The Sumerians by Paul Collins

The Sumerians by Paul Collins

The Sumerians are widely believed to have created the world’s earliest civilization on the fertile floodplains of southern Iraq from about 3500 to 2000 BC. They have been credited with inventions no lesser than cities, writing and the wheel, and therefore hold an ancient mirror to our own urban, literate world. But is this picture correct? Paul Collins reveals how the idea of a Sumerian people was assembled from the archaeological and textual evidence uncovered in Iraq and Syria over the last 150 years. Reconstructed through the biases of those who unearthed them, the Sumerians were never simply lost and found, but reinvented a number of times, both in antiquity and in the more recent past.

Paul Collins is Keeper of the Middle East Department at the British Museum. His books include Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia (2016) and The Assyrians (Reaktion Books, 2024).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781836392651
ISBN 10	1836392656
Title	The Sumerians
Author	Paul Collins
Series	Lost Civilizations
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Reaktion Books
Year published	2026-08-01
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.