What Ancient DNA Revealed About Sumerian Women Is Extremely Disturbing

[00:00:00]In the year 1922, deep beneath the sands of southern Iraq, a British archaeologist named Leonard Woolley made a discovery that would haunt the field of archaeology for the next 100 years. [music] He found a pit, a great pit cut into the earth more than 4,000 years ago. And inside that pit, carefully arranged in rows, were the bodies of many young women. They wore golden [music] headdresses. Their gowns had been threaded with lapis lazuli and silver.

[00:00:30]Small cups lay their hands. They had been buried alive in their finery to serve a queen into the afterlife. Their names were never recorded. Their stories were never written down.

[00:00:43]For a century, archaeologists could only guess at who they were, where they came from, and what their lives had truly been. But in the last few years, something has changed. Scientists have learned how to read the genetic code locked inside bones that are 4,000 years old. They have begun to extract ancient DNA from Sumerian burials, from the royal cemetery of Ur, from villages along the Tigris and the Euphrates. And what they have [music] found is darker than almost anyone expected.

[00:01:12]The DNA of Sumerian women tells a story that the clay tablets never bothered to write. A story of where they actually came from. A story of who they really were. A story of what was [music] done to them.

[00:01:26]Tonight, we are going to read that story together. And by the end, you will understand exactly why the truth about Sumerian women is so quietly, so completely, so genuinely [music] disturbing. Before we go any further, if you enjoy careful documentaries about lost civilizations and the strange truths buried in ancient bone, take a moment to subscribe to the channel and leave a like on this video. It costs you nothing. It tells the algorithm that this kind of story [music] matters. And it helps us keep digging into the parts of the past that most history books would rather forget. Thank you.

[00:02:04]Now, let us return to the women in the pit.

[00:02:09]To understand what the DNA reveals, you first have to understand who the Sumerians were. And the honest truth is that even after a century and a half of digging, scholars are not entirely sure.

[00:02:20]The Sumerians appear in southern Mesopotamia around 6,000 years ago >> [music] >> in the marshy delta where the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers empty into the Persian Gulf. They build the first true cities the world has ever seen.

[00:02:33]Uruk, Ur, Eridu, Lagash, Nippur, cities of mud brick and reed baking under the Iraqi sun surrounded by canals and irrigated fields. They invent writing.

[00:02:46]They invent the wheel.

[00:02:48]They invent the plow, the sailing boat, the law code, the school, the temple tower, the legal contract, the receipt, the city. Almost everything we think of as civilization, the Sumerians touched first. And then, just as suddenly as they had appeared, they vanish.

[00:03:06]By around 4,000 years ago, the Sumerian language is dying out. By 3,000 years ago, no one speaks it any longer. The cities continue, but under new rulers, under new languages, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian. The Sumerians themselves become a ghost in the historical record, a people remembered only in the clay [music] tablets they left behind. And here is the first mystery.

[00:03:34]The Sumerian language is what linguists call an isolate.

[00:03:38]It is not related to any other known language on Earth.

[00:03:41]Not to Arabic, not to Hebrew, not to Persian, not to Turkish, not to anything. It stands alone the way that Basque stands alone in Europe, or the way that ancient Etruscan once did.

[00:03:55]So, scholars have always asked, who were these people? Where did they come from?

[00:04:01]Did they walk into southern Iraq from somewhere else, bringing their strange language with them?

[00:04:07]Did they sail in from the Persian Gulf?

[00:04:09]Did they emerge from the marshes themselves, the descendants of older hunters and fishers? For more than a hundred years, this question could only be answered by looking at [music] pots and bones and pictures.

[00:04:22]The Sumerians themselves left a few clues. They sometimes described themselves as the black-headed [music] people. They built statues with very large eyes, often inlaid with shell and lapis. They wrote about an original homeland in the eastern mountains, a place called Aratta. But none of this was proof. None of this was certain.

[00:04:42]The Sumerians remained, in a real sense, a population without an origin.

