The Sumerians: Lost Civilizations

Lost Civilizations

by Paul Collins

The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world’s earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BCE. They have been credited with the invention of nothing less than cities, writing, and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our own urban, literate world. But is this picture correct? Paul Collins reveals how the idea of a Sumerian people was assembled from the archaeological and textual evidence uncovered in Iraq and Syria over the last one hundred fifty years. Reconstructed through the biases of those who unearthed them, the Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past.

Genres: History, Ancient History, Nonfiction, Archaeology, 21st Century

208 pages, Hardcover

Published March 22, 2021

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Paul Collins is Curator of later Mesopotamian collections, Department of the Middle East, The British Museum.

Reviews

[Ali Di · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Those who lie beneath the soil of Mesopotamia are hunger for their stories to be retold."
- Anonymous

The Lost Civilizations Series
The book is part of a series published by the University of Chicago Press focused on highlighting influential ancient societies that rose and fell throughout history. This volume on the Sumerians delves into a culture that was mostly unknown until relatively recently. The excavation of ancient mounds and long-buried cities in Southern Iraq starting in the mid-19th century led to the revelation of the Sumerians as one of the earliest advanced civilizations on record.

How the Auture Looks at The Subject
Collins structures his book in an interesting way, framing the narrative around the archaeological discoveries and shifting perspectives on Sumerian society over the past 150 years. Rather than simply recounting a straightforward history of the Sumerian people, Collins critically analyzes how the prevailing theories and assumptions about the Sumerians have changed over time. He argues that in many ways, our conception of the Sumerians says more about the scholars studying them across different eras than it does about the actual historic reality of these ancient people.

The book's central idea is that after extensive archaeology and academic investigation into the Sumerians, our knowledge remains fragmented. Collins suggests mainstream interpretations may have distorted the true nature of Sumerian society by trying to cast it as a monolithic and isolated culture.

Book's Structure
Collins organizes his study into sections that construct his argument. It begins by revisiting initial archaeological finds in the 1800s that unveiled Sumerian traces in Mesopotamia. Next, he delves into deciphering cuneiform on clay tablets, revealing Sumerian language and writings.

One section explores how early Assyriologists saw Sumerians as a distinct ethnic group. Collins challenges this, referencing scholars who propose Sumerians as a blend of cultures, influenced by neighbors like the Akkadians.

Later, the book portrays a more intricate Sumerian society, due to improved excavations and historical insight.

History of Sumerian Excavations & Decipherment of Cuneiform
Collins provides a compelling overview of how ancient Sumer was gradually unearthed and deciphered after centuries of being virtually unknown. The first documented excavations of Sumerian sites like Sippar, Kish and Uruk began in the 1840s and 1850s. However, these early digs were often haphazard, focused more on finding monumental architecture and artifacts to take back to Europe rather than systematically studying sites.

Pioneering steps were taken in deciphering the unfamiliar cuneiform script on recovered clay tablets and monuments throughout the late 19th century. Scholars like Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson made breakthroughs in understanding the symbols and grammatical structure of the long dead Akkadian and Sumerian languages preserved in cuneiform. This allowed the translation of early written works like the Epic of Gilgamesh that shed light on Sumerian culture and beliefs.

Yet Collins notes that even early on, there were debates around whether Sumerian represented a distinct language isolate or just a prestigious written idiom, while Akkadian functioned as the common spoken language. This foreshadowed later disagreements about whether the Sumerians truly represented a defined, cohesive ethnic group.

Questioning Monolithic Portrayals of Sumerian Society
According to Collins, early Assyriologists molded perceptions of the Sumerians in a way that conformed with racial thought and nationalism of the day. Their theories portrayed the Sumerians as an isolated, homogeneous population ethnically and culturally distinct from surrounding peoples in the ancient Near East. The Sumerians were depicted almost as proto-Europeans, painted with a broad brush as the inventors of urban civilization, writing, science and high culture later passed down the line.

But Collins argues more recent archaeology and scholarship demonstrates flaws in this monolithic view of Sumerian society. For one, cuneiform records mention groups like the Martu (Amorites) and Subiru who moved around the broader region. It is unclear if these groups should be thought of as entirely outside invaders or just mobile components within the native population. The traditional view also downplays complex interactions and influence between the Sumerians and neighboring cultures like the Akkadians and Elamites.

