Mesopotamia, especially Sumeria
Last update: 11 Feb 2025 13:04First version: Before 13 March 1995
Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder
It is mildly insane to have one notebook for this whole subject. To use a comparison I learned from Van De Mieroop's book (below), more time separates the invention of writing in Sumer and the end of cuneiform civilization than the interval between Homer and the present day. A lot changed in those millennia, even in the comparatively small area...
Idle observation: It's kind of weird that the oldest language recorded in writing, and the apparent inventor of literacy, is Sumerian, a linguistic isolate, with no known relatives living or extinct. It's even odder than one of the next oldest written languages is Elamite, from the highlands just east of Sumer, which is also a linguistic isolate. What was going on around there? Was everywhere just full of weird little languages, and this happens to be a place where we can see some of that recorded?
- Recommended:
- Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff", Structure and Dynamics 1:1 (2005): 2 [Comments]
- Gilgamesh [I am fond of the Mason translation, but there are many...]
- Samuel Noah Kramer
- History Begins at Sumer
- The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character
- Marc Van De Mieroop, The Ancient Mesopotamian City [Review in BMCR. My comments.]
- Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer
- To read:
- Guillermo Algaze
- Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides, In the Garden of the Gods: Models of kingship from the Sumerians to the Seleucids
- Jeremy Black, Reading Sumerian Poetry
- Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods
- Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians [2nd ed. 2004]
- Stephanie Dalley, The City of Babylon: A History, c. 2000 BC--AD 116
- David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
- Benjamin R. Foster and Karen Polinger Foster, Civilizations of Ancient Iraq
- Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld;' and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle
- Charles Halton and Saana Svärd (ed. and trans.), Women’s writing of ancient Mesopotamia: an anthology of the earliest female authors
- Sophus Helle
- Thorkild Jacobsen
- Samuel Noah Kramer
- In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography
- Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta: A Sumerian Epic Tale of Iraq and Iran
- From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration
- Nissen, Damerow and Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East
- Oates, Babylon
- A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
- Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia
- J. N. Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History
- Eleanor Robson
- Mesopotamian Mathematics, 2100--1600 BC: Technical Constants in Bureaucracy and Education
- Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History
- Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia
- Francesca Rochberg
- Lawrence Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum
- Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq
- Michael Schmidt, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
- N. M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets
- Marc Van De Mieroop
- Henry T. Wright
- Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic
