The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world's earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BC. They have been credited with the invention of nothing less than cities, writing and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our own urban, literate world. But is this picture correct?
Paul Collins reveals how the idea of a Sumerian people was assembled from the archaeological and textual evidence uncovered in Iraq and Syria over the last 150 years. Reconstructed through the biases of those who unearthed them, the Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past.
The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world's earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BC. They have been credited with the invention of nothing less than cities, writing and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our own urban, literate world. But is this picture correct?
Paul Collins reveals how the idea of a Sumerian people was assembled from the archaeological and textual evidence uncovered in Iraq and Syria over the last 150 years. Reconstructed through the biases of those who unearthed them, the Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past.
Paul Collins is Jaleh Hearn Curator for Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, specializing in the art and archaeology of Mesopotamia and Iran. He is the author of Assyrian Palace Sculptures (2008) and Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia (2016).
“[A] stimulating new book. . . . The Sumerians, for all their
doubtful status as a formal society, have a remarkable list of
achievements to their credit. Besides being the world’s earliest
attested civilization in the fourth millennium BCE, they invented
cuneiform—the world’s earliest writing—and the sexagesimal system
of mathematics. Their cities, such as Uruk and Ur, were the
headquarters of the world’s earliest city-states, with
bureaucracies, legal codes, divisions of labor, and a money
economy. . . . A civilization made vivid by Collins’s clear and
expert text.”
*Science*
"A highly readable, fully authoritative account of all aspects of
the ways of life of the Sumerians, one of the most important
peoples of the ancient world. Collins also covers the issue of the
discovery and rediscovery of the Sumerians very effectively,
bringing to life not just the Sumerians themselves but also the
early travelers and antiquarians who first engaged with them. The
book, too, is superbly illustrated."
*Roger Matthews, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, University
of Reading*
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