Mesopotamia, especially Sumeria

21 Dec 2008 21:55

---

Recommended:
• Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff", Structure and Dynamics 1:1 (2005): 2 [From the abstract: "Economic geographers correctly note that regional variations in economic activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation. This article proposes that essentially similar forces account for the emergence of the world's earliest cities in the alluvial lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (Souther Mesopotamia), sometime during the second half of the fourth millennium BC."]
• 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
  • The Uruk World System: The Dynamics of Expansion of Early Mesopotamian Civilization [Blurb]
  • Ancient Mesopotamia at the Dawn of Civilization: The Evolution of an Urban Landscape [Blurb]
• Jeremy Black, Reading Sumerian Poetry
• Jean Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, and the Gods [Blurb]
• Harriet Crawford, Sumer and the Sumerians [2nd ed. 2004]
• Samuel Noah Kramer, In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography
• Nissen, Damerow and Englund, Archaic Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic Administration in the Ancient Near East [Blurb]
• Oates, Babylon
• 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 [blurb, ch. 1]
• Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq
• Henry T. Wright
  • "Uruk States in Southwestern Iran" [PDF]
  • "Cultural Action in the Uruk World" [PDF]