we see some inlays that make up a series of figures. Originally, it was thought that this royal banner of Ur must have been the cover of a kind of banner.

You see that it has a vaguely rectangular appearance. Today we know that it was a much prettier object, much more fascinating than simply the case of a banner because it seems that this box actually served as the case of a musical instrument, as well as the case of a harp and Not just any harp, we have found many harps in the royal necropolis of Ur. The Sumerians in the Third Millennium BC 4600 years ago were very refined and enjoyed delicious banquets enlivened by musicians who played, among other things, harps and what harps the harps were decorated with. mother-of-pearl inlays where we saw mysterious animals in strange postures were decorated with bull heads with ox heads adorned with gold with lapis lazuli with an artistic refinement with an absolutely wonderful delicacy also within the trousseau of the Sumerian sovereigns in these tombs of Ur we have found objects as famous as that goat that is eating those leaves in a scene of delicious everyday life cups all made of gold daggers also made of gold with stupendous finesse and mastery of goldsmithing but along with all these wonders Leonard Woley the archaeologist who excavated the royal tombs of Ur also found testimonies that here in those tombs really horrible events had taken place here on the left they have the tomb of Puabi this woman who seems to be a priestess queen the two things at the same time on the right was Just below the tomb of Puabi they have the tomb of her husband who must have been the high priest king in this city of Ur and if you look at the background marked in a thicker black line you have what was the burial of Puabi herself and you see the skeleton and the magnificent trousseau that surrounded it, but in the chamber that was just in front of the tomb of Puabi we found a lot of skeletons of young men and women carefully placed on the ground along with also skeletons of animals under the tomb Puabi was her husband's tomb, which is the one on the right, you can also see the place where the tomb was marked with a thick line.

The corpse of Puabi's husband and around that place notice that there are a lot of little circles, those are skulls. skulls of young men and women, you see that here in front there are the skeletons of four animals, they are oxen, and you see that here, a little further on, you can see other figures that are also the skeletons of young men in the prime of life, the scene we have In the diagram in the drawing on the right, if we saw it in three dimensions before our eyes, it would be more or less like this.

In the background in white, you have the burial of Puabi's husband. Puabi's tomb was right above and around his burial. King, high priest of the city of Ur, you see that there are a series of girls, perhaps concubines, wives, second-rank servants of the monarch, you see that we also have musicians, one of them still playing the harp, we have a chariot in which perhaps it has been introduced. in the tomb the trousseau that accompanies it along with the oxen and here it even guards the access to the tomb we have a group of warriors Well, all these people who were in the prime of life who were young at the time of the death of His lord accompanied him to the tomb, they were probably poisoned and deposited there next to the tomb of their lord of the king of Ur so that they would accompany him and serve him also in the afterlife.

Think for a moment about the power that a man must have. ruler to get dozens There is a tomb that is not there But there is another tomb that we have found with 70 corpses 70 corpses of young men and women think about the power that a ruler must have to get 70 people in the prime of life to come down with him to the grave drink a poison and accompany him Eternally in the afterlife naturally all these rulers To be able to exercise all this power to be able to organize the crews of thousands of workers who dug the canals and kept the reservoirs intact to be able to send men to get copper in the Taurus or Carnelian Mountains in the Valle del Lindo in the cultures of Jarapa and Mojen Jod Daro to be able to direct all this the Sumerians also had to equip themselves with administrative tools And the truth is that theirs are some of the most effective administrative tools. ancient ones that we have documented in human civilization, for example.

It seems that it was among the Sumerians where the custom of sealing documents or sealing clay tablets was born, which was enormously abundant there fresh through the use of cylinder seals that would be the equivalent of the signature or the seal of its owner, for example this cylinder seal that you see here always made in Piedras duras, you see that in the center of the top row there is a lady larger than the others with a more spectacular hairstyle who is having a drink or receiving a flower This is the seal of Puabi, the woman we have seen before, the owner of the tomb and the owner of that wonderful funerary trousseau that we have seen before.

