Landscapes+-+Sandy

The landscape of ancient Sumer was a very extreme environment. The average temperature during the summer in Sumer was around 43 degrees Celsius. This is part of the reason that the Tigris and the Euphrates River were so important. This is also a good thing because it allowed for irrigation to develop, which is the bases of all our sewage and water systems today. The two rivers also enabled them to travel in a much shorter time, because they wouldn’t have to trek across the desert for weeks to get a few board feet of timber. Instead they could travel one way by boat, shortening the time by weeks possibly days. The people in Sumer would have been able to terra form the land in small amounts, but mostly it would have been flat where they selected to build a city. This would mean that there would be farmland nearly all the way around the cities. The farmland would have looked like a giant residential zone with roads going through it in perfect squares, except there were no houses and the roads were actually little irrigation channels. Beyond the plains there would have been hills and small mountains, this provided some protection because they could have lookouts and they would now when to be prepared to defend. The big chunk of the land in ancient Sumer was desert and this meant that the only place that people really lived were the cities, there were basically no small towns or villages because you need water to keep people alive. Overall most of Sumer was barren and empty but near the river it was rich and flourishing.
 * __Landscapes of Ancient Sumer __**