Save guides, add subjects and pick up where you left off with your BBC account. Narrator: Hello, future people of the UK. Would you like to visit me at the dawn of civilisation in ancient Sumer?

This is a Sumerian cuneiform clay tablet from the Ur III period, c.2100 B.C. This was the heyday of the Sumerian civilisation which occupied much of modern day Iraq. Sumerian was a non-Semitic ...