The Sumerians.

• Author: Podany, Amanda H.

The Sumerians. By PAUL COLLINS. Lost Civilizations. London: REAKTION BOOKS, 2021. Pp. 214, illus. $25. [Distributed by University of Chicago Press.]

Paul Collins's latest contribution to the Lost Civilizations series, published by Reaktion Books, shares its name, The Sumerians, with a popular 1928 book by C. Leonard Woolley and an equally popular 1963 book by Samuel Noah Kramer. But whereas Kramer's book had a subtitle, Their History, Culture, and Character, Collins's book has none. If it did, it might be A Story of Ancient and Modern Myth-Making (p. 19). This is an important book, but it is very different from its namesakes, and from other surveys of the ancient Middle East, because it is not, at its core, a traditional history or even a thematic study of a period or a people. It is, instead, an examination of what has been discovered and asserted (often wrongly) about the people commonly called the Sumerians, and how the perception of their culture has changed over time. Collins discusses a great many more modern scholars and writers than individuals from ancient Iraq. This is by design and is necessary for the author's main arguments. As he notes, "[t]he Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but they have been reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past" (p. 19). The book shows how this happened.

In chapter one, "Origins," the author begins with the ancient Mesopotamians' own view of their ancient history, enshrined in the Sumerian King List. He goes on to discuss the phases of interest in the history of the ancient Middle East from the late sixteenth century of our era to the "discovery" of the Sumerians with the decipherment of the Sumerian language in the second half of the nineteenth century. The chapter ends with a "brief aside" about the cuneiform script, how it was written, and how it developed over time, which will be useful for general readers.

Chapter two, "The Sumerian Problem," begins the historiographical discussion that dominates the rest of the book, as scholars (and other writers) in each era reconsidered the Sumerians in light of the preoccupations of their own times. First comes the "acrimonious scholarly debate" that started in the mid-nineteenth century about the supposed race of the people who spoke Sumerian, given that their language was found not to be Semitic. Jules Oppert, who first coined the name Sumerian for the language, proposed (wrongly) that Sumerian was an "Aryan"...