An Ancient Civilization
From the tablets of Sumer, Twenty-five firsts in Man’s Recorded History
By Samuel Noah Kramer
The Falcon’s Wing Press. 293 pp. $5.00.

A Century ago the Sumerians were an unknown people. The ancient Egyptians and Persians, even the Assyrians and Babylonians, were known from the Greek historians and the Bible, but of the Sumerians there was no trace and no one suspected that they had ever existed. Then, between 1889 and 1900, archaeologists of the University of Pennsylvania excavated at the site of the long buried city of Nippur, one hundred miles south of modern Baghdad in Iraq. Again since 1948 the University Museum in Philadelphia and the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have sponsored digging at the same site. As a result of these excavations we have learned that Nippur was the cultural and spiritual center of Lower Mesopotamia at a period when this land was known as Sumer and its people were the Sumerians.

It was a long time after the first finds were turned up by the archaeologists before the story of the Sumerians could be put together in any fullness. Doubtless the most important of all the finds was a large number of clay tablets inscribed with wedge-shaped marks. These inscriptions were clearly the same kind of writing which was already well known in the Near East and which was called cuneiform, from the Latin word cuneus, meaning wedge. On the famous Rock of Behistun in Iran there were cuneiform inscriptions in three languages, Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, and these had been deciphered. But the language of the new texts was different, and so it too had to be deciphered. Since in these texts the writers call their land Sumer, we now simply designate the language as Sumerian and the people as the Sumerians.

In ancient Mesopotamia history is piled up, layer upon layer, in the successive levels of the great city mounds of the past. Working down through these levels, the excavators find the Sumerian remains below—and so they must be older than—the ruins of the time of the well-known Akkadian king, Sargon, who probably ruled about 2300 B.C.E. Here in the time before Sargon we are back in what is called the Uruk period, and before the Uruk there was the Obeid period. There is no doubt that the Sumerians were the leading people in Lower Mesopotamia in the later part of the Uruk period. The question is whether they were also there in the earlier part of the Uruk period and in the prior Obeid period. One group of archaeologists answers this question in the affirmative and attributes the earliest remains that have been discovered to the Sumerians. Another group, to which Samuel Noah Kramer belongs, believes that the Sumerians came in only later, probably during the 4th millennium B.C.E.

The working out of this puzzle, which scholars refer to as the “Sumerian question,” is quite a fascinating study in itself. Reduced to some of its essentials, the argument of the school of thought to which Professor Kramer belongs is that Sumerian epic literature presupposes a stage of culture comparable to that in which the epics of Greece, India, and Europe arose. These eras constituted the so-called Heroic Ages of the Greek, Indian, and Teutonic peoples, respectively, the common features of which were that national migrations brought relatively barbaric peoples in upon disintegrating civilized power. The Sumerians may have come as a primitive people into Lower Mesopotamia where an urban civilization already existed. Those who had formed the earlier civilization were, it may be surmised, Iranians from the East and Semites from the West. In other words, people from Iran introduced a peasant-village culture into Mesopotamia, which Semites later brought to the level of an urban state. Then the Sumerians poured in with primitive vigor, learned from the predecessors whom they overcame, and, before long, developed new aspects of civilization.

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Doubtless their most momentous contribution was the invention of writing, for as far as we can tell from present evidence, the cuneiform system was created by the Sumerians. At first the writing was pictographic; that is, a word was represented by a picture of the object to which reference was being made. Since this would call for drawing an indefinite number of such pictographs, it was a great gain that gradually the signs came to stand for phonetic values.

In this script the Sumerians put down what is now known to have been a very extensive literature. The epics presumably were originated by bards and minstrels who recited their poems orally, for in the written texts the patterns of repetition seem to reflect such an oral stage of the tradition. In the study of this literature of the ancient Sumerians, Professor Kramer has made himself one of the leading authorities. Many of the tablets are in the University of Pennsylvania museum, his own university, many are in the Museum of the Ancient Orient in Istanbul, and some in other places. Not infrequently part of one tablet will be in Philadelphia, the other part of the same tablet in Istanbul. Kramer has done a first-class detective job of ferreting out missing fragments and piecing together the scattered parts of what are veritable crossword puzzles. Even so the literature remains extremely fragmentary and often difficult to interpret; even the results presented in this book are not seldom described as tentative.

Already, however, the information which we have is nothing less than amazing. These ancient Sumerians came on the scene more than five thousand years ago; the actual tablets translated in this book are three thousand and four thousand years old. Yet the nature of the people seems to be about the same as that of modern man. Kramer brings this out by quoting from their proverbs (which he has translated). Clothes made the man then as now, it seems, for the Sumerians said, “Everybody takes to the well-dressed man.” But economic perplexities were many, and this is how they expressed their dilemma:

“We are doomed to die, let us spend;
We will live long, let us save.”

Taxes were already high, and “the man to fear,” they said, “is the tax collector!”

The fields of Sumerian interest were many and varied, and in this book we get excerpts from their literature touching upon education, international affairs, government, social reform, justice, medicine, agriculture, and many other themes. Some of these texts are the oldest recorded comments we have on such subjects.

It may be in their philosophy and religion that the ancient Sumerians seem most removed from modern man, for they apparently believed in hundreds of deities who were conceived now and then in a grossly anthropomorphic way. Nevertheless, many ideas and motifs which are taken up in later religions and appear in the pages of the Bible can be found in the Sumerian religious literature. One of the most significant of these was the doctrine of the creative power of the divine word, a doctrine which was evidently originated by the Sumerian philosophers, which became a dogma throughout the ancient Near East, and which continues to influence Jewish and Christian thought through the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of the Gospel According to John.

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