Some argue the linguistic label "Sumerian" does not necessarily denote a unified ethnic identity. Collins thinks assumptions about the Sumerians tell us more about the Eurocentric worldview of early scholars seeking prestigious ancestors than the murky on-the-ground realities in antiquity. He advocates for a more skeptical, nuanced analysis when dealing with fragmented evidence about the ancient world.

Enduring Legacy of Sumerian Civilization
Regardless of debates around the concept of a distinct Sumerian identity, Collins stresses that the cultural florescence in ancient southern Mesopotamia undeniably represents a crucible of many innovations in human civilization. Breakthroughs like the wheel, sailboats, plow agriculture, irrigation systems and early forms of writing and literature originated with the resourceful inhabitants of cities like Uruk, Ur and Lagash.

The longevity of cuneiform writing in multiple languages across Mesopotamia and beyond attests to the strong legacy of systems first developed by the Sumerians. Collins praises the ingenuity and creativity of the Sumerian people who crafted beautiful works of art, profound literature and complex bureaucratic structures to administer their cities and farms. Modern scholars still struggle to fully comprehend Sumerian advances in math, astronomy and accounting.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Book
Positive
• Concise intro to Sumerian civilization, great for general readers
• Tracks changing academic views on the Sumerians
• Challenges traditional ideas on Sumerian society
• Highlights lasting value of Sumerian accomplishments despite identity debates

Negative
• More visuals like maps and photos could enhance it
• Limited info on daily life in Sumerian cities
• Expand on biases in early scholarship
• Sumerian origins and ethnicity questions remain ambiguous

[Carlos Wang · Rating 4 out of 5]

作者用了知識考古學的概念，還有一些新歷史主義的邏輯來反思。(就是“一切史皆當代史”，“歷史是任人塗抹的小姑娘”這種論調)
書中主要帶著讀者回顧了蘇美爾跟美索不達米亞的考古經過，以及一些研究成果，最後從告訴讀者結論：或許根本不存在所謂的“蘇美爾文明”，在遠古，應該是一個“蘇美爾的文明”，它是在特別的區域內由一群人建構與共享的文明體系，而不是專屬於某個特定族群的特定文明。而且它未必消亡，只是轉變了型態而已。

蠻有意思的。
其實就像華夏文明一樣，即便不談進入二十世紀，到了清末，這塊土地上的文明跟春秋戰國還有幾分相似？有，但已經桃花依舊，人面全非了。

[Chris Jaffe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a nice overview that's as least as much a history of how we know about the Sumerians as much as it is a history of the Sumerians. The book's organization centers on archeological knowledge/discoveries of the ancient civilization. So we begin in the 19th century looking back at olden times, and then progress throughout the last 200 years as we learn more and more of them. This is common in books of way back ancients: you focus on the archeology because so little is really precisely known. But it's more than that in this book - it actually relates to Collins's main thesis. He argues that we always look at the Sumerians and invent them in our own image. They are what we want them to be, and as we change over time, so does how we view the Sumerians. Early on, it was the in-thing to wonder about their racial status, seeing them as one single distinctive race, because that's how we saw all life and peoples. We take a more nuanced view of life now, so we take a more nuanced view of the Sumerians.

Late in the book you get a chapter - a long one, nearly one-fourth of the entire book - where you go over the Sumerians themselves. By this time, it's mostly a refresher as most of the points have already been gone over. The Sumerians began in the marshes of Iraq, and formed cities. Writing was invented in Uruk, probably by one person. They formed city-states, but eventually were conquered by Sargon, whose Semitic-speaking empire was from the northern part of Mesopotamia. There was some back and forths, and a later era where Ur was the main power. But Elamites were on the rise in what's now Iran and Babylon grew in the north. Most of all, Sumerians died out as a first language, only surviving as an official language of scribes. (He never makes a comparison to Latin in Medievel Europe, but that's what it sounded like to me). Sumerian culture became subsumed by others, and the last known cunieform inscription came in 75 AD, as that was the langauge of the lost Sumerian language. That said, even in its prime, Sumeria was likely a place of many langauges, as an early list of kings show a bunch of kings with Sumerian names. Thus the old notion of Sumeria as a single people/race was always wrong.

It's one of the best books I've read about way back when times. I gave it four stars, but in writing this review, I may have convinced myself to kick it up to five stars out of five.

