But this is not necessarily so. How monarchy came to Sumer is in fact a fascinating, if somewhat obscure, historical development. Sumer was an early civilization in southern Babylonia, now southern Iraq. The Sumerians were a small but ambitious and enlightened group, whose most important cultural achievement was the invention and development of cuneiform writing. The Sumerian language is unrelated to any known language family, but the style of writing cuneiform was later adopted for many other languages, such as the Babylonian and Assyrian dialects of Akkadian, and, in an alphabetic form, Ugaritic.
Historians usually divide Sumerian history into three major periods.
They would be much easier to remember if they were called simply early, middle and late. B.C.E. Isin-Larsa Period c. The gap between the early and middle periods was a period of darkness. In the first, greater part of this dark period, Sumer was conquered and ruled by the Akkadians, a Semitic people, who occupied the northern part of Babylonia. The last 50 years of so of this historical gap experienced the occupation of Sumer by the Guteans, a barbaric people from the east, who brought about the downfall of the Akkadian Empire and disrupted all civilized life in Sumer.