History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Recorded History

by Samuel Noah Kramer

Book Overview

Which civilization had the first system of law? The first formal educational system? The first tax cut? The first love song? The answers were found in excavations of ancient Sumer, a society so developed, resourceful, and enterprising that it, in a sense, created history. The book presents a cross section of the Sumerian "firsts" in all the major fields of human endeavor, including government and politics, education and literature, philosophy and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0812212762
• ISBN13: 9780812212761
• Release Date: April 1988
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

What is was like to live in ancient Sumer

I had fun reading Samuel Noah Kramer's book "History Begins at Sumer". This isn't a typical history book. It doesn't go into any detail at all about the different city-states of Sumer, who ruled what lands, where Sumer was, or even mention any dates or events of any widespread significance, etc. What this most unique book is is a collection of 39 essays on daily life taken almost exclusively from information recorded on 4,00 year old cuneiform tablets. There's an essay on a tablet, Kramer describes, where a father tries to convince his son to study hard and become a scribe, how a farmer should tend to his fields, Sumerian proverbs and wisdom, and Sumerian mythology stories. There's even an essay on sexuality. If you can imagine the Sumerians were a little less inhibited than we are about these matters! There are extensive quotations from these tablets, so you surely get the full flavor of the Sumerian experience right from the source. What most people don't realize is that there are now perhaps tens of thousands of tablets with Sumerian language essays and documentations in existence that only in the mid 1800's became translatable. This opened up a vast world of insight into a civilization that was in many ways one of the first to use written language extensively yet had vanished beneath the sands of the Mesopotamian desert in 1500 BC. It also means that unlike civilizations and cultures that came before us, the Sumerian civilization in large part failed to gets its due credit. Surprisingly, there aren't many scholars who can read these tablets and from what I understand thousands of them still sit undeciphered in the British Museum and many more lay buried and many more were recently illegally excavated, heading for antiquities auctions during the current turmoil in Iraq. Kramer was probably one of the worlds foremost scholars on these tablets and he writes beautifully and effortlessly, like you're reading an article in the New Yorker literary magazine. Lastly, although Kramer doesn't come right out and say it, I believe his passion to understand and write about the Sumerian culture is that he is probably Jewish and it appears that many of the Bible stories were taken from the Sumerians, including the flood, Eden, and a "rib" story, and Abraham was born in Ur. The Old Testament was complied somewhere between 1200 BC and 200 BC. The Sumerians wrote the same stories down perhaps over a millennium before that.

Compelling Evidence for the Origin of Modern Religion

I bought this book to further clarify the origin of the stories (myths) of the Bible -- Genesis creation story, Noah and the flood, Moses and the Law, resurrection stories, etc. This book enlightens one on this and much more. Easy and entertaining read (though serious). Fascinating to learn about the most ancient known civilization, and how its mythologists and poets and stories (as recorded on tablets) have shaped subsequent civilizations and gave rise to ancient pagan religions and our own modern religions.

39 examples of our Sumerian legacy

This book is a collection of essays written by Samuel Noah Kramer regarding various cultural "firsts" in Western history as discovered on Sumerian cuneiform tablets. Kramer's experience and prolific career as a Sumerologist lend credence to the observations and interpretations that he puts forth here. Essay topics range from anecdotal illustrations of the first recorded lullaby and the first written description of an aquarium to more profound subjects such as the first cosmology and the first heroic age. I particularly enjoyed Kramer's comparative discussion of the three "Heroic Age" cultures (Greek, Indian, Germanic) and the suggestions that this raises regarding the origin of the first Heroic Age in Sumer. Also interesting are his interpretations of literary imagery in Sumerian poetry, as well as his treatment of the extensive parallels that exist between the Sumerian literary tradition and the Bible. All in all, "History Begins at Sumer" provides a well-rounded perspective of Sumerian spirituality and culture. However, since this book is really a collection of independent, stand-alone essays, the reader may find it difficult at times to extract a unified impression of what the author was trying to express.

We are all Sumerians, whether we know it or not.

Although I've been known to grumble at Kramer's dullness, the present book, far from being dull, ought to be of real interest to many. Professor Samuel Noah Kramer was the world's leading Sumerologist, but in this book he seems to have risen above the dry academic persona we find in some of his other books and allowed his love and enthusiasm for things Sumerian to show. Basically the book sets out to explain and describe, using extensive quotations from Sumerian Literature, what Kramer took to be thirty-nine civilizational firsts of the Sumerians. Many new archaeological discoveries have been made since the 3rd revised edition of 'History Begins at Sumer' was published in 1981, and current thinking seems to be leaning towards the view that, far from beginning in Sumer, civilization first arose further East in India. But whether it first began in Sumer or in India, since the Indus script hasn't yet been deciphered, and the Indians didn't write on imperishable clay tablets anyway, we have as yet no thirty-nine Vedic Indian firsts, and perhaps should give Kramer the benefit of the doubt and enjoy his splendid book. After a brief Introduction, the thirty-nine firsts follow. Mutterings have been heard about the 'pop' overtones of the term 'firsts,' but it seems to me an interesting way of treating Sumer's history, and the book, in my opinion, is far more successful at capturing and holding one's attention than Kramer's later and more conventional study, 'The Sumerians.' Most of the chapters are centered on a Sumerian text, some quite brief and others fairly long, which Kramer envelopes with his full and interesting commentary. Often we are given a line drawing of the actual cuneiform tablet from which the text was taken, and these have a special fascination all of their own. Besides the 28 line drawings, the book is further enriched with 34 halftones - sculptures, cuneiform tablets, stelae, artefacts, archaeological sites - which greatly add to the interest of the book. Among the firsts covered are such things as: The First Schools, The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency, The First "War of Nerves," The First Bicameral Congress, First Historian, The First Case of Tax Reduction, The First Legal Precedent, The First Pharmacopoeia, The First Moral Ideals, The First Animal Fables, The First Literary Debates, The First Love Song, The First Library Catalogue, The First "Sick" Society, The First Long-Distance Champion, The First Sex Symbolism, Labor's First Victory, and so on. Many of these and other chapters are memorable, and once having read them you'll never forget them. You'll never forget them because, in fact, they are about yourself. What I mean is that one of the more important things we learn from Kramer's fascinating book is that, whether we realize it or not, we are all, in a sense, Sumerians. The patterns that were perhaps first laid down in Sumer - urbanization, monumental architecture, kingship, writing system, distinc

An anthology of "firsts" in history

We owe much of our knowledge on Ancient Sumerian civilization to Mr Samuel Kramer. As one of the specialists on Sumerian cuneiform and written culture, he traced the clay tablets of Ancient Mesopotamia in various places and brought together the parts of puzzles that belonged to very early Sumerian myths. In this legendary work, Mr Kramer presents us the "39 firsts" of history, including "The First Farmers Almanac", "The First Law Codes", "The First Noah", "The First Resurrection" and so on. The book does not follow a chronological order but presents the achievements of the Ancient Sumerians in an "item-by-item" basis. You not only learn the historical basics on Ancient Mesopotamia in various chapters of this brilliant work, but have fun by reading the fascinating original Sumerian myths, including "Inanna's voyage to the land of the dead". If you're into ancient history, this book should be on your "Top 10" list. If you need further reading from Mr Kramer, "Sumerian Mythology" may well follow the suit.