[Flash Sheridan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I understand the ideological requirement that the author, a curator at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, proclaim of the Sumerians that “they may never have existed, at least not as a distinct ethno-linguistic population.” That would have excused writing an incorrect book, but not such a bad book. His favorite piece of evidence seems to be that Queen Pu-abi, the wife of a Sumerian king, was probably Akkadian. There were of course complex and fascinating interactions between Sumerian and Akkadian culture(s), with interesting parallels with Greece and Rome. One wonders if Professor Collins would deny the ethnic differences between Greeks and Romans if he could get away with it, or perhaps have denied Egyptian (or perhaps Macedonian) ethnicity given Cleopatra’s ancestry.

     Since Professor Collins didn’t want to write about the most interesting people in recorded history, or at least the people who began it, he spends excessive time denouncing modern European racism and imperialism (which one would have thought superfluous in the context), and too little on the advertised subject of the book. He footnotes Said’s notorious (and irrelevant) _Orientalism_ several times, but in his key denial that the Sumerian term (literally “the black-headed people”) normally translated as “Sumerian” does not actually mean “Sumerian,” he provides no footnote, much less a discussion of the counter-argument. The digressions mean that what should have been the bulk of the book, from chapter 5, “The First Writing,” to the ritual denunciation of the second Iraq war (beginning of the second section of Chapter 6) are far too hurried. The University of Chicago has a reputation for intellectual freedom; I hope they can find someone to write a second edition of this book who actually wants to write a book about the Sumerians.

[Stan Prager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of: The Sumerians: Lost Civilizations, by Paul Collins
by Stan Prager (1-18-23)

