Culture of Sumerians

The society of Sumeria was one of the first known advanced civilizations in the world and the first to thrive in southern Mesopotamia, lasting from about 3500 BC to 2334 BC. As the Sumerian villages grew into large cities, they formed city-states. This is where a city government would rule the city as well as the land around it.

Their culture was comprised of a group of city-states, including Eridu, Nippur, Lagash, Kish, Ur and the very first true city, Uruk. These city-states had canals and walled settlements, varying in size, to provide irrigation and defense from their neighbors if necessary. Each city-state had its own ruler. They went by various titles such as lugal, en, or ensi. The ruler was like a king or governor. The ruler of the city was often the high priest of their religion as well. Although the Sumerian city-states had much in common, they fought for control of the river water, a valuable resource.

The Sumerians had a common language and believed in the same gods and goddesses. The belief in more than one god is called polytheism. The core pantheon consisted of An (heaven), Enki (a healer and friend to humans), Enlil (gave spells spirits must obey), Inanna (love and war), Utu (sun-god), and Sin (moon-god).

Architecture on a grand scale is generally credited to have begun under the Sumerians, with religious structures dating back to 3400 B.C. Cities dotted the plains of Sumeria, each one dominated by a temple built for one of their human-like gods, on top of what were called ziggurats. Here the priests would perform rituals and sacrifices.

The Sumerians were the first known civilization to use writing to record their thoughts and literature. The Sumerian language is the oldest linguistic record. It first appeared in archaeological records around 3100 B.C. and dominated Mesopotamia for the next thousand years.

The artists and artisans were very skilled. Artifacts show great detail and ornamentation, with fine semi-precious stones imported from other countries, such as lapis lazuli, marble, and diorite, and precious metals such as hammered gold, incorporated into the design. Facing a scarcity of stone, Sumerians made leaps in metal-casting for their sculpture work, though relief carving in stone was a popular art form.
Culture of Sumerians

The ancient horsemen from Asia: The Scythians

The steppes of central Asia in ancient times provided a vast belt of grazing land for tribes of nomadic herdsmen. They were highly mobile people who lived according to the rhythm of the season, following the wandering of their sheep, goats, horses, cattle or yaks. Theirs was a cold and forbidding landscape of mountains and bare plains. They had no writing and they made no stone-built cities. Moreover, as wanderers they had no use for cumbersome furnishings, using only lightweight household items, chiefly of wood hides and cloth.

Scythians were one of numerous eastern nomadic groups that swept over Europe between the first millennium B.C. and the middle of the second millennium A.D. The east-to-west movement of these nomadic military societies changed the character of the population in Europe and Asia both by displacing indigenous peoples and by transmitting a new culture.

What is known of the nomads survives in a scattering of graves, and in texts written by observes from the settled civilizations to the east and west. The first time that the Greeks came into contact with the Scythians can be traced to the 7th century BC, when the first Greek settlements were established on the northern Black Sea shores. Since that time, the Scythians were constantly present in Greek tradition and many ideas were developed regarding these people.

Scythians were Indoeuropean people, inhabiting the steppes to the north of the Black Sea, between the rivers Dniester and Don, on the territories of today’s Ukraine, Russia and Moldova. They spoke a language from the Iranian family.

The Scythian women were rarely seen, but kept confined to their wagons and circular tents; these tents made of felt stretched over a wood framework and known as yurts, can still be seen in central Asia today. The men wore kaftans, distinctive pointed headgear and trousers – a major invention of Asian horsemen and one that made riding more comfortable. They also carried swords, shields and a bow and arrow case.

Scythians were pastoralists and warriors, among the earliest people to master the art of horseback riding. After a series of wars in 4th BC they gained a dominant position in Eurasia.

Herodotus says of the Scythians dominance of Asia: The Scythians ravaged the whole of Asia. They not only took tribute from each people, but also made raids and pillaged everything these peoples had. once Kiaksar and the Medians invited the Scythians to a feast and killed them.

Notorious among ancient peoples for their cruelty, the Scythians were said to blind their slaves to make them easier to manage, and to drink from cups made from enemies’ skulls.

The Greek historians Herodotus described many of the Scythians’ outlandish customs, especially their burial rites which included the ceremonial slaughter of wives, servants and animals.

Archaeological data show that Scythian society was marked by high social stratification. The burial of kings, according to Herodotus, took place in a great square pit. The royal corps was embalmed, its belly slit open, cleaned out, and filled with chopped frankincense, parsley and anise before sewn up again. With the bodies of slaughtered attendants and horses were piled mounds of golden vessels.

