Sumer

2 9.9

An ancient region in southern Iraq where the first cities and early writing began

proper noun
/ˈsuːmər/

: Sumer

Alongside Sumer and Egypt, it was one of the first major civilizations, built on agriculture and pastoralism, strengthened by internal and external trade and a shared iconography.

So the Bible's telling us possibly that Abraham was from Sumer.

Examples

(History, by definition, is the story of humankind based on written documents, which first appeared around the year 3000 B.C.E. in Sumer.)

Academic text (2015)
In Sumer, beer was seen as a civilizing force and a sociable activity.

Blog text (32)
In ancient Sumer, beer was used as a form of payment, and people were paid in it.

Blog text (32)
Thus, in the southern state of Sumer, water storage and irrigation were essential to agriculture.

Academic text (1990)
Both of these stories existed in Sumer 6,000 years before the Bible was written.

The Fourth Kind (2009)
The earliest known creation myth is probably from Sumer, circa 3000 B.C.

Fiction book (2002)
Abraham came from Ur, a city in Earth's oldest civilization, Sumer.

Blog text (9)
The archaic peoples who gave rise to the early civilizations of Greece, Sumer, Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China shared a similar sense of the cosmos.

Academic text (1993)
The famous British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, in his twelve-volume history of the world, A Study of History, analyzed in great detail the thirty civilizations that have existed since history began in Sumer 5,000 years ago.

Academic text (2015)
In ancient Sumer, beer was used as a form of payment for laborers.

Surface Forms

Sumer main

Etymology

Sumer comes from an old name used by people nearby, Šumeru, for the southern part of Mesopotamia long ago. The people who lived there called their land Ki-en-gir, often rendered as 'land of the noble lords' or 'civilized land', so Sumer is the name of the place where the first cities and writing began.