Early Dynastic

Sumer fragments. The unified cultural sphere of the Uruk Expansion gives way, after 2900 BCE, to a constellation of competing city-states. Each has its own king, its own patron god, its own walls. Kish, Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Umma, Nippur, Adab — twelve or so cities sharing a language, a script, and a continuous low-grade war over water, land, and prestige.

Kingship becomes a permanent office. The Sumerian King List, compiled much later, gives every city a turn at supremacy and assigns each king a reign measured in years — symbolic at first, eventually historical. Before the flood the kings reign for tens of thousands of years; after, the numbers begin to fall into a plausible range. The list is part myth, part chronicle, part political claim.

The most important rivalry of the period is between Lagash and its neighbour Umma, fought over a strip of fertile land called the Guedena. The conflict produces, among other things, the Stele of the Vultures of Eannatum of Lagash — the earliest historical inscription we have. The stele claims that the god Ningirsu personally awarded the territory to Lagash; the actual treaty was sworn before half a dozen gods at once.

The script grows up during this period. Proto-cuneiform signs lose their pictographic quality and become wedge-shaped — cuneiform literally means "wedge-form" in Latin. Scribes start using signs phonetically (one sign for a syllable rather than a thing), which allows them to spell anything they can say: names, verbs, grammatical particles. Sumerian language enters the written record fully, no longer just as accounting shorthand but as something approaching prose.

Temples become enormous. Religion is omnipresent: every city has its god, every street has its altar, every official act is sworn in a god's name. The early literature we recover is liturgical — hymns to gods, lamentations over destroyed cities, ritual instructions.

This is the period in which Sumerian civilization reaches what Henri Frankfort called its "classical" form: city-state, king-priest, ziggurat, irrigation, temple-economy, conspicuous warfare. It is, in some sense, the period the Sumerians themselves would later remember as their golden age — even though the tablets show it as anything but golden for the men who fought its wars.