Sumer and the Sumerians

The scholarly nature of this book is excellent and intellectually honest. When inferences about happenings or interpretations arose, the author was quick to withhold attribution of accuracy. The breadth and depth of this work is amazing, and its readability good. He places Sumeria in the context of Mesopotamian history, which renders things easier to understand. His focus includes, among other things, archaeology, history, funerary rites, settlement and family structure, governing patterns, social status, agriculture, overall geographical issues and borders, and literary accommplishments. Excellent text and/or review of this important period of civilization.

Another good reference book to add to my library.

I enjoyed this book as an intro to a more detailed look at the Sumerians through archeology. It is not really a general or historical overview. Some quality of life improvements this book could use are more/better maps, some sort of timeline, and a king list.

Great!!!

The book is great, but it took forever to get here.

As other reviewers have mentioned this book is for university student archeologists. If you a regular Joe who wants to learn about ancient Sumer and it's literature, look elsewhere.Books are totally obsolete as a tool for learning. Computers and HTML (hypertext markup language) have been around for decades and provide a vastly superior method for knowledge transference.The only reason we still have books for learning is because Authors and Publishers are still trying to cling to an old profit-making paradigm in which distribution can be controlled and every copy will only be obtained for a fee.I frequently find myself wishing for the quick reference capability of hypertext to remind myself of where a particular region, city, geographic feature etc. is located on a map or to link to a definition of a word or other locations where the word is used in the book. So many wonderful features of hypertext!!!The maps included in the book often seem to use a randomly selected mixture of different city names from modern to ancient across multiple time frames with little regard to whether they match the nearby associated text. Hypertext would allow you to click on a name and instantly see it on a pop-up map!!! Sweet mother of immaculate saint Rosary cross the mercy blah blah, that's freakin' awesome! How are we still using books for crap's sake? OK, fiction novels, I'll let you have that.The other problem with books is that every person's mind works differently. An author will compose a book in a way that jibes with their own unique brain function--the way in which they would prefer the content to be presented if THEY were the reader. For that reason, as a method of knowledge transference, a book will vary greatly in it's effectiveness from one reader to another.I would much prefer that the book be divided into time periods and that each time period be dealt with one by one in order from oldest to youngest and then each time period section be divided into the various topics of (social organization, architecture, town-planning etc.) That how my brain likes things. I just don't have enough extra brain-power to re-organize an entire book of scatter-shot information in my head.

I agree with some of the other reviewers that it's not clear who, if anyone, this book is intended for. I've only gotten through the first two chapters, but the poor organization means that the book is only fully comprehensible by those who don't need it. A crucial point in expository writing is to define your terms when you first use them, especially in a book for "students beginning to study the archeology and history of the ancient Near East." The author introduces the discussion of the crucial Uruk archeological period at the beginning of chapter 2 by saying that it "was a long one...," without either saying what its evidentiary meaning is, or (until much later) what its likely timeframe was. Admittedly there are very large error bars on the chronology; presenting those along with the various plausible dates is precisely the duty of the author of a book for beginning students. Even the relative chronology of the various archeological periods is poorly presented; even a simple introductory sentence along the lines of "The chief archeological periods, in approximate order, are..." would have been better than presenting them piecemeal.The author's evidence-based presentation isn't even a consistent privileging of epistemology over comprehensibility. When we come to politics ("It is clear that the priesthood too could exercise considerable control..." on page 31), it seems clear that this has to be based on written evidence, but there has been no preceding mention of this, much less a discussion of the evidence and its limitations. (For a book on a people most notable for the invention of writing and a civilization relying on it, this seems an astonishing choice.)Another key duty of an author, though I admit that this one is less often honored, is to ensure that a map being discussed actually labels all the place names mentioned. This is particularly painful for map 2, where most of the discussion is of places not labelled, e.g., the Taurus and Zagros mountains, Jezirah ("the former" is too ambiguous to be helpful), and Samarra, among many others.