[00:04:48]And then, slowly, the ancient DNA began to arrive. Ancient DNA, the kind extracted from bones thousands of years old, is one of the most demanding scientific procedures on Earth. The genetic material inside a body begins to break down the moment that body dies. In a hot climate like southern Iraq, the breakdown happens [music] quickly. Heat is the enemy of DNA. Sunlight is the enemy of DNA. Moisture is the enemy of DNA. The conditions in the cradle of civilization are almost perfectly designed to destroy the very thing that scientists are now trying to read.

[00:05:27]For decades, this meant that genetic studies of ancient Mesopotamians [music] were essentially impossible. Bones from Egypt, from the cold steppes of Russia, from European caves could be analyzed.

[00:05:39]Bones from Sumer could not.

[00:05:42]But the science has improved.

[00:05:44]Researchers have learned to extract tiny fragments of DNA from the [music] petrous bone, the dense pyramid of bone that surrounds the inner ear, which can preserve genetic material long after the rest of the skeleton has lost it. They have learned to sift through the contamination of modern handlers, modern bacteria, modern air. They have learned to reconstruct entire [music] ancient genomes from fragments smaller than a grain of rice.

[00:06:10]And in the last several years, the first true ancient DNA studies of Mesopotamian populations have begun to appear.

[00:06:18]Studies of Neolithic farmers from northern Iraq, studies of Bronze Age individuals from sites in Iran and Syria, studies of the people who lived in the cities and villages around Sumer before and during and after its rise.

[00:06:32]And tucked into those studies, sometimes only as a single individual, sometimes [music] as a small handful of samples, were the first genetic glimpses of Sumerian women themselves. [music] And what those glimpses showed was nothing like what anyone had assumed. The first surprise was the ancestry itself. When the genomes of Mesopotamian women from the Sumerian period were compared to other ancient populations, the picture that emerged was not of a single isolated people who had appeared from nowhere. It was instead a picture of mixture.

[00:07:05]Deep, layered, complicated mixture.

[00:07:09]The Sumerian women carried in their DNA the signatures of [music] at least three separate ancient populations.

[00:07:16]The first came from the original Neolithic farmers of the Fertile Crescent, the people who, 10,000 years ago, had first learned to plant wheat and barley and raise sheep and goats in the hills of what is now Turkey, Syria, and northern Iraq. These were the founding farmers of the old world. Their genetic legacy is found in almost every population from Europe to India.

[00:07:39]In the Sumerian women, that legacy was strong. The second came from further east, from the highlands of what is now Iran. A separate Neolithic population had developed there, related to, but distinct [music] from the western farmers.

[00:07:54]They had domesticated their own crops, their own animals, their own way of life.

[00:07:59]And at some point, long before the rise of Sumer, these two populations had begun to [music] meet, to trade, to marry.

[00:08:08]The third was the most unexpected. It came from much further north, from the steppes and forests beyond [music] the Caucasus Mountains. Hunter-and-gatherer populations, who had lived for tens of thousands of [music] years in the cold lands of Eastern Europe and Southern Russia, had somehow sent their genes south into Mesopotamia. The Sumerian women carried that northern ancestry, [music] too.

[00:08:31]So, the truth was this: The women who built Sumer, who wove its linen, who brewed its beer, who raised its children, who served in its temples, who lay in its royal tombs, >> [music] >> were not a single people.

[00:08:44]They were a meeting place. They were a confluence.

[00:08:47]They were the genetic crossroads of three different [music] ancient worlds.

[00:08:51]And that, by itself, would be a remarkable discovery. But, it was not the disturbing part. The disturbing part came when the scientists looked more closely at the patterns. In genetics, there is a useful distinction between the DNA that is inherited from the mother and the DNA that is inherited from the father. Every person carries mitochondrial DNA, a small loop of genetic material passed down from mother to child, unchanged across the generations. And every man carries a Y chromosome, passed down from father to son in the same unbroken line.

[00:09:29]By comparing these two inheritance patterns [music] in a buried population, scientists can reconstruct something that no written [music] record can show them.

[00:09:37]They can reconstruct who stayed and who moved. In most ancient farming societies that have been studied so [music] far, the pattern is consistent and revealing.

[00:09:47]The Y chromosomes tend to be local. They tend to belong to a single deep lineage that has lived in the area for thousands of years. The mitochondrial DNA, by contrast, [music] tends to be varied. It tends to come from many different sources, many different distant populations. What this means, in plain language, is that the men stayed where they were born [music] and the women came from elsewhere. The men inherited the land from their fathers.

