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Sumer and the Sumerian City-States. Sumer, the land of southern Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates (roughly modern southern Iraq), was home to the earliest known civilization in history. Settled from about 4500 BCE in the Ubaid period, the region's irrigation-fed farmland supported a dense network of cities by the fourth millennium: Eridu, Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Kish, Nippur and others, each an independent city-state ruled from its temple and palace.
The Sumerians produced an astonishing share of humanity's firsts. Around 3400-3200 BCE their accountants and priests developed cuneiform, the world's first writing system, first for grain tallies and then for law, literature and royal boasting. They built the ziggurat, worked bronze, used the potter's wheel and the wheeled cart, and organized math around the sixty-based numbers we still use for minutes and degrees. In the Early Dynastic period (c. 2900-2350 BCE) kings like Gilgamesh of Uruk and the royal tombs of Ur show a wealthy, competitive society of walled cities fighting over fields and canals.
Sumer's cities fell to outside rulers - Sargon of Akkad around 2334 BCE, then the Gutians - but Sumerian civilization had one last brilliant chapter: the Third Dynasty of Ur (c. 2112-2004 BCE), whose founder Ur-Nammu issued the earliest surviving law code and built the great ziggurat of Ur. When Amorite invaders and shifting rivers broke that kingdom, Sumer's political story ended, but its gods, epics and learning were absorbed wholesale by Babylon and Assyria.
Every later Mesopotamian civilization, and through them much of the ancient world, built on Sumerian foundations: writing, law, kingship, the calendar, flood stories and school texts were still being copied in Sumerian a thousand years after the last Sumerian speaker died. The site's excavations in the 19th and 20th centuries recovered a whole lost civilization from the mounds of Iraq.
Britannica: Sumer
World History Encyclopedia: Sumerians
Humanities LibreTexts: 2.6: Sumerian City-States