Amorites rulers in the early second millennium to indicate the arrival of a large group
of incomers who might be the Sumerians. This negative evidence suggests that they
were already well established in the southern plain by the late Uruk period. However,
once the previously assumed link between specific groups of people, on one hand, and
material culture, on the other, is broken, as it is by most scholars today, the question
of the arrival of the Sumerians becomes less significant because the culture concerned
no longer has to be equated with the arrival of a single group.
The second use of the word ‘Sumerian’ is to describe a culture, that is to say, the sum
total of the evidence from texts and archaeology for a way of life, its beliefs and
customs. The Sumerian culture is still only partially known because the evidence we
have is incomplete, mediated by the twin accidents of discovery and survival. It is also
strongly skewed in favour of urban settlements and public buildings (Adams 2008 ).
Unlike the Assyrians with their magnificent stone wall reliefs and huge fortifications,
the inhabitants of the south built in mudbrick, which made the retrieval of all but the
thickest walls and the largest structures almost impossible when using the crude
excavation techniques of the first explorers. In addition much of the material culture
was made of perishable materials such as reeds and palm wood which do not survive
either, leaving further gaps in our knowledge.
However, in spite of this, by the middle of the nineteenth century the great ziggurat
at Ur and the sites of Uruk, Babylon and Nineveh, amongst others, had been
identified, and the first inscriptions in the Sumerian language discovered, although its
decipherment was to take a little longer. Excavation in the twentieth century saw far
more sophisticated techniques of recovery used, intensive study of tablets and a rapid
expansion in our information. As our knowledge grows, a strong case can now be made
for saying that Sumerian culture was, as Cooper proposed (see above), the product of
an extraordinarily productive mixing of a wide variety of different elements.
It is Sumerian culture as described above which will be explored in most of the
chapters in this book. It is ironic that as our information improves many of the old
certainties become blurred. The tidy groups which help us reconstruct ancient societies
are now becoming fuzzy. The old oppositional categories of human and divine, palace
and temple, church and state, urban and rural, nomad and settled, no longer fit our
more nuanced understanding of the evidence. For example, Steinkeller ( 2007 ) sees
town and country as a continuum with all land owned by temples. As boundaries
between such categories are becoming unclear and our understanding of the textual
and iconographic evidence improves, we hope that we are edging closer to a realistic
portrait of the Sumerian world.
The most contentious use of the word ‘Sumerian’ is to describe a people. There may
have been such a people, but there is no physical anthropological evidence to support
this, no separate groups of long heads or round heads as some early anthropologists
thought (Soltysiak 2006 ). In the future it may be possible to group skeletal remains
by DNA analysis, but human bones are badly preserved in the area, and even if
different DNA groups were identified, it would still be impossible to know which
represented the earliest Sumerians. This use of the word will not be dealt with here.
The present volume will present some of the most recent findings as well as
summaries of the existing state of our knowledge. It will also set the Sumerian world
in its contemporary context and in some cases reassess the influence it had on its
neighbours. It is hoped that this mixing of clearly presented old and new data will be
–– Introduction ––