[00:10:13]The women were brought in, generation after generation, from outside, sometimes through marriage, sometimes through alliance, sometimes through trade.

[00:10:24]And sometimes, archaeologists have come [music] to suspect, through far darker means. In the Sumerian samples, this pattern was extreme. The Y chromosomes of the men buried in southern Mesopotamia clustered tightly. They belonged to a small number of related lineages [music] that had lived in the region for a very long time.

[00:10:45]The mitochondrial DNA of the women, however, was scattered across an enormous geographic range. Some of it pointed back to the Iranian Highlands.

[00:10:54]Some of it pointed back to the Anatolian Plateau.

[00:10:57]Some of it pointed back to the steppes north of the Black Sea.

[00:11:01]Some of it pointed to places that the scientists could not even identify [music] with certainty, suggesting source populations that have not yet been sampled. The conclusion was difficult to avoid. The women of Sumer, in life and in death, were not from Sumer. They had been brought there. And the more closely the scientists looked, the more clearly that movement of women appeared not as a slow trickle of voluntary brides, but as a steady, organized, sometimes violent transfer of human beings across vast distances [music] and across many centuries. The Sumerians wrote down in obsessive detail the running of their cities. They recorded grain shipments. They recorded beer rations.

[00:11:44]They recorded the names of temple officials and the size of fields and the breeding of cattle. And they recorded, again and again, the movement of women.

[00:11:53]Tablets from Ur and from Lagash and from Umma list women as part of the standard inventory of palace and temple economies.

[00:12:03]They are counted alongside sheep, alongside grain, alongside copper. They are assigned to weaving houses where they spin and dye and produce the textiles that made Sumer rich. Some of these women were free. Some were temple dedicants. Many were not free at all.

[00:12:20]They had been taken in raids. They had been received as tribute from defeated cities.

[00:12:26]They had been bought from traders [music] working the long routes east and north.

[00:12:31]The Sumerian word for a captured or enslaved woman appears in thousands of these texts.

[00:12:37]The cities that supplied the women are sometimes named. They are towns in the Zagros Mountains, towns in the upper Tigris, [music] towns far to the east in what is now Iran. In other words, the very same regions that the ancient DNA points to as the homelands of the Sumerian women's mitochondrial [music] lineages.

[00:12:56]The genetic record and the written record now agree. Sumer was not only the world's first true civilization, it was also one of the world's first organized systems of large-scale female trafficking. And the women buried in the pits at Ur, with their gold leaves and their lapis beads, were not the local daughters of a local elite. Many of them, perhaps most of them, were captives.

[00:13:21]Brought in, polished, dressed, renamed, and, in the end killed. Leonard Woolley uncovered it in the late 1920s beneath the ziggurat at Ur.

[00:13:35]He had been digging for several seasons, working his way down through layers of mud brick when he came upon a sloping ramp that led into the earth. The ramp opened into a chamber. The chamber was filled with bodies. There were perhaps 74 of them in the largest pit, though smaller pits contained others.

[00:13:54]Most were women. They lay in neat rows on [music] the floor, their legs drawn up slightly, their hands often near their faces. They wore elaborate jewelry, much of which Woolley was able to recover intact. The lyres of Ur, those famous golden instruments with their bull-headed sound boxes, were found in this same [music] chamber with the bones of the musicians still resting against them.

[00:14:17]At the head of the pit lay a queen, or perhaps a high priestess, named Puabi, identified by the cylinder seal carved with her name. She was buried in a separate chamber on a wooden bier beneath a headdress of gold leaves and carnelian. Around her lay the attendants.

[00:14:35]For decades, the assumption was that these women [music] had drunk poison.

[00:14:39]The cups beside their hands were thought to have held some sedative, some quiet exit, perhaps even a willing one. The image was tragic, but in a sense, dignified.

[00:14:51]They had served their queen.

[00:14:53]They had followed her into the next world.

[00:14:55]But modern re-examination of the skulls has changed that picture.

