Mesopotamia, especially Sumeria
Last update: 11 Aug 2026 10:44First 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 on cities (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 of the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates...
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 (miscellaneous, inadequate):
- 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
- Tom Stevenson, "Beyond Mesopotamia", London Review of Books 47:4 (6 March 2025) [Essay on the recent decipherment of Linear Elamite; archived copy]
- Douglas I. Thompson, "The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the 'Other Half' of the History of Political Thought", Perspectives on Politics forthcoming (2025+) [Comments]
- 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, Gilgamesh, history and reception:
- David Damrosch, The Buried Book: The Loss and Rediscovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh
- Alhena Gadotti, 'Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld'; and the Sumerian Gilgamesh Cycle
- Sophus Helle, Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic
- Michael Schmidt, Gilgamesh: The Life of a Poem
- Theodore Ziolkowski, Gilgamesh Among Us: Modern Encounters with the Ancient Epic
- To read, (other) poetry:
- Sophus Helle, Enheduana: The Complete Poems of the World's First Author
- Thorkild Jacobsen, Harps that Once... : Sumerian Poetry in Translation
- Samuel Noah Kramer
- To read, not otherwise or not yet classified:
- 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
- Benjamin R. Foster and Karen Polinger Foster, Civilizations of Ancient Iraq
- Charles Halton and Saana Svärd (ed. and trans.), Women’s writing of ancient Mesopotamia: an anthology of the earliest female authors
- Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness: A History of Mesopotamian Religion
- 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
- Oates, Babylon
- A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization
- Susan Pollock, Ancient Mesopotamia
- Beate Pongratz-Leisten, Myth, Text and Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: A Narrative Reading of the World
- 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
- N. M. Swerdlow, The Babylonian Theory of the Planets
- Marc Van De Mieroop
- Selena Wisnom, The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World
- Henry T. Wright