The laws and punishment in Sumer where very harsh and they involved slaves and deaths. Some punishments were unfair and some were unfair in comparison to the laws.
Some of the first code of laws are those of a Sumerian king of Ur known as Ur-namma who ruled from 2112 BCE to 2095 BCE.
Ur-Namma forthrightly declared the reason for his laws:
I did not deliver the orphan to the rich. I did not deliver the widow to the mighty. I did not deliver the man with but one …show more content…
If a city came to prominence under a ruler or powerful official, then the local gods rose alongside them. These became ‘state’ gods, worshipped by the wealthy and elite in the temples. However, the most of the people continued to worship their local gods. Some gods, were preferred by certain people, some were only worshipped in certain areas, and others prominent only in certain eras. In later times, different gods were frequently combined or merged. A lot of the people also looked up to the gods for guidance.
The Sumerian religion influenced mesopotamian mythology as a whole, surviving in the mythologies and religions of the Hurrians, Akkadians, Babylonians, Assyrians and other culture groups. The ancient Sumerians had a tendency to merge new beliefs with the old ones rather than simply replace them.
Each city housed a temple that was the seat of a major god in the Sumerian pantheon, as the gods controlled the powerful forces which often dictated a human's fate. The city leaders had a job to please the town's patron deity, not just for the good will of that gods but also for the good of the other deities in the council of