The Noble People

The thirteen constellations of the ecliptic. Here, the Sun is "in" Libra, backdropped as seen from Earth. Aries / Pisces is in the night sky. It's early Autumn on Earth.

The first and most well-known constellational family is the Zodiac, a Greek word meaning "Circle of Animals." The Zodiac consists of twelve of the thirteen constellations which lie along the Ecliptic, the apparent path of the Sun and its visible planets (including the Moon) through the night sky. Since the Sun, the Moon, and the planets all move in relation to these constellations these asterisms have taken on critical importance scientifically, navigationally (they traditionally have special mention in the Nautical Almanac), culturally, and in terms of the human psyche. 

Of the twelve Zodiac constellations, seven represent animals: A ram, a bull, a crab, a lion, a scorpion, a mythical sea-goat, and two fishes. Four represent humans or quasi-humans: A set of twins, a woman, a centaur armed with a bow, and a man carrying a water jug (the uncounted constellation is a man handling a snake). The twelfth constellation is the only inorganic one, a pair of scales (and there is every reason to believe that the scales replaced the snake-handler as a member of the Zodiac over time).

Ancient Sumer lay at the old head of the Persian Gulf. The Sumerians first appeared at the northern end of the rivers and moved southward. Their ultimate home was marshy and low-lying, and may have been disastrously inundated by a flood at some point in the far distant past; at least, they wrote of a great deluge, and their descendants retold the story in a book now called the Bible. E-Din, a pastoral region near Eridu, where early man thrived, was also the subject of Sumerian legends in which many modern people still believe.

Who invented the Zodiac? Almost certainly the Sumerians. The people of Sumer invented many things, among them being the smelting of copper (and later the smelting of copper and tin into bronze), the wheel as a means of transportation, the sail for use on river boats, the pottery wheel and glazed pottery, writing, record-keeping, and the earliest literary epics, mathematics, astronomy, agriculture and irrigation systems including the plow, money, banking and non-barter commerce, soap, board games, beer brewing, urban planning, contracts and law codes, and the idea of gods who live in the sky. It was a Sumerian who claimed to have spoken with the One And Only God. In short, we'd be nowhere without the Sumerians.

They didn't invent war, but they technologized it. 

Cuneiform was the written language in which the Sumerians kept detailed records and wrote down their legends.

Who were they? They were originally not a Middle Eastern (i.e., Semitic) people although they dominated the emerging culture of Mesopotamia (Iraq) and intermarried with the Semites who called them "The Noble People." 

The earliest extant record of the Sumerians (100th-70th Centuries BCE) has them living around the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern day Turkey and Syria, though their language has no similarity to any other. It's thought that they came off the Asian steppes as a hunter-gatherer people, wandered into Anatolia, and discovered the wild cereals that grow in abundance there. Learning to tame them for use as a regular food source, over the next two or three thousand years the Sumerians moved southward along the watercourse of the Tigris-Euphrates until they reached the sea. By that point they were the predominant people of Mesopotamia, and established the first real cities, Eridu, Uruk, and Ur where the rivers emptied into the Persian Gulf. Although they did not establish an "empire" (since each city or city-state was independent and sponsored by a different sky-god), culturally they essentially ran the world, or at least what would become the Western world. 

Enki, the god of all Wisdom and Creation, and his cohorts, the Annunaki. The horned helmets were standard garb for the gods, who, the Sumerians claimed, taught them all their arts and sciences. Enki was also portrayed as a serpent god, the Serpent representing age, wisdom, healing and reincarnation. According to speculative historians, the Annunaki may have been an advanced race of space aliens who bestowed knowledge on mankind. No hard evidence for this theory exists, but in assessing the amazing cultural advances of the Sumerians one can't help but wonder if they had help from somewhere, perhaps the remnants of an earlier culture.

According to their Epics, Time and the World began when the gods came down to earth to live with men at Eridu, now some six or seven thousand years ago; they divided the day into 24 equal parts, and each part into sixty minutes, and each minute into sixty seconds. They also realized that the Moon circles the Earth in roughly 30 days and that the Earth circled the Sun in just a bit over 360 days, discoveries that either fit well with or inspired their base-60 number system. They also identified the ecliptic, realizing that the Sun moved through the star patterns of the night, and that the seasons coincided with the passage of the Sun through particular signs. This was helpful for the planting. 

To make life easier they identified the star patterns with the animals they had domesticated along with the plants they were now growing. So, Spring the time of new life, became their New Year, and began when the Sun moved into the constellation of the rutting young ram. They didn't call the constellation Aries (that came much later) but they associated Ku Mal, "He Who Dwells In The Fields" with the life-force, an enterprising, daring, active, courageous, incisive, spontaneous, and very energetic creature, which might as well be a description of the Sumerian people themselves. And so they began to associate each of the constellations that the heavenly bodies moved through with different traits, all of which together might be said to make up the perfect human being. Each set of traits was a "sign" of a person's dominant characteristics.

Being a people who loved order, their astronomer - astrologers divided the path of the Sun into equal parts of 30 degrees each, making for a perfect circle in the sky, and assigned each constellation and its associated traits a place. 

The system wasn't perfect. Not all the constellations were the same size, and so a "sign" didn't necessarily coincide with the time the Sun was in a given constellation. The year turned out to be 365.25 days long, not a neat 360. They soon discovered that the Earth wobbled a little on its axis (precession), so that the Sun appeared to move backward through the constellations and signs over time (once about every 26,000 years). With this knowledge they assigned each sign an "Age" during which it would dominate human thoughts and actions. Mostly, like their savanna-dwelling ancestors in Africa, the Sumerians sought order out of seeming chaos, the most human of all characteristics. 

And so shall we. In discussing the constellations of the Zodiac, each will have two entries, one for the asterism itself, and one for the astrological sign, hopefully without too much crossover; but let's not forget that the science of astronomy and the art of astrology were once one.

Sumerians enjoying beer, or perhaps a hookah. In any event, Sumerian beer recipes have survived to the present day. The Sumerians smoked, but not tobacco, a New World plant.