Here I have brought you another different seal where we see some gentlemen who have just taken an ear of wheat from the of the ground, these seals must have been used by Sumerian authorities and officials to seal documents, something essential in any self-respecting administration. One very interesting thing about Mesopotamia is that these Sumerians, look back in the third quarter millennium BC, were the first as I tell you about having cities, developing an urban civilization and equipping yourself with these administrative tools that I have just begun to describe. The fact is that the rest of the civilizations that existed in Mesopotamia up to the Persians until the end of the Iron Age rose On the basis of the Sumerian civilization they took advantage of it, they built on it as in years standing on the shoulders of giants and through the rest of the civilizations that have existed in Mesopotamia they have left us some of the most brilliant finds of the Sumerians, for example it seems that it is to the first Sumerians who had to think How to design the first great Mathematical operations to whom we owe a very rare custom which is the custom of counting by dozens and by half dozen and which we have still applied since time immemorial to eggs.

So the Sumerians are present in our lives every time we go to the supermarket and every time we open the refrigerator because it seems that it was in Sumer in Mesopotamia where they began to develop mathematics where they also saw the need to use the first calculators and as you all know Because we have all started counting like this, the first calculator that all human beings have used is our hand and we have all counted with our fingers, what happens is that if we only count with our fingers Wow, well, in the best of cases we get together with 10 It's not that we need to calculate much either, but instead of counting only with our fingers 1 2 3 4 5 6 We count with the phalanges, as you see, here I encourage you to do it Yes, instead of counting with our fingers We count with the phalanges 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 no longer appear 12 in Calamano 24 in both it seems that the Sumerians calculated 6 12 24 and from the custom of using the fingers the phalanges in this way it has remained Also the custom of counting by dozens and counting by half dozen so that later they say that ancient history is not current, the Sumerians were also the first to develop a really complicated mathematics and to develop an incipient astronomy, the first to let us.

At least Let us know the first maps of the sky and to calculate the movement of the Stars and also to develop a mathematics that would take us further than 24. It seems that the Sumerians also adopted the custom of counting in 60s, with 6 being 60, the truth is a number from a mathematical point of view very comfortable And very easy to operate with it The fact is that if you have ever wondered why we divide the hour into 60 minutes and the minutes into 60 seconds And why we have not done it as we We do everything 100 by 100 or 10 by 10 because it seems that this goes back to this Sumerian magma that later permeated the rest of the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean and if you have wondered why we talk about taking a turn of 180 gr or why We grant 360 g to a sphere because it seems that it is also due to the first astronomical calculations of the Sumerians who used this sexagesimal system based on 12 60 to create their first maps of the sky and their first really complex mathematical operations, well naturally not We cannot talk about a complex administrative structure, we cannot talk about organizing a state or organizing a society if we do not have the key tool on which any human civilization is based, which is writing, and it seems that the Sumerians were also the first to begin to develop a really complicated system of writing that began to adopt the custom or practice of writing in a generalized and standardized way and some of the oldest written documents that we have on the face of the earth we have also found in this lower basin of the Euphrates in the territory of the Sumerian civilization Here you have one of these documents, one of the oldest that we have found, it is dated, as you can see on the slide, to the end of the fourth millennium BC, this is about 5,000 years ago and this is not the oldest type of writing that the Sumerians began to develop using what was abundant in their territory.

The Egyptians dedicated themselves to writing with papyrus, of which the Sumerians had a lot. What they did was write on clay tablets baked in the sun, of which there was an abundance in the Valley of Mesopotamia and the type of writing that they developed with a punch making incisions on the tablets. Cuneiform writing is what all Middle Eastern civilizations later used until the time of the Achaemenid Persians and the Alexandrian invasion and the discovery of Sumerian texts. The fact that the Sumerians were such an important civilization that the rest of the civilizations of Mesopotamia considered them their cultural fathers, the giants on whose shoulders they had stood, has also allowed us to know the Sumerian language in detail and to be able to translate it easily, and this has allowed us provided a tremendously interesting fact and that is that when we began to translate the Sumerian language and when we began to translate the language of the rest of the inhabitants of Mesopotamia we have discovered that the Sumerians are what is called a linguistic island, I mean the inhabitants of Mesopotamia and The vast majority of the Middle East were still Semitic today.

