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Title: The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character by Samuel Noah Kramer ISBN: 0-226-45238-7 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: June, 1971 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (9 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: In a city without watchdogs, the fox is the overseer
Comment: Based on few and hardly decipherable documents, Prof. Kramer sketches us the originality, importance, history and legacy of a till recent times unknown people, the Sumerians.
He gives us a fair view of their city organization (a bicameral congress), social organization (individualism and family), laws (written), agriculture (irrigation), cuneiform language, education (schools and mathematics), architecture (ziggurats) and anthropomorphic religion.
Of course, we are still in a very primitive society with legal selling of children, extremely brutal justice, temple prostitution and where the price of a grown man slave is less than the price of an ass.
We get also a good idea of the 'modern' Sumerian character: aggressive competition, drive for prestige and superiority, the importance of material prosperity and their counterparts: fear, hatred and wars.
Prof. Kramer gives us also an excellent explanation of cuneiform writing and mathematics. The meaning of the words is identical with the objects pictured. So, words are a picture of the external world (Wittgenstein!).
A large part of the book concerns the high quality of the Sumerian literature. It influenced the Bible (the paradise and the creation of man), the Greek and most of all the Acadian literature with 'The Descent of Ishtar in the Underworld' (to raise the dead) and the Epic of Gilgamesh (the quest for eternal life).
The Sumerian history shows us that from the beginning of mankind very 'modern' problems surfaced: taxation to finance wars, the struggle between the temple and the palace or the battle between the few (powerful) and the many.
A very interesting book, not only for historians.
Rating: 4
Summary: Solid History by a top Archaeologist.
Comment: This should be viewed as a companion to History Begins At Sumer (which is the better book and should be read first). A quality introduction to this great topic.
Rating: 1
Summary: Biased and Superficial
Comment: If you enjoy being bored to tears, buy this book. If you like nothing better than to read the dry and uninspired prose of a bloodless, superficial, and unimaginative pedant, you'll love it. But be warned. Kramer will kill forever any budding interest that you may have had in the Sumerians, convinced as he is that they were a bunch of simple-minded boobies who simply stumbled upon the ideas which set the pattern for all future civilization. As a non-Semitic people, he assures us that the Sumerians were nowhere near as smart as the Semitic peoples (Babylonians, Assyrians, Kramer, etc.,) who followed after them.
Sad to say, Kramer positively drips with arrogance, and with the extreme subjectivity which passes for 'objectivity' in the world of conventional learning. Whatever does not fit in with his thesis (Semites are smarter), and with his narrow and superficial view of things, he either belittles or altogether ignores.
I struggled vainly for a long time to read his book, have re-started it several times, and once even got as far as page 150 before shuddering yet again to a despairing halt. Happily the gods intervened at that point and directed me providentially to Zechariah Sitchin's 'The 12th Planet.'
Chapter 2 of Sitchin's book, 'The Sudden Civilization,' gives a wonderful overview of the Sumerians and their achievements from which you will learn far more than from Kramer, for Sitchin, though every bit as learned as Kramer, gives us scholarship minus prejudice plus a welcome and generous helping of the insight and imagination which Kramer so evidently lacks, all written up in a lively and vigorous style and with far more facts. He may even leave you, as he did me, with a desire to set about learning the language of this amazing people. But Kramer simply irritates and bores, though his book does contain some useful appendixes and interesting photographs.
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Title: History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine "Firsts" in Recorded History by Samuel Noah Kramer, Hiroshi Tanaka ISBN: 0812212762 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: December, 1989 List Price(USD): $20.95 |
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Title: Sumerian Mythology: A Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. by Samuel Noah Kramer ISBN: 0812210476 Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization by A. Leo Oppenheim, Erica Reiner ISBN: 0226631877 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: September, 1977 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford World's Classics) by Stephanie Dalley, C. J. Fordyce ISBN: 0192835890 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: September, 1998 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux ISBN: 014012523X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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