The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character

by Samuel Noah Kramer

in classical times as Babylonia, consists of the lower half of Mesopotamia, roughly identical with modern Iraq from north of Baghdad to the Persian Gulf.

Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone.

Later, the Sumerians invented the brick mold for shaping and baking the ubiquitous river clay and so had no more building-material problem.

potter's wheel, the wagon wheel, the plow, the sailboat, the arch, the vault, the dome, casting in copper and bronze, riveting, brazing and soldering, sculpture in stone, engraving, and inlay.

Almost all that we know of the early history of western Asia comes from the thousands of clay documents inscribed in the cuneifo...

one overriding factor which fostered a strong spirit of co-operation among individuals and communities alike: the complete dependence of Sumer on irrigation for its well-being-indeed, for its very existence.

The scholars and archeologists who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were looking not for Sumerians but for Assyrians;

In the case of the Sumerians, however, there was no recognizable trace of the land, or its people and language, in the entire available Biblical, classical, and postclassical literature (or at least so it was thought; see pages 297-99 for the possibility that Sumer is mentioned in the Bible under a slightly variant form).

This group of trilingual cuneiform inscriptions, which was roughly the counterpart of the Egyptian Rosetta stone, did not come from Iraq but from Iran, although it is Iraq that is the home of cuneiform writing.

In fact, as early as the twelfth century a rabbi of Tudela, in the kingdom of Navarre, by the name of Benjamin son of Jonah visited the Jews of Mosul and correctly identified the ruins in the vicinity of that city as those of ancient Nineveh, although his account was not published until the sixteenth century.

the identification of Babylon was not made until 1616, when the Roman Pietro della Valle visited the mounds in the neighborhood of modern Hilla. This sharp-eyed traveler not only gave a remarkable description of the ruins of Babylon, but also brought back to Europe inscribed bricks that he had found there and at the mound now called by the Arabs Tal al Muqayyar, "the mound of pitch," which covers the ruins of ancient Ur; and thus it was that the first examples of cuneiform writing came to Europe.

Carsten Niebuhr, a Danish mathematician who, besides copying at Persepolis the inscriptions which led to the decipherment of cuneiform, was the first to give his contemporaries a concrete idea of the r...

A. Michaux sold to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris a boundary stone found near Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad, which proved to be the first reall...

About this same time Abbe Beauchamp, vicar-general at Baghdad and correspondent of the Academy of Science, was making careful and accurate observations of what he saw around him, particularly in the ruins of Babylon; in fact, he actuall...

He was the first to describe parts of the...

he also mentions finding solid cylinders covered with minute writings that he felt resembled the ...

Rich turned up at Mosul, where he sketched and investigated the great mounds of ancient Nineveh. He collected many inscribed tablets, bricks, boundary stones, and cylinders, among them the famous Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib cylinders,

He was followed by Robert Ker Porter who made accurate artistic reproductions of a number of Mesopotamian

In 1828 Robert Mignan excavated briefly in the ruins of Babylon, where...