When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century, they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia: the Sumerians. The exploits and achievements of other Mesopotamian peoples, such as the Assyrians and Babylonians, were already known to a large segment of the population through the Old Testament and the nascent field of Near Eastern studies had unraveled the enigma of the Akkadian language that was widely used throughout the region in ancient times, but the discovery of the Sumerian tablets brought to light the existence of the Sumerian culture, which was the oldest of all the Mesopotamian cultures. Although the Sumerians continue to get second or even third billing compared to the Babylonians and Assyrians, perhaps because they never built an empire as great as the Assyrians or established a city as enduring and great as Babylon, they were the people who provided the template of civilization that all later Mesopotamians built upon. The Sumerians are credited with being the first people to invent writing, libraries, cities, and schools in, and many would argue that they were the first people to create and do those things anywhere in world. When Western Europe was still in the Stone Age, it was the Sumerians who invented writing and the wheel, divided time into minutes and seconds, tamed nature, and built gigantic cities. Thus, it should be no surprise that the Sumerians also provided the civilizational template for the earliest forms of astronomy. As the Sumerians gazed at the sky and began mapping the cosmos, they successfully tracked retrograde motion and predicted lunar and solar eclipses, bringing forth thousands of years of discoveries made by enterprising astronomers. For the Mesopotamians, astronomy and astrology intertwined. Today, astronomy is understood as the scientific study of the universe, focusing on the physical properties of different bodies, from how they move to how they came into being. Conversely, astrology is a non-scientific belief system that interprets the stars and planets to predict human behavior, personality, or future events. However, in Mesopotamia, the astronomy determined the course of religion and the choices made by rulers, providing a certain mix between the mundane and the surreal. From their births to their deaths, the ancient Mesopotamians believed that deities surrounded them, and whether their social interactions were on the level of a smaller city or that of a larger nation-state, the deities played key roles in the social fabric of their society. Astronomy and astrology were thus wielded in order to divine supernatural intentions, and thereby plot proper courses in everyday life.