Reading the “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” in its entirety rekindled a long dormant interest in the Sumerians, the ancient Mesopotamian people that my school textbooks once boldly proclaimed as inventors not only of the written word, but of civilization itself! One of the pleasures of having a fine home library stocked with eclectic works is that there is frequently a volume near at hand to suit such inclinations, and in this case I turned to a relatively recent acquisition, The Sumerians, a fascinating and extremely well-written—if decidedly controversial—contribution to the Lost Civilizations series, by Paul Collins.
“The Epic of Gilgamesh” is, of course, the world’s oldest literary work: the earliest record of the five poems that form the heart of the epic were carved into Sumerian clay tablets that date back to 2100 BCE, and relate the exploits of the eponymous Gilgamesh, an actual historic king of the Mesopotamian city state Uruk circa 2750 BCE who later became the stuff of heroic legend. Most famously, a portion of the epic recounts a flood narrative nearly identical to the one reported in Genesis, making it the earliest reference to the Near East flood myth held in common by the later Abrahamic religions.
Uruk was just one of a number of remarkable city states—along with Eridu, Ur, and Kish—that formed urban and agricultural hubs between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is today southern Iraq, between approximately 3500-2000 BCE, at a time when the Persian Gulf extended much further north, putting these cities very near the coast. Some archaeologists also placed “Ur of the Chaldees,” the city in the Hebrew Bible noted as the birthplace of the Israelite patriarch Abraham, in this vicinity, reinforcing the Biblical flood connection. A common culture that boasted the earliest system of writing that recorded in cuneiform script a language isolate unrelated to others, advances in mathematics that utilized a sexagesimal system, and the invention of both the wheel and the plow came to be attributed to these mysterious non-Semitic people, dubbed the Sumerians.
But who were the Sumerians? They were completely unknown, notes the author, until archaeologists stumbled upon the ruins of their forgotten cities about 150 years ago. Collins, who currently is Curator for Ancient Near East, Ashmolean Museum, at University of Oxford, fittingly opens his work with the baked clay artifact known as a “prism” inscribed with the so-called Sumerian King List, circa 1800 BCE, currently housed in the Ashmolean Museum. The opening passage of the book is also the first lines of the Sumerian King List: “After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridu. In Eridu, Alulim became king; He ruled for 28,800 years.” Heady stuff.
“It is not history as we would understand it,” argues Collins, “but a combination of myth, legend and historical information.” This serves as a perfect metaphor for Collins’s thesis, which is that after a century and a half of archaeology and scholarship, we know less about the Sumerians—if such a structured, well-defined common culture ever even existed—and far more about the sometimes-spurious conclusions and even outright fictions that successive generations of academics and observers have attached to these ancient peoples.
Thus, Collins raises two separate if perhaps related issues that both independently and in tandem spark controversy. The first is the question of whether the Sumerians ever existed as a distinct culture, or whether—as the author suggests—scholars may have somehow mistakenly woven a misleading tapestry out of scraps and threads in the archaeological record representing a variety of inhabitants within a shared geography with material cultures that while overlapping were never of a single fabric? The second is how deeply woven into that same tapestry are distortions—some intended and others inadvertent—tailored to interpretations fraught with the biases of excavators and researchers determined to locate the Sumerians as uber-ancestors central to the myth of Western Civilization that tends to dominate the historiography? And, of course, if there is merit to the former, was it entirely the product of the latter, or were other factors involved?
I personally lack both the expertise and the qualifications to weigh in on the first matter, especially given that its author’s credentials include not only an association with Oxford’s School of Archaeology, but also as the Chair of the British Institute for the Study of Iraq. Still, I will note in this regard that he makes many thought-provoking and salient points. As to the second, Collins is quite persuasive, and here great authority on the part of the reader is not nearly as requisite.
Nineteenth century explorers and archaeologists—as well as their early twentieth century successors—were often drawn to this Middle Eastern milieu in a quest for concordance between Biblical references and excavations, which bred distortions in outcomes and interpretation. At the same time, a conviction that race and civilization were inextricably linked—to be clear, the “white race” and “Western Civilization”—determined that what was perceived as “advanced” was ordained at the outset for association with “the West.” We know that the leading thinkers of the Renaissance rediscovered the Greeks and Romans as their cultural and intellectual forebears, with at least some measure of justification, but later far more tenuous links were drawn to ancient Egypt—and, of course, later still, to Babylon and Sumer. Misrepresentations, deliberate or not, were exacerbated by the fact that the standards of professionalism characteristic to today’s archaeology were either primitive or nonexistent.
None of this should be news to students of history who have observed how the latest historiography has frequently discredited interpretations long taken for granted—something I have witnessed firsthand as a dramatic work in progress in studies of the American Civil War in recent decades: notably, although slavery was central to the cause of secession and war, for more than a century African Americans were essentially erased from the textbooks and barely acknowledged other than at the very periphery of the conflict, in what was euphemistically constructed as a sectional struggle among white men, north and south. It was a lie, but a lie that sold very well for a very long time, and still clings to those invested in what has come to called “Lost Cause” mythology.
But yet it remains surprising, as Collins underscores, that what should long have been second-guessed about Sumer remains integral to far too much of what remains current thinking. Whether the Sumerians are indeed a distinct culture or not, should those peoples more than five millennia removed from us remain artificially attached to what we pronounce Western Civilization? Probably not. And while we certainly recognize today that race is an artificial construct that relates zero information of importance about a people, ancient or modern, we can reasonably guess with some confidence that those indigenous to southern Iraq in 3500 BCE probably did not have the pale skin of a native of, say, Norway. We can rightfully assert that the people we call the Sumerians were responsible for extraordinary achievements that were later passed down to other cultures that followed, but an attempt to draw some kind of line from Sumer to Enlightenment-age Europe is shaky, at best.
As such, Collins’s book gives focus to what we have come to believe about the Sumerians, and why we should challenge that. I previously read (and reviewed) Egypt by Christina Riggs, another book in the Lost Civilizations series, which is preoccupied with how ancient Egypt has resonated for those who walked in its shadows, from Roman tourists to Napoleon’s troops to modern admirers, even if that vision little resembles its historic basis. Collins takes a similar tack but devotes far more attention to parsing out in greater detail exactly what is really known about the Sumerians and what we tend to collectively assume that we know. Of course, Sumer is far less familiar to a wider audience, and it lacks the romantic appeal of Egypt—there is no imagined exotic beauty like Cleopatra, only the blur of the distant god-king Gilgamesh, the Noah without the ark—so the Sumerians come up far more rarely in conversation, and provoke far less strong feelings, one way or the other.
The Sumerians is a an accessible read for the non-specialist, and there are plenty of illustrations to enhance the text. Like other authors in the Lost Civilizations series, Collins deserves much credit for articulating sometimes arcane material in a manner that suits both a scholarly and a popular audience, which is by no means an easy achievement. If you are looking for an outstanding introduction to these ancient people that is neither too esoteric nor dumbed-down, I highly recommend this volume.


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Review of: The Sumerians: Lost Civilizations, by Paul Collins https://regarp.com/2023/01/18/the-sum...

You can examine the Sumerian King List Prism at the Ashmolean Museum online here:
https://www.ashmolean.org/sumerian-ki...

I reviewed “The Epic of Gilgamesh” here:

Review of: Gilgamesh: A New English Version, by Stephen Mitchell https://regarp.com/2018/03/31/review-...


I reviewed other volumes in the Lost Civilizations series here:

Review of: The Indus: Lost Civilizations, by Andrew Robinson https://regarp.com/2017/06/23/review-...