Herodotus also described that the Persian great Kings, decided to invade Scythia. With Persian King himself in command, the Persian army of 700,000 soldiers marched across the Danube to the Russian steppes. The Scythians steadily retreated while the Persians pursuit. It was indeed very strange war to Persian. There was nothing to be captured and held - no citied, no buildings, no plunder, nothing but the rimless steppe. He was fighting air.
The ancient horsemen from Asia: The Scythians

Dani people of New Guinea

The Dani are well known because of the excitement that accompanied the discovery of their complex culture, terraced gardens, and densely populated communities in the mountainous region previously thought to be uninhibited.

Although Europeans has been aware of the existence of the islands of New Guinea since the mid 1500s, knowledge was confined to the coastal fringes.

In 1938, Richard Archbold, an American pilot and also adventurer was circling the world on a flying boat.  As he flew over the Baliem area, he spotted from the air the valley’s tracts of symmetrical gardens and circular dwellings.

From the point of view of the outside world Archbold had ‘discovered’ a group of tens of thousands of people called the Dani. Excitement over this New Guinea discovery was intense and the press dubbed the valley “Shangri La.” In the early 1960s, Harvard University organized a large expedition to the region.

The outside world may not have known of the Baliem valley, but people have settled there and cultivated gardens for at least 7,000 years.

Often describe as a Stone Age culture, the people today live much as they did thousands of years ago. Their expert gardening skills are now helped by steel rather than stone tools, but their daily behavior, families and villages carry on almost as they always have.

For food staple, the Dani rely on root crops such as the sweet potato, introduced about 300 years ago, and the indigenous taro, which women cultivate in gardens in the valley floor and mountainsides.

Women also raise pig, which men strategically exchange to promote their status, and to strengthen their political alliance. People identify themselves by membership in a totemic clan. In the past, clans groups into multi layered political units, and large scale pre contact war dominated political activities.
Dani people of New Guinea

The nature of Ethnocentrism

Culture shock can be an excellent lesson to relative values and in understanding human differences. The reason culture shock occurs is that we are not prepared for these differences.

Because of the way we are taught our culture, to some degree we are all “ethnocentric”. The term of ethnocentrism is derived from two words, ethno or nation and kentron, or center. Thus it refers to the fact that our outlook or world view is centered on our own way of life.

Ethnocentrism is the belief that one’s own patterns of behavior are the best: the most natural, beautiful, right or important. It is the process of judging another culture using the standards of one’s own culture. Therefore other people, to the extent that they live differently live by standards that the inhuman, irrigational, unnatural, or wrong.

Ethnocentrism leads members do ethnic groups to view their culture as superior, as the one that other cultures should adopt.

Ethnocentrism also leads to prejudice against foreigners, who may be viewed as barbarians, uncultured people or savages.

People will find aspect of another culture distasteful, be it sexual practices, a way of treating friends or relatives, or simply a food that they cannot manage to get down with a smile.

Ethnocentrism creates a strong sense of group solidarity and group superiority, but also discourages intercultural or intergroup understanding.

A good example is seen in nationalism, the sense of identity that arises when one group exalts its own culture over all other groups and organizes politically and socially around this principle.
The nature of Ethnocentrism

Society of Sumerian in Mesopotamian: Death of Kings

In Sumerian society monarchs and their family lived in splendid palaces where the king rules along with a council of elders.

When a king of the Sumerian city state of Ur died he did not go alone to his tomb. His entire household of some 70 people was buried with him, having taken poison in order to follow their sovereign into the next life – where they would continue to serve him loyally as before.

The Sumerian believed that kings could take things with them on their journey to the afterlife.

They filled royal tombs with everything they thought people would need on this journey, including clothes, jewelry, riches, weapons and even people.

The preparation for this mass burial was meticulous. First along, sloping shaft was dug down to a pit that would serve as the tomb chamber. This was filled with rich offerings, and the king’s corpse was placed in it. 

The chamber was then sealed, and a great procession of attendants moves down into the shaft. These included court ladies in resplendent golden headdresses, guard with sheathed daggers, musicians strumming bulls’ head lyres, servant, harem, grooms with ox-drawn chariots, and soldiers wearing coppers spears. 

When archeologists uncover the tombs of some these exalted kings, they found the bodies a buried with gold and silver artifacts.