The languages ​​they spoke were languages ​​of the Semitic trunk. For example, Arabic. For example, Hebrew, as the language of the Nabataeans and other peoples of the Middle East in ancient times, and yet the language that was spoken in the Sumerian cities was not of the Semitic stock and had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there is a language that is not related to any of their neighbors is a small Enigma that the Sumerian civilization has left us and that I must tell you that we have not yet been able to solve satisfactorily. On the other hand, when we began to read the tablets we have also learned that this Sumerian civilization is experiencing its peak period in the Third Millennium BC think about it for a moment 4600 4500 years ago when in the Iberian Peninsula we had practically not even entered the Chalcolithic we were leaving the Neolithic era and slowly entering the age of metals but also when reading the documents we have seen that the number of Semites those who surrounded the Sumerians in the area of ​​the Zagros in the northern area in the heart of Mesopotamia throughout this Third Millennium BC began to expand began to grow began to increase in number and began to put pressure on the Sumerian cities and we have also seen that as the Semites increase in number they slowly begin to infiltrate a little into the territory of the Sumerians they put pressure on the Sumerian States we have also seen that the Sumerian states begin These cities that were all independent also begin to become more aggressive and begin to try to create Not only the first city states that the Sumerians had already dominated, they had been living in city states for 1000 years but the Sumerians began to want to create the first states that They incorporate several city states and In the middle of the Third Millennium BC we begin to see that the Sumerians begin to wage war among themselves and begin to try to expand and also begin to have problems with these Semites that surround them.

Here you have, for example, despite of her beatific appearance with both hands joined and that smiling face because they havehere at the lugal to the Warrior King quis salsi Warrior King of the city of Uruc at the beginning of the 14th century BC Well, this man managed to expand from his original Ur and take over from his original Uruc and take over the cities of Ur and Quish and create a mini Sumerian empire according to subjugating other cities here We have one of the most interesting remains of Sumerian culture, the famous Stele of the TR tells us about a military victory in a war and a military victory, the victory of the city of Lagash which is one of the Sumerian cities about the city of Umma which is another of the Sumerian cities and notice that in the image on the right These are fragments of the Stele of the Vultures that unfortunately we have fragmented the images that I have put enlarged in The previous slide are the ones on the right side.

Not here you see the two sides of the Stela de Los Buitres placed one next to the other. Well, on the right they have the soldiers of Lag Gash, according to the soldiers of the city. of lag gash who are marching with their shields presided over by their commander and if you look under the feet of the gas soldiers you have the defeated the soldiers of humma who are being literally crushed by their enemies but we could say that the who are being literally crushed by their enemies are lucky because others who have been left lying on the battlefield are being eaten by wild animals.

On the left they have the text that describes this Victory and if you look at the top Here you have to look at Much like someone who has a spyglass or or or some telescope or something or very Good View Well at the top if you notice We have a lot of birds flying, they are not just any birds, they are the vultures that give their name to the Stela and if you Look even closer and you will see that the vultures are carrying in their beaks, one is carrying a head, another is carrying an arm, another is carrying a leg.

It is the moment after the battle, the corpses have been left lying on the ground and The Vultures are tearing them to pieces and taking them away. devour them, no, the truth is that the Sumerian civilization in its artistic manifestations has a peaceful, beatific appearance, but then when you go down a little, you see that they were tremendously crude people, no. So, as I tell you, that's why it's called the Stele of the Vultures because we have those Vultures. that they fly over and that they are taking away the pieces of the corpses. Well, this Stele of the Vultures, as I told you, tells us about the victory of the king of Lagash over the city of Umma and here in another fragment of the Stele you can see it on this side okay, you see there the fragment that I am going to show you is the one on the left here you can see the king of lag gash okay a sovereign who we also see that he is well eaten he is well fed the physical power reveals that he has eaten Well, he has not been hungry, he is a powerful man, we see him with those long beards, we see that he has a Mace on his head, and then if you look closely, we see that he is holding a kind of basket, a kind of latticework where we see the enemy prisoners who They have been captured and in a truly wonderful image that I love in delicious detail, we see one of the prisoners trying to escape.

