For thousands of years, the Sumerians were a forgotten people. No book recorded their achievements; no spade unearthed their treasures. The Sumerians had passed out of history, until, in the mid-19th century, linguists studying Assyrian cuneiform writing discovered cuneiform tablets written in another language. Linguists and archaeologists alike soon began to realize that in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the Sumerians had produced the world’s first great civilization. Today, after the discovery of Sumerian buildings and their treasures, Sumerian pottery and household goods, and—most significant—tens of thousands of clay tablets containing Sumerian writings, the Sumerians […]