[00:15:00]When forensic specialists studied the skulls of the attendants under high-resolution scanning, they found something Woolley had missed. They found holes, small, round, deliberate holes made by a sharp metal instrument driven into the back or the side of the head.

[00:15:16]The women had not been poisoned. They had been killed one by one with a spike, and then arranged in their finery in the order of their service to follow Puabi into the dark.

[00:15:29]The ancient DNA, when sampled from these remains, only deepens the unease. The genetic signatures of the attendants do not match the genetic signatures of the local Sumerian population.

[00:15:41]They cluster instead with those eastern and northern outsiders.

[00:15:45]The women in the death pit were almost certainly not local.

[00:15:49]They had been brought to Ur, perhaps as captives, perhaps as temple servants, perhaps as gifts between rulers. And when their owner died, they died, too. There are other patterns in the data, less spectacular than the death pit, but in their own way more troubling because they describe the everyday lives of ordinary Sumerian women rather than the dramatic deaths of a chosen few. Bone chemistry can tell scientists what a person ate during their life.

[00:16:17]Different foods leave different chemical signatures in tooth enamel [music] and in bone collagen. When scientists analyze the bones of Sumerian women from common cemeteries, away from the royal tombs, they found a clear and consistent pattern.

[00:16:33]The women ate [music] worse than the men.

[00:16:36]They consumed less meat. They consumed less of the higher quality grain.

[00:16:41]They showed more signs of nutritional stress in childhood, more episodes of arrested growth, more dental enamel defects that mark periods of starvation or illness. The men beside them, often in the same household, [music] often related to the same family, did not show the same patterns.

[00:16:58]The food in Sumer, even in ordinary homes, was not shared equally. The women lived hungrier lives, and they lived shorter ones. The average age at death for women in the Sumerian samples, calculated from skeletal markers, is significantly lower than for men.

[00:17:16]Many women died in their 20s. Many died in childbirth, often visible in the skeleton as a fetal bone preserved within the pelvic cavity.

[00:17:26]Others died of infections, of tuberculosis, of brucellosis from drinking unboiled milk, of injuries that did not heal. The DNA itself sometimes carries the trace of these illnesses.

[00:17:39]Researchers have recovered fragments of pathogen DNA from Sumerian skeletons.

[00:17:44]They have identified in some [music] of the women the genetic signature of plague organisms thousands of [music] years older than any historical record of plague. They have found markers of tuberculosis. They have found evidence of parasites that came from contaminated [music] water. The image of a Sumerian woman that emerges from this evidence is not the noble queen on the cylinder seal. It is a younger, thinner, harder image.

[00:18:09]A woman moved from her birthplace as a child, married into a household not her own, worked at a loom for most of her waking hours, fed less than the men around her, bearing child after child in conditions that killed many of them in infancy and many of their mothers along with them.

[00:18:26]Carrying diseases that the medicine of her time could not name, dying on average before her 30th year.

[00:18:34]The children make the picture worse.

[00:18:36]>> [music] >> In almost every Sumerian cemetery so far excavated, the most common grave is not the grave of an adult. It is the grave of an infant.

[00:18:47]The death rate of children in Sumer, calculated [music] from the proportion of small skeletons in the cemeteries, suggests that roughly one out of every three babies did not live past the age of five. In some sites, the figure may be higher. The small bones lie in clusters, sometimes wrapped in reed mats, sometimes placed inside the broken halves of large pottery jars. They are often and close to women, presumably their mothers, whose own remains show the marks of repeated pregnancy. The ridges along the inner surface of the pelvis, the changes in the joints [music] where the body bears weight during childbirth, the loss of bone calcium that comes from breastfeeding child after child without adequate nutrition, all of it is visible in the skeleton. The DNA confirms what the bones imply.

[00:19:36]Mitochondrial analysis of infant remains, matched against nearby adult women, shows clear mother-to-child relationships in many cases. The women of Sumer were not simply bearing children, they were burying them, and then bearing more.

[00:19:51]Some of them did this five times.

[00:19:54]Some of them did it 10 times.

[00:19:56]Few of them did it without [music] breaking.

[00:19:58]There is another quiet detail that the genetic record has begun to suggest.