I don't know if you notice here. Oh, look here, this one here who is trying to escape from the prison. basket has two little hands placed around the basket and is trying to go with little success because we see the King's Mace that is hitting him in the head to stop him from escaping Not in a graphic way absolutely as I tell you wonderful no Well then stay with the names here we have the victory of the Sumerian city of lagash over the Sumerian city of umma a little later The king of umma who was called the lugal the warrior king the chief of the zagi armies and who is known as the lugalzagesi All together, he took revenge and this lugalzagesi managed to defeat those of Lagas who had defeated them in the Stela of the Buitres.

He conquered the city of Lagas and then managed to reunite Under his aegis, reunite Under his command the majority of the Sumerian cities. We are in the second half, already at the end of the Third Millennium BC In the middle of the 4th century BC And this is the first time in which all the Sumerian cities have been unified under the same sovereign agreement that would be this king of umma There you see the lower Euphrates Basin there you have the city of Umma and the rest of the Sumerian cities in the red circle that he placed on his Under his power we would be here Apparently before the birth of the first Sumerian empire and at the moment in The Sumerians have finally stopped being city states, they have created an empire in the entire lower Euphrates Basin and who knows if they are prepared for bigger undertakings and bigger conquests, no, but right at this moment when the Sumerians are ready. of becoming an empire begins the story of one of the most fascinating characters of Mesopotamia, who is the famous sargon, sargon was not actually his name, sargon is a nickname, sargon is the contraction of sarrin, which could be roughly translated as king, just like suitable king the king who must be the one who has been designated by the gods to become sovereign and this sargon who is a man of Humble origins is going to become a legendary figure in Mesopotamia in one of the most important rulers of the Basin of the Tigris and the Euphrates I already tell you that Sargon is the righteous king, the king loved by the gods and his story, which has become a legend, will be transmitted to all Mesopotamian civilizations.

But this Sargon, chosen by the gods to govern, is not a Sumerian but He is an Akkadian, he is a Semitic, he is one of the members of these peoples that surrounded the Sumerians and he has an absolutely fascinating story. The legend tells us that once upon a time there was a city in the north of the Sumerian territory in the area that you see. there marked in green in the area between kish and acad the legend tells us how I tell you that there was a priestess of the goddess innana the goddess innana is the Goddess of love of beauty is the equivalent of what will later be istar to what will later Aphrodite will be what Venus will later be, well, this priestess of this innate goddess seems to have affairs when she, well, could not relate in that way with gentlemen and she becomes pregnant and in addition to becoming pregnant she gives birth to a child and feels so much for having became pregnant and gave birth to a child, being a priestess of the innate goddess, who, notice, takes the child, puts it in a basket and delivers it to the waters of the Euphrates River, and the waters of the Euphrates carry the child downstream if you think. moment this story of the child abandoned in the basket and dragged by the waters of the River We have seen it several times at least you will remember the story of Moses, for example, found by the daughter of the pharaoh or then the story of Romulus and Remus that They are also dragged by the waters of the Tiber until their basket pools there in the area because of what is now Rome.

Ah, this reveals to us what I have told you before that despite the enormous chronological distance that exists between the Sumerians And Despite the physical distance, we are talking about the Valley of Mesopotamia. The Sumerians created a civilization so advanced and so developed that it was the starting point of the rest of the civilizations of the Middle East and the myths, legends and Mesopotamian narratives were transmitted. to the entire Eastern Mediterranean Well, this sargon, as it could not be otherwise, does not drown in the river, but the basket is picked up by a boatman, sargon is raised by him, sargon, as it could not be otherwise, becomes a young man, tall, strong, beautiful and attracts the attention of the Sumerian King of the city of Quish, which is the northernmost of the Sumerian cities.

You see it up there, and at this moment I am totally convinced that you remember, it belonged to the lugalzagesi of umma and was part of This first in quotes Sumerian empire Well, Sargon is so handsome, he is so tall, he is so well built, he exudes majesty from every pore of his skin that the king of Quis notices him and makes him his cupbearer, makes him an important figure in His court does not and Sargon begins to ascend in this way despite his humble origin. The fact is that one night Sargon has a strange dream, the innana goddess appears to him accompanied by doves, which are the characteristic bird of the goddesses of fertility throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and the goddess Inana tells him that the king of Quis, who was called Urzua, his sovereign, the man who rules over Sargon, is destined to die drowned in his own blood and that he, Sargon himself, could not be otherwise. destined one day to become king The fact is that Sargon was young he was handsome he was a chosen one of the gods he exudes majesty and sovereignty but we cannot give him the name of being particularly cunning because after having this dream we understand any premonitory on the part of the goddess and nana, the first thing good old Sargon did was go tell his King, go tell the King, I wanted to tell him, Look, I dreamed that you were going to drown in your own blood and that one day I was going to become King.

