The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character
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History Begins at Sumer.
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Diakonoff,
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Falkenstein,
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C...
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University of Pennsylvania
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Istanbul Museum
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Hilprecht Collection,
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Its climate is extremely hot and dry, and its soil, left to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive.
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The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone.
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In spite of the land's natural drawbacks, they turned Sumer into a ve...
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they learned to bake the river clay and mud, the supply of which was practically inexhaustible, into sickles, pots, plates, and jars. In lieu of the scarce building timber, they cut and dried the huge and plentiful marsh reeds, tied them into bundles or plaited them into mats...
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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,...
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they prized highly wealth and possessions, rich harvests, well-stocked granaries, folds and stalls filled with cattle, successful hunting in the plain,
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and good fishing in the sea.
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Spiritually and psychologically, they laid great stress on ambition and success, pre-eminence and pre...
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The Sumerian was deeply conscious of his personal rights and resented any encroachment on them, whether by his king, his superior, or his equal. No wonder that the Sumerian...
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Irrigation is a complicated process requiring communal effort...
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by the third millenium B.C., there is good reason to believe that Sumerian culture and civilization had penetrated, at least to some extent, as far east as India and as far west as the Mediterranean, as far south as ancient Ethiopia and as far north as the Caspian.
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Even so, it is still apparent in a Mosaic law and a Solomonic proverb, in the tears of job and a Jerusalem lament, in the sad tale of the dying man-god, in a Hesiodic cosmogony and a Hindu myth, in an Aesopic fable and a Euclidean theorem, in a zodiacal sign and a heraldic design, in the weight of a mina, the degree of an angle, the writing of a number.
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The decipherment of Sumerian actually came about through the decipherment of Semitic Akkadian,
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like Sumerian, is written in cuneiform script.
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He collected many inscribed tablets, bricks, boundary stones, and cylinders, among them the famous Nebuchadnezzar and Sennacherib cylinders, carefully copied by his secretary Carl Bellino and sent to the epigrapher Grotefend for decipherment.
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Andre Daulier Deslandes published the first accurate engraving of the palace of Persepolis, but copied only three of the characters on the inscriptions and placed them in his engraving in a manner that tended to give the impression that the writing was merely decorative, a theory widely held during the eighteenth century.
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The first complete inscription from Persepolis was not published until 1711, the author being jean Chardin, a naturalized English citizen who had visited Persepolis three times during his youth.
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Kuyunjik and Nebi Yunus, two mounds covering the ruins of Nineveh.
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Khorsabad,
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Khorsabad ruins covered the palace of the mighty Sargon II, who ruled over Assyria in the first quarter of the eighth century B.C.-although this was unknown to the excavators, of course-and contained acres of Assyrian sculpture, friezes, and...
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Austen Henry Layard began digging first at Nimrud, then at Nineveh, and again at Nimrud. In addition to the royal palaces covered with bas-reliefs, he found at N...
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great grandson of S...
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The Babylonian-Assyrian (or as it is now called, Akkadian) script, stated Hincks, was not alphabetical, but both syllabic and ideographic, that is, the signs might represent syllables (of consonant plus vowel, vowel plus consonant, or consonant plus vowel plus consonant) which were combined in various ways to make a word, or each sign might express an entire word.
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W. F. Fox Talbot, who did research on integral calculus and helped lay the foundations for present-day photography, was also an amateur Orientalist; he had studied the publications of Rawlinson and Hincks and had even published translations of a number of Assyrian texts.
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Rawlinson, after studying the syllabaries excavated at Kuyunjik, had come to the conclusion that they were bilingual and that the Semitic Babylonian words in them explained corresponding words in an entirely new and hitherto unknown language, which he designated "Akkadian" and which he considered to be "Scythian or Turanian." Here, then, we learn for the first time of the possibility that there had existed a non-Semitic people and a non-Semitic language in Mesopotamia. In
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The correct naming of the non-Semitic people who invented the cuneiform script we owe to the genius of Jules Oppert, whose contributions to all facets of Assyriology, and especially to the study of the syllabaries, were so outstanding.
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The first significant excavation on a Sumerian site was begun in 1877 at Telloh, the ruins of ancient Lagash, by the French under the direction of Ernest de Sarzec.
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Gudea, steles-the Stele of the Vultures is one of the more important of these-the Gudea cylinders, and thousands of tablets, many of which dated to the dynasty of Ur-Nanshe.