Near East Kingdoms

Kisiga (City) (Sumer)

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The city states of Sumer formed one of the first great civilisations in human history (see feature link). This Near Eastern civilisation emerged a little way ahead of that of Africa's ancient Egypt, and up to a millennium before that of the Indus Valley culture.

It developed out of the end of the Pottery Neolithic across the Fertile Crescent, a period which had seen Neolithic Farmer practices spread far and wide across the Near East and beyond. Southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq and the western edge of Iran) was subjected to permanent settlement, initially in the form of pastoralists but soon as farmers too.

By the late fourth millennium BC, Sumer was divided into approximately a dozen independent city states which used local canals and boundary stones to mark their borders. Many of the smaller cities emerged in two broad waves, in the mid-third millennium BC and at the start of the second millennium BC. One of these was the small city of Kisiga or Kisig.

The gods Lugalirra and Meslamtaea appear originally to have been patrons of the city Kisiga, but the city's precise location is yet to be confirmed. It is often linked to the archaeological site of Tell al-Lahm (alternatively shown as Tell Al-Laham, Tell el-Lahm, or Tell el-Lehem), but then so are the ancient cities of Dur-lakin and Kuara. This site sits about thirty-two kilometres to the south-east of Ur.

A branch of the Euphrates once flowed past this location, only shifting in the later first millennium AD to leave the area arid. The name Kisíg(a) has been put forward by Paul-Alain Beaulieu as the older spelling of the first millennium BC's Sealand settlement of Kissik. Even so, linking these two names to one site is not fully accepted.

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(Information by Peter Kessler, with additional information from Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City, Gwendolyn Leick (Penguin Books, 2001), from Encyclopaedia Britannica (Eleventh Edition, Cambridge (England), 1910), from Historical Atlas of the Ancient World, 4,000,000 to 500 BC, John Heywood (Barnes & Noble, 2000), from The Ancient Near East, c.3000-330 BC, Amélie Kuhrt (Routledge, 2000, Vol I & II), from Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East, Michael Road (Facts on File, 2000), from Mesopotamia: Assyrians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Enrico Ascalone (Dictionaries of Civilizations 1, University of California Press, 2007), from The Archaeology of Mesopotamia, S Lloyd (Revised Ed, London, 1984), from History of the Ancient Near East c.3000-323 BC, Marc van der Mieroop (Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 2007), and from External Links: Ancient Worlds, and Evolution of Sumerian kingship (Ancient World Magazine), and Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Project (Published between 2003-2021, part of the Babylonian section of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology), and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and Kissik, Düru and Udannu, Paul-Alain Beaulieu (Orientalia, Nova Series, Vol 61, No 4, 1992, pp 400-424, available via JSTOR).)

c.2500 BC

Sumerians continue to control southern Mesopotamia during the 'Early Dynastic' period. The major city states are: Adab, Akkad, Bad-tibira, Borsippa, Eridu, Girsu, Isin, Kish, Lagash, Larsa, Mari, Nippur, Shuruppak, Ur, and Uruk.

Some of the earliest cities, such as Sippar, Borsippa, and Kish in the north, and Ur, Uruk, and Eridu in the south, formed the endpoints of what became the complex Sumerian network of cities and canals (click or tap on map to view full sized)

Kisiga is one of the minor cities, at a time at which the scribes of Abu Salabikh bear Semitic names. Sumer is now a multi-lingual region, with at least two major languages being spoken in the form of Sumerian and Semitic (sometimes labelled proto-Akkadian, with that later being a dominant form of non-Sumerian).