Samuel Noah Kramer – författare

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 ethics, law and justice, agriculture and medicine, even love and family.History Begins at Sumer is the classic account of the achievements of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq during the third millennium B.C. They were the developers of the cuneiform system of writing, perhaps their greatest contribution to civilization, which allowed laws and literature to be recorded for the first time.

From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration by Samuel Noah Kramer offers modern readers a rare window into the world’s earliest recorded literature. Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on Sumerian civilization, surveys a century of philological and archaeological work that has recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from sites such as Nippur, Ur, and Kish. These texts—myths, hymns, laments, disputations, and proverbs—preserve a literary culture nearly four millennia old. The volume moves from the painstaking story of how this forgotten corpus was reconstructed to close readings of works that illuminate Sumerian ideas of creation, kingship, and divine femininity.Structured in three thematic parts, the book examines Sumerian cosmogony, highlighting how ancient poets envisioned the separation of heaven and earth and the creation of humankind. Kramer then turns to royal hymns, showing how they model the “perfect man” through exaltation of kings such as Shulgi. Finally, he foregrounds the adoration of goddesses like Inanna, underscoring Sumer’s distinctive portrayal of liberated female divinity. Richly documented and accessible, this study bridges philology, literary history, and comparative religion, making the oldest poetry in human history newly legible for scholars of the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration by Samuel Noah Kramer offers modern readers a rare window into the world’s earliest recorded literature. Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on Sumerian civilization, surveys a century of philological and archaeological work that has recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from sites such as Nippur, Ur, and Kish. These texts—myths, hymns, laments, disputations, and proverbs—preserve a literary culture nearly four millennia old. The volume moves from the painstaking story of how this forgotten corpus was reconstructed to close readings of works that illuminate Sumerian ideas of creation, kingship, and divine femininity.Structured in three thematic parts, the book examines Sumerian cosmogony, highlighting how ancient poets envisioned the separation of heaven and earth and the creation of humankind. Kramer then turns to royal hymns, showing how they model the “perfect man” through exaltation of kings such as Shulgi. Finally, he foregrounds the adoration of goddesses like Inanna, underscoring Sumer’s distinctive portrayal of liberated female divinity. Richly documented and accessible, this study bridges philology, literary history, and comparative religion, making the oldest poetry in human history newly legible for scholars of the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

Sumerian Mythology Revised Edition Samuel Noah Kramer "A real addition to the body of world mythology."--American Anthropologist "No people has contributed more to the culture of mankind than the Sumerians, and yet it has been only in recent years that our knowledge of them has become at all accurate or extensive. [This book is] our first authoritative sketch of the great myths of the Sumerians, their myths of origins, of creation, the nether world, and the deluge. The book . . . makes entrancing reading and for the general reader it opens up a whole new vista undreamed of before."--Theophile J. Meek Samuel Noah Kramer was Clark Research Professor Emeritus of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was also Curator Emeritus of the Tablet Collections. 1998 184 pages 5 1/4 x 8 23 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-1047-7 Paper $14.95s 10.00 World Rights History"