The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character

by Samuel Noah Kramer

literary creations, and value motivations of the civilization created in ancient Sumer that will be briefly sketched in the following pages. First, however, a brief introductory review of the archeological "resurrection" of the Sumerians and their culture and of the decipherment of their script and language. Remarkably enough, less than a century ago not only was nothing known of Sumerian culture; the very existence of a Sumerian people and language was unsuspected. The scholars and archeologists who some hundred years ago began excavating in Mesopotamia were looking not for Sumerians but for Assyrians; these were the people about whom they had considerable, though far from accurate, information from Greek and Hebrew sources. 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). The very name Sumer had been erased from the mind and memory of man for more than two thousand years. The discovery of the Sumerians and their language was quite unlooked for and came quite unexpectedly, and this rather irrelevant detail led to controversies which were