Product Description

Book Description:

"The Sumerians were a non-Semitic, non-Indo-European people who lived in southern Babylonia from 4000-3000 B.C.E. They invented cunieform writing, and their spiritual beliefs influenced all successive Near Eastern religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. They produced an extensive body of literature, among the oldest in the world. Samuel Noah Kramer spent most of his life studying this literature, by piecing together clay tablets in far-flung museums. This short work gives translations or summaries of the most important Sumerian myths." (Quote from sacred-texts.com)

Table of Contents:

Publisher’s Preface; Preface; Introduction; The Scope And Significance Of Sumerian Mythology; Myths Of Origins ; Myths Of Kur; Miscellaneous Myths; References And Notes; Supplementary Notes; Endnotes

About the Publisher:

Forgotten Books is a publisher of historical writings, such as: Philosophy, Classics, Science, Religion, Esoteric and Mythology. www.forgottenbooks.org

Forgotten Books is about sharing information, not about making money. All books are priced at wholesale prices. We are also the only publisher we know of to print in large sans-serif font, which is proven to make the text easier to read and put less strain on your eyes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121007 in Books
• Published on: 2007-11-12
• Released on: 2007-12-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 195 pages

About the Author
About the Author:

"Kramer was born in 1897 in the Ukraine. In 1905 as a result of the anti-Semitic pogroms of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, his family emigrated to Philadelphia, where his father established a Hebrew school. After graduating from high school and obtaining a bachelor's degree, Kramer tried a variety of occupations, including teaching in his father's school, becoming a writer and becoming a business man.

He later stated in his autobiography, concerning the time when he began to approach the age of thirty, still without a career: "Finally it came to me that I might well go back to my beginnings and try to utilize the Hebrew learning on which I had spent so much of my youth, and relate it in some way to an academic future." [citation needed]

He then enrolled at Dropsie College of Philadelphia for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, and became passionately interested in Egyptology. He then transferred to the Oriental Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania, working work with "the brilliant young Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, who was to become one of the world's leading figures in Near Eastern Studies."[citation needed] Speiser was trying to decipher cuneiform tablets of the Late Bronze Age dating from about 1300 BC; it was now that Kramer began his life-long work in understanding the cuneiform writing system.

Kramer earned his Ph.D. in 1929, and was famous for assembling tablets recounting single stories that had been distributed between different institutions around the world. He retired from formal academic life in 1968, but remained very active throughout his post-retirement years.

In his autobiography, published in 1986 he sums up his accomplishments as follows: "First, and most important, is the role I played in the recovery, restoration, and resurrection of Sumerian literature, or at least of a representative cross section . . . Through my efforts several thousand Sumerian literary tablets and fragments have been made available to cuneiformists, a basic reservoir of unadulterated data that will endure for many decades to come. Second, I endeavored . . . to make available reasonably reliable translations of many of these documents to the academic community, and especially to the anthropologist, historian, and humanist. quot; (Quote from wikipedia.org)

Customer Reviews

nice little overview
This book was written a while ago and it is a very academic bit of work. This isn't a story book based on ancient myths, it is an attempt to put together an overview of Sumerian mythology from fragmented cuneiform tablets. The source material is reference throughout, you find both pictures and drawings of the tablets along with transliterations and translations. Then and only then the author goes on to explain what the quoted material indicates about the myth. Excellent, thorough text.