Sumer and the First Cities苏美尔与最初的城市

Around 4000 BCE, in the fertile floodplain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, a people we call the Sumerians began gathering into settlements larger than any the world had seen. This region, southern Mesopotamia, had no timber, stone, or metal of its own — but its irrigated fields produced grain in surplus, and surplus grain could feed people who did not farm: priests, artisans, soldiers, and scribes.约公元前4000年，在底格里斯河与幼发拉底河之间肥沃的洪泛平原上，我们称之为苏美尔人的族群，开始聚居成前所未见的大型聚落。这片美索不达米亚南部的土地本身没有木材、石料或金属，但经过灌溉的农田盛产谷物，而剩余的谷物可以养活那些不务农的人：祭司、工匠、士兵与书吏。

By about 3200 BCE the city of Uruk may have held tens of thousands of inhabitants, making it plausibly the largest city on Earth at the time. Its people raised monumental temples of mud-brick, called ziggurats, dedicated to gods such as Inanna and An. Cities like Ur, Lagash, Eridu, and Kish each formed an independent city-state, ruled by a king (lugal) and organized around the temple household.到约公元前3200年，乌鲁克城可能已有数万居民，很可能是当时地球上最大的城市。人们用泥砖砌起宏伟的神庙——被称为「金字形神塔」（ziggurat），供奉伊南娜、安等神祇。乌尔、拉伽什、埃利都、基什等城市各自形成独立的城邦，由国王（lugal）统治，并以神庙经济为核心运转。

The Sumerians' most far-reaching invention was writing. To track stores of grain, livestock, and trade, scribes pressed wedge-shaped marks into clay tablets with a reed stylus — a script we call cuneiform. What began as accounting grew, over centuries, into a tool for recording laws, letters, hymns, and literature. The clay, once baked or simply dried, could last for millennia, and hundreds of thousands of tablets survive today.苏美尔人影响最深远的发明是文字。为了记录谷物、牲畜与贸易，书吏用芦苇笔在泥板上压出楔形符号——这种文字被称为「楔形文字」。它起初只是记账工具，历经数百年，逐渐发展为记录法律、书信、赞美诗与文学的载体。泥板一经焙烧或自然晒干便可留存千年，如今仍有数十万块泥板保存下来。

From this world came some of humanity's oldest literature, above all the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose hero-king searches for immortality and confronts a great flood — a story with echoes in later traditions. The Sumerians also gave us the sexagesimal (base-60) system that still divides our hours into 60 minutes and our circles into 360 degrees.这个世界孕育了人类最古老的一批文学，其中最著名的是《吉尔伽美什史诗》——英雄君王追寻永生、直面一场大洪水，这个故事在后世诸多传统中都有回响。苏美尔人还留给我们六十进制，至今仍将一小时分为60分钟、把圆分成360度。

Sumer's independent city-states were eventually absorbed by larger powers — first the Akkadian Empire of Sargon around 2334 BCE, later Babylon and Assyria. But the template the Sumerians created — the city, the written record, organized religion, codified law, and a stratified society — became the working model of civilization across the ancient Near East and far beyond.苏美尔的独立城邦最终被更大的势力吞并——先是约公元前2334年萨尔贡的阿卡德帝国，后来是巴比伦与亚述。但苏美尔人所创造的范式——城市、文字记录、有组织的宗教、成文法与阶层分明的社会——成为古代近东乃至更广阔世界的文明蓝本。