Word: sumer
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...year-old urban culture that covered some 300,000 square miles in modern-day Pakistan and northwestern India. Digs at major sites such as Mohenjo-daro and Harappa revealed a sophisticated society whose towns had advanced sanitation, bathhouses and gridlike city-planning. Evidence of trade with Egypt and Sumer in Mesopotamia, as well as the presence of mining interests as far as Central Asia, suggests that the fertile Indus River basin could have been home to an empire larger and older than its more famous contemporaries in the Middle East...
...Kurds are pushing for varying degrees of federalism, and the U.S. is supporting the plan. The Kurds have long sought a large degree of autonomy for their region in the north. The Shi'ites too are now calling for an autonomous region in the south, to be called Sumer, home to Iraq's only ports, as well as at least 80% of its oil reserves...
...that was bad enough. Iraq's cultural history stretches back an astonishing 10,000 years, to the very dawn of civilization. The first cities, the earliest known legal system and the first written language all arose there--in the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms of Sumer, Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia. And artifacts from that entire, mind-boggling sweep of time--hundreds of thousands of objects that had survived wars and successive invasions by Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great, the Mongols and other marauders long forgotten--might now be missing or destroyed...
...locate all the violence and related mischief on the men's side of the campfire: no blood on our hands! But there are other reasons to doubt the eternal equation of masculinity with aggression and violence, femininity with gentleness and a taste for green salads. In ancient Greece and Sumer the deities of the hunt, Artemis and Ninhursag, were female--extremely female, if you will, since these were also the goddesses who presided over childbirth. Even more striking is the association of ancient goddesses with nature's original hunters, the predatory animals. In Anatolia, the predator goddess was Kybele, known...
...surrounding countryside, newly developed irrigation systems nourished the barley, wheat, flax and other crops that fed the growing cities. Period drawings from Sumer, part of Mesopotamia, provide the earliest known evidence of wheels -- essentially wooden planks rounded at the ends and fitted together in a circle -- which were used on ox-drawn carts and, later, chariots. Sailing ships embarked on distant trading missions. By 3000 B.C., the world's first written language, cuneiform, had appeared on small clay tablets, replacing the strings of marked clay tokens that merchants had previously used to keep track of their transactions. And at least...