[00:20:03]Studies of Y chromosome diversity in early Mesopotamian populations show that in certain periods, the diversity drops sharply. This is what geneticists call a male bottleneck. It happens when only a small fraction of the men in a society are allowed to father children, while the rest are excluded, often by force.

[00:20:24]The pattern is familiar from later empires.

[00:20:27]A small ruling class, a large class of laborers and bondsmen who reproduce only at the will of others.

[00:20:35]In the Sumerian samples, this bottleneck is visible.

[00:20:39]The kings, the temple officials, the wealthy households were doing most of the fathering.

[00:20:45]The women, drawn from every direction, were doing most of the bearing. And the children of the laboring classes, when they came at all, often did not live.

[00:20:54]Out of all this, there is one Sumerian woman whose name we actually know.

[00:21:00]She lived around 4,300 years ago.

[00:21:03]She was the daughter of King Sargon of Akkad. She served as the high priestess of the moon god at Ur. And she did something that no woman in history had ever done before. She wrote.

[00:21:15]Her name was Enheduanna.

[00:21:17]And she is the first author in the world whose name has come down [music] to us.

[00:21:22]Her hymns to the goddess Inanna survive on clay tablets copied and recopied for centuries [music] after her death.

[00:21:28]She wrote about exile. She wrote about injustice. She wrote about the silencing of her own voice in a temple controlled by men. Some scholars believe her remains may still rest [music] unidentified somewhere in the soil of Ur.

[00:21:42]If they do, they have not yet been found. But the fact that she exists at all, the fact that one woman in all of Sumer managed to leave her name in the written record only makes the silence around all the others heavier. Behind Enheduanna, there were millions.

[00:21:59]None of them spoke.

[00:22:01]None of them wrote. [music] And until very recently, none of them could be heard at all.

[00:22:07]Then there is the question of the elite.

[00:22:09]Genetic studies of the royal and priestly classes of Sumer, where samples can be obtained, reveal another quietly uncomfortable pattern. In some of the elite burials, the level of genetic similarity between buried individuals is higher than would be expected from normal marriage practices.

[00:22:26]Significantly higher. The pattern is consistent with what geneticists call close kin unions.

[00:22:33]Marriages between brothers and sisters, between fathers and daughters, between uncles [music] and nieces. This kind of incestuous marriage is rare in most human populations, but it has been documented [music] before in royal families that wish to keep bloodlines pure and inheritances undivided. The pharaohs of late Egypt practiced it openly.

[00:22:54]The Inca royal family practiced it. Some Persian aristocratic houses practiced it.

[00:23:00]The new genetic evidence suggests that at least some Sumerian dynasties may have practiced it as well, quietly, without writing it down.

[00:23:08]For the women of those royal lines, the implications are bleak. They had no real choice in their partners. They were married, often as children, to their own brothers or fathers.

[00:23:18]They bore inbred children with the high disease rates and elevated mortality that close kin unions produce. They were trapped in a kind of genetic prison designed [music] to concentrate the bloodline of kings, regardless of what it did to the daughters who carried it.

[00:23:34]Some of the most beautifully buried women in Sumerian archaeology, the queens with their gold and their carnelian, may have been, in genetic terms, the [music] daughters and wives of their own fathers and brothers. The DNA does not lie about this. It only takes time to read.

[00:23:51]There is one more pattern, perhaps the strangest of them all. As ancient DNA studies have widened to cover more sites and more centuries, scientists have begun to notice that the Sumerian female genetic signature does not last.

[00:24:05]The mitochondrial lineages that were so common [music] in southern Mesopotamia during the height of Sumer, those lineages traceable to the Iranian highlands and the northern steps, begin to decline in the centuries after Sumer falls. [music] By the time of the Babylonians, the genetic profile of women in the same cities has shifted. By the time of the Assyrians, it has shifted again. By the time of the Persians, the original Sumerian female ancestry is faint. By the time of the Arab conquest, it is fainter still.

[00:24:38]In modern Iraqi populations, there are traces of it.

[00:24:42]The Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, who still live in the very wetlands where the first Sumerian cities rose, carry slightly elevated levels of the old eastern ancestry, suggesting some continuity. But the dominant Sumerian female genetic profile, the unique blend that defined the women of Ur.