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• The district Summer is the land between Tigris and Euphrates
• Population increased due to irrigation techniques
• cities and town founded, some had 40,000 inhabitants 
• better food storage for diversity in professions-priests, tradesmen, artisans, politicians, farmers
• kings emerged as did family dynasties and the concept of the "city-state"
• Sumerians invented the earliest form of writing known as "cuneiform" 
• a pantheon of Sumerian gods and goddesses emerged with many of the deities representing the natural elements of the world
• world's first epic was Sumerian "Epic of Gilgamesh" which told of a great flood
• Sumerians first divided the hour into sixty minutes and the minute into sixty seconds; they also organized a calendar based on moon cycles
• the Ziggurat was a Sumerian temple built on top of a "mountain" of earth