It’s been said that good fences make good neighbors, and it seems that many of history’s most famous civilizations would agree. Dating back to the ancient world, governments and militaries have constructed sprawling defensive walls to keep hostile enemies at bay, define their national borders and even prevent their own citizens from fleeing—often with decidedly mixed results. From an ancient Sumerian bulwark to the Berlin Wall, here are seven of history’s most influential manmade barriers.
The world’s earliest known civilization was also one of the first to build a defensive wall. During the 21st century B.C., the ancient Sumerian rulers Shulgi and Shu-Sin constructed a massive fortified barrier to keep out the Amorites, a group of nomadic tribesmen who had been making incursions into Mesopotamia. This “Amorite Wall” is believed to have stretched for over a hundred miles between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in what is now Iraq. It was likely the first extensive rampart not built around a city, but it only succeeded in fending off the Sumerians’ enemies for a few years. Hostile invaders either penetrated the wall or simply walked around it, and by the reign of Shu-Sin’s successor, Ibbi-Sin, Sumer found itself under attack from both the Amorites and the neighboring Elamites. After the destruction of the city of Ur around 2000 B.C., Sumerian culture began to vanish from history.
