Sumer

[Intro] Yeah Sumer

First Ever Civilization

Mesopotamia

Let's Go

[Verse] Between two rivers I was born

Mud bricks stacked to touch the sun

Uruk waking before the dawn

Priests and kings had just begun

Tigris and Euphrates taught me how to speak

Cuneiform pressed in wet clay deep

Scribes kept records of the grain we reaped

A city counted what the people keep

[Chorus] Sumer rising from the silt and stone

Sumer every tablet carved alone

Sumer we built the world before the throne

Sumer now the dust has made it known

[Verse] Ziggurat a stairway made of mud

Gudea prayed and sealed it with his blood

Gilgamesh a man who feared the flood

Wrote his grief on every broken bud

Wheels rolled first along my dusty roads

Plows split earth and lightened every load

Numbers counted stars and seasons glowed

Laws were etched before the code was owed

[Chorus] Sumer rising from the silt and stone

Sumer every tablet carved alone

Sumer we built the world before the throne

Sumer now the dust has made it known

[Bridge] Empires fall like reeds beside the stream

Akkad came and swallowed up my dream

Still the clay remembers what we mean

Still the words outlast the king and queen

[Chorus] Sumer rising from the silt and stone

Sumer every tablet carved alone

Sumer we built the world before the throne

Sumer now the dust has made it known

[Outro] Sumer

Sumer

What the river left behind

Sumer

[Verse 3] Yo, they dug me up out the trench where the river bends

Cold case in the clay with a message to my friends

Every bone is a witness, every shard is a statement

Somebody's great-grandson caught a case from my pavement

I ain't dying quiet, I ain't going out soft

Potsherds in a museum, still I'm calling the shots

You can box up my ledger, you can catalog my knife

But the tablet in the vault is still telling you my life

[Verse 4] Talk about a code, mine came before the stone

Twenty thousand lines and I ain't break a single bone

Lawyers read my judgments like they reading off the wall

First precedent in history, I never had to stall

Prisoners in the courtyard, debtors in the street

I gave 'em scales and weights so they could settle what they eat

You want justice? Ask a scribe who held the reed

I was writing down the rules before you learned to read

[Chorus] Sumer rising from the silt and stone

Sumer every tablet carved alone

Sumer we built the world before the throne

Sumer now the dust has made it known

[Verse 5] They say the cradle got abandoned, say the story went cold

Say the river changed its mind and let the desert take hold

But I been underground, I ain't never left the block

I'm the reason that your calendar got hands on the clock

Sixty seconds, sixty minutes, circle in the sky

I'm the one who split the hour so you'd never wonder why

Bronze in the furnace, lapis in the crown

You a footnote in a chapter that I'm still writing down

[Bridge] (Still here)

Every brick I laid is talking

(Still here)

Every ditch I dug is walking

(Still here)

You can bury what you find

(Still here)

But you can't bury the mind

[Verse 6] I seen dynasties come, I seen dynasties go

Persians at the gate with a hundred thousand bows

Babylon on top, then the Medes roll through

Rome ain't nothing but a later version of what I knew

So when they ask you who invented keeping score

Who first drew a boundary and who first declared a war

Point at the two rivers, point at where the reeds grow

That's the corner of the world where they learned to run it slow

[Chorus] Sumer rising from the silt and stone

Sumer every tablet carved alone

Sumer we built the world before the throne

Sumer now the dust has made it known

[Outro] Rest in power

Every tablet, every scribe

Rest in power

What the river couldn't hide

Sumer

Sumer