Review of: Egypt: Lost Civilizations, by Christina Riggs https://regarp.com/2019/04/13/review-...

Review of: The Etruscans: Lost Civilizations, by Lucy Shipley https://regarp.com/2020/11/22/review-...

[Sanjay Prabhakar · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just when you think Collins is going to shift the focus from 19th and 20th century archaeologists (and their moral, ideological, and technical inadequacies) to the ostensible subject of the book, he simply doesn't, apparently putting a higher premium on shitting on his predecessors in the field than describing any sites or models in detail. Important sites and artefacts seem to be mentioned primarily in order to highlight their misuse.

Yes, I get it, the history of the development of the field really matters. The archaeologist on the blurb, Roger Matthews, makes this amply clear in his Archaeology of Mesopotamia, Theories and Approaches. But Collins is taking the piss.

His obsession with this reflexive approach reaches comical levels, reminscent of Nabokov's mad Charles Kinbote, in the following sentence: 'At the very time when Adolf Hitler's armies were invading Poland, Jacobsen published his reconstruction of the Sumerian King List.' I actually laughed when I read this.

[Piet van den Berg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book about one of the oldest civilizations that mostly lived in southern Mesopotamia. The book had a narrative that followed research into the Sumerians throughout the centuries (mostly 19th and 20th). I liked this approach in principle: we know so little about this civilization, and much of our perspective on them has been shaped through the cultural lenses of the times in which discoveries have been made. The author in the end even concludes that it is unclear that the Sumerians ever existed - that they have largely been a product of a patchwork of perceptions biased by the times. This to me was a valuable insight that the book, through its structure, carefully builds up. It's also amazing to me how little we know about this time, which stretches for millennia and saw many complexities in human organization. But of course it also a bit spellbreaking - it's a book that dispells illusions of knowledge and insight. This left me a bit disappointed, but that's not the fault of the author of course.

[Ada Pieńkowska · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book, but not on the Sumerians themselves, but on how modern scholars have rediscovered them and how modern ideas influence how we view history. I am also not entirely sure what the last chapter is about. It is quite obvious the Sumerians didn't exist as a separate nation in the modern sense, the very idea of nation is pretty recent after all. Because elsewhere, he disregards the idea that Sumerian was just a scholarly language, not used by the wider population. Does he oppose the dichotomy between Sumerians and Semites? If so, the last chapter made that point more confusing.

[Daniel Gould · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that tends to focus on the story of the archaeological discovery of the Sumerians and the artifacts we have to describe them, rather than trying to take you all the way back to their time. Still great and enlightening, and generally very well written. You'll learn about all the major discoveries and finds and how they changed our understanding of who the people we now call Sumerians actually were.

[Kevin Gross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well written and organized, lavishly (as they say...) illustrated. Collins does an excellent job of describing both the history of the Sumerians as well as the history of the history. He makes the point that there is uncertainty as to what exactly "Sumer" was: a distinct ethnic group, a civilization, a language, or? It is a good thing that this sort of analysis in the present time can leave somewhat open such questions, rather than pushing, often implicitly, hypothesis as fact.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book. Had a vague recollection of “Sumerians” as the founders of civilization. This book is a major update of information. Highly recommend it to anyone curious about the time people began to live collectively. I didn’t realize “race” has no DNA/biological basis. Written in interesting and comfortable terms that won’t overwhelm the average reader. A good book.

[Sonny · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was there a civilization of the Sumerians, a separate group of people? Or was there a civilization of Sumer, a geographical area of Mesopotamia? This book looks at the evidence and talks about the people and the evidence discovered.

[Nigel Thornton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is actually a history of Mesopotamian archaeology which concludes that there probably was no such thing as the Sumerians.

[Roberto Arias · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book started with a 2 star rating, until it catch me. Now I think it is an extraordinary book, waking up curiosity in me. The end of the book just blew my mind. Loved it!

[Alexander Westerlund · Rating 4 out of 5]

En extremt bra introduktion till hur man sett på sumererna genom tiderna. Men man borde läsa mer böcker om mesopotamien för att få en bild över hur deras samhället och religion såg ut.

[Lauren Noel · Rating 2 out of 5]

My fault for not realizing this is more of a deep dive into how the sumerians have been studied versus a history of the sumerians themselves

[FirinneSolas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating!

[Hans · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disappointing
More a history of archeology than a history of sumerians.