Excavators of one of the 5000 years year old graves in city of Ur found not only the skeleton of king, but also a chariot, the remains of a donkey to pull the chariot, various weapons, tools, valuables and 65 members of the royal court.

All carried small cup from which they drank a lethal drug before lying down by the tomb chamber to prepare for the eternity. The musicians continued to play their lyres until the end, when they took poison and succumbed.

The shaft was then filled in with several layers of earth and clay, amid further ritual offerings and libations. The lack of resistance on the part of the attendants indicated a fatalistic obedience both of their sovereign and to their gods. Certainly all the evidences suggest that religion was very importance to the Sumerians. 

They believe that gods ruled the earth and that men were created to be their servants. Each city was regarded as belonging to a particular god and goddess, whose earthly home was the city’s temple, the scene of elaborate rituals conducted by a hierarchy priests. This customs appears to have ended before 2000 BC.
Society of Sumerian in Mesopotamian: Death of Kings

Cro-Magnon Culture: Burying the Dead

More than 100,000 years ago, Neanderthals started burying their dead. At about the same time, Cro-Magnon also appeared.

When a Cro-Magnon died the body was not simply abandoned and left to rot in the open. 

The Cro-Magnons buried their dead in or near the caves and huts in which they lived.

Cro-Magnon buried dead body with food, ornaments and weapons. They also used pigments to decorate the dead. Such burial activity suggests that Cro-Magnon were developing a religion.

They were anticipating a new life in the world beyond this one, because they were buried in their beaded clothes, along with their tools, weapons, jewelry and favorite possessions.

In many burials, daubed red ochre has been found scattered over the corpse.
Cro-Magnon Culture: Burying the Dead

The meaning of culture

As anthropologist use the term, culture is the way of life shared by a group of people. It is the collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes the members of one human group from those of another.

Culture what makes people similar to one another and unites them as a group, overcoming individual differences in personality.

Culture is acquired behavior; it is learned rather than inherited genetically. It is passed on from one generation to the next through the process known as socialization.

What is socialization? Socialization refers to all the processes that transform a human being into an active participant in society. The agents of socialization are a parents, other members of the family, peers, workmates, schools, churches and the mass media.

Although the methods of teaching children the appropriate behavior patterns may vary from one society to another, all societies engage in some form of child training.

It is assume that early childhood experiences will last effect on an individual, and insofar as the same basic experiences are shared by most children in a society, a general personality pattern will be shared among most adults in that society.

Culture is present in every social act and affects hence levels of education, business and industrial practices and language. The word culture derive from the same French word ‘culture’ and the Latin word ‘cultura’.

The word referred to the tilling of the land, the improvement of crops and crop production.

Before 1780, ‘culture’ meant the tending of natural growth and a process of human training.

Later in the eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century, culture came to be a thing in itself rather than a prioress, a general state or habit of the mind closely connected with the idea of human perfection.  
The meaning of culture 

 

Different society with different culture

The idea of a science of society can be said to have emerged in the eighteenth century Enlightenment, a period in European history characterized by intellectual innovations, ranging across the arts, literature, science and engineering.

Society refers to the totality of social organizations, such as corporation, school, hospitals and religious groups that share a common habitat or a territorially defined place and depend on each other for survival.

While culture is the core concept in cultural anthropology and is an important concept in sociology.

Although the basic types of cultural behavior are universal, in most cases they differ in form from one culture to another.

Take endorsement of the body. In the United States, it has many ways of changing the natural appearance of the human body.

It is the most ancient and widely encountered form of permanent body alteration. The practice of tattooing is believed to have spread from the Middle East, through India, China and Japan to Pacific Island cultures as early as 2000 BC.

On a fairly simple level, some people do things such as comb their hair a certain way, pierce their ears, or polish their nails.

Others have parts of their body designed with tattoos, permanent mutilations of the body following patterns that are unique to our culture.

Tattoos in other cultures are quite different. As early as 300 BC Japanese and Chinese society tattooed their faced to protect themselves from evils forces.

Still others have cosmetic surgery such as nose jobs, hair transplant, and silicone injections to change their appearance.

In other cultures the ways in which the body is adorned are quite different. Some of the better known examples, such as the extended lower lip of the Ubangi women, or a bone inserted into a pierced nose, seem bizarre to us. But in every culture we find some form of adornment.

Among some South American Indian tribes boards are tied firmly against the head of an infant to change the shape of the skull.

The sense of ‘culture' as a ‘whole way of life’ has been most marked in twentieth century anthropology and sociology.
Different society with different culture