OrientalInstitute

It’s very difficult. Scholars who study the ancient history of these civilizations are deeply invested in the current threats to cultural heritage in the regions we study.

We have many projects to preserve and protect cultural heritage—including conservation training programs. It’s also important to educate the public, and we do that by engaging with visitors to our Museum. For our centennial, for example, we are exhibiting works by contemporary artists including Michael Rakowitz and Mohamad Hafez, who deal with the loss of cultural heritage throughout the Middle East as a way of highlighting current issues.

There is a popular belief that the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth – Anunnaki is a general term for deities – are extraterrestrial beings who used Mars as a waystation en route to colonizing Earth in antiquity! These and other similar beliefs are categorized as ancient astronaut hypotheses. What these hypotheses have in common is their premise that extraterrestrial beings made contact with ancient civilizations on Earth and brought with them technology so advanced that they were accorded divine status. The tenets of Anunnaki believers are largely based on the writings of Zecharia Sitchin (1920–2010) who, drawing upon his analyses of Sumerian texts, argued that the Anunnaki were extraterrestrial beings who had traveled to Earth from the planet Nibiru and ultimately created humankind in the form of the Sumerians who worshiped them. However, we do not believe that the Sumerians were extraterrestrials!

Thanks for your question! It’s typically assumed that literacy rates were extremely low – limited to elites. But there’s considerable evidence for somewhat more widespread literacy, and varying types and levels of literacy. For instance, in a particularly well-documented period, roughly, 2100-2000 BCE many professionals (including, for instance, boat captains) claimed the title dub-sar ‘scribe’, which must have meant that their educational training included basic literacy in reading administrative texts connected with their professions.

We have a rough idea about how Sumerian was pronounced. Sumerian is a linguistic isolate and not related to any known language, so we cannot compare it to related, better known languages. Most knowledge of Sumerian pronunciation is indirect through renderings in Akkadian, the other main language of ancient Mesopotamia, which is Semitic. So our knowledge of Sumerian is through the lens of Akkadian, a very different language. Also Sumerian is written mainly logographically – with signs representing words, another feature that complicates understanding pronunciation.

Rather than one source in particular, we can gather some info from the work of a few scholars and publications. There is a long-standing debate about the number of people who resided in Mesopotamian settlements—the density of occupation of Mesopotamian cities has been discussed for decades, but most scholars accept that anywhere from 100 to 200 people per hectare lived in these cities. The earliest-known city in Mesopotamia was that of Uruk. By 3000 BC, Uruk was about 100 hectares in size, and so we estimate the population of Uruk to have been around 10,000–20,000 inhabitants.

There are many similarities, but the average person led a difficult life -- working longer, working earlier, eating a diet much less varied than ours in the USA, and certainly had a much lower life expectancy. Their relationship to technological advances was radically different than ours -- generations would pass without substantive technological advances that would affect daily life. There was a notion, expressed in literary texts, that when the world was first created, people led more primitive, less civilized lives.

On the other hand, it was possible to be paid for your labors in beer!