You don't have to connect many loose ends to understand that I'm going to become King in your place and that presumably I'm going to have something to do with your death. Not obviously, because the king of Kis doesn't like this at all. I remind you again that we are in a time when it seems that almost almost almost a sumerian empire has arisen and the king of kish belongs to this kingdom led by the lugal zagi of umma and the king of kish tells sargon after sargon tells him this dream Well, very well, I am going to give you a secret message, Sargon, so that you can take it to the king of Humma, to our lord, to the ruler of this entire Sumerian empire, Sargon, you must transmit the message, the tablet, you must take it to Humma, but in no case. case you must examine its contents and well we have a very obedient sargon who takes the tablet to the city of umma and on that tablet that the king of quish had given to sargon on that tablet it said when you receive this you must immediately kill the bearer of the tablet The fact is that the lzma reads the tablet, discovers what he has to do, that he has to kill Sargon and it is time and this happens to us relatively frequently with the Sumerian narratives.

At that moment the tablet that tells us the story of Sargon is broken and We don't know how the story continues and we don't know what happens in the most exciting moment. We don't know what happens. It kills him. It doesn't kill him. What does Umma's lugalzagesi who is also at the peak of his power do? Precisely at that moment Well, the truth is that we do not know exactly how the tablet ends, but we do know for sure how the story ends because we know that Sargon, who is not a Sumerian, is a Semitic who comes from the other side of the Sumerian empire, who comes from the area in the heart of Mesopotamia that the river has carried to the Sumerian city of Quis we know that Sargon, just as the goddess had prophesied to him, became King, not just any king, Sargon, the first of Ahaz, became the ruler par excellence. of the Mesopotamian civilizations in the just king who will appear referred to again and again centuries and generations later in the narratives of the Mesopotamian culture and who built an empire much larger than the Empire of the lugal zagues and of umma an empire that included all the cities Sumerians that remained in the hands of this Sargon but that also included the heart of Mesopotamia, the Tigris Valley, the Euphrates Valley to the city of Mari, which was a very important caravan stop between Mesopotamia and Syria and even expanding as you see in the slide towards the steppe.

Syria to the city of Ebla and to the territory of Elam in the valleys next to the Zagros, tradition also attributes to this Sargon, first remember, not a Sumerian, a Semitic, the founding of a new capital for his empire, the city of Akkad, which must have been very close to where Babylon was later born and with this the Empire that Sargon founded is no longer called the Sumerian Empire or the Empire of Us of Ur or Umma but is called the Empire of Ahaz the Akkadian Empire when Sargon becomes the one that He has traveled through the four regions in which he has walked through the four parts of the world, he who has subjected the north, the south, the east and the west to a title lord of the four parts of the world that we will still find with Darius the Third when Alexander the Great arrives there. at the end of the 4th century BC that is how powerful the Mesopotamian heritage is when this Sargon remember Akkadian non-Sumerian Semitic founds his empire creates the Akkadian Empire slowly the heart of Mesopotamia moves to the territory of the Akkadians moves north moves to the city ​​of Ahaz to the neighboring city of Ahaz, which was the city of Babylon, and a new empire begins to emerge, a different civilization that will be the Babylonian civilization, the civilization of the Akkadians, with that the history of the Sumerian world ends, the Sumerians are incorporated into the civilization.

Akkadia and then to the Babylonian civilization that will rise on the shoulders of the Sumerians to go even further in the development of culture but with the end of the empire of the lugal zagues and umma with the end of the independence of the Sumerian cities with The birth of this new world ruled by the Akkadians and the Babylonians ends the history of the great Sumerian civilization and with it this conference also ends. Thank you very much to all