The Sumerian World (Routledge Worlds)

Very academic text heavy and a overall wonderful book. This has helped me tremendously with research.

I am a tour guide at the Oriental Institute Museum. I told our librarian to order this book six months before it was to be published and sold. I have read about half of the essays which are very thorough yet very readable. I particularly enjoyed the essays on irrigation and the solving of the question of wether or not irrigation planning resulted in the incipient stages of civilization. I was also pleased to learn that their legal system was not overtly tough on the poor and widows, a sign that these people were not despotic.I would recommend this book to any person with at least a BA in archaeology and from what I have heard, the book answers questions that might be of use to researchers of the Sumerian archaeology, writing, culture, history, development of civilization, the legal system, the possibility that the Sumerians may have developed a government close in form to a democracy, and which leaders were thought to be deities and which not.I will incorporate the book into my tours of the museum.

I largely agree with Christopher Culver’s review, and am not qualified to judge the accuracy of the content. But I will note that the book is poorly edited. The table of figures is sadly lacking page numbers. There are frequent references to figures in other chapters, which require extensive searching. Sometimes they’re simply incorrect: map 29.1 is actually a duplicate of 0.2. The reader should instead consult map 0.1, though the intended map would presumably be more useful.The most amusing editing errors are 2036–2928 for the reign of Shu-Sin (p. 570), and “Mayan” for “Magan,” p. 592. Ironically (especially given the poor organization of her _Sumer and the Sumerians_), the worst-edited chapter would seem to be the editor’s own, with, e.g., two errors (capitalization and spurious comma) in a single sentence, the last of the Ur III section on p.457.

Thorough and informative, but not for us the hoi polloi. One chapter is so full or jargon, one marvels how many complicated words there are in the English language. Occasionally a sentence of two pops up with only ordinary words; well, nobody's perfect. Could use better illustrations.