Sumerian Mythology by Samuel Noah Kramer

I found this book in a Toronto “little free library” (little free bookshop, ammaright???) a few years ago and picked it up as potentially of interest.

I’d heard of the Sumerians – who hasn’t? – and though I knew little of them other than that they were an ancient civilisation that was destroyed (or destroyed itself?) many millennia ago, despite having been a complex society with more in common with the contemporary world than many of the variously arranged human groupings of the many centuries since it ended (that isn’t necessarily a compliment (it isn’t a compliment: this is a bad bad bad way to run a society and I hate it here so much so much so much)).

The Sumerians existed a long, long, time ago: before the Romans and the Etruscans and the Greeks, before the Canaanites and the Babylonians and the French: long ago, but not unknowably long ago, because the Sumerians did something that plenty of much later historical groups didn’t do, and they left an extensive written record of their time…

Written records, preserved for four thousand years on the numerous stone tablets scattered about the ruins and remains of their never fully re-built-over empire, giving historians and linguists and anthropologists a direct route to the deeply ancient past…

Sumerian mythology and history comes to us direct, it isn’t primarily known through later edits and reimaginings and recordings – as is the mythology of countless other ancient societies, especially those that have been categorised as “religious” rather than “mythological”: those texts have been written and rewritten and translated and detranslated and retranslated more times than it’s possible to certainly know.

With so many millennia of disinterest in Sumerian writing, these texts, then, arrived to the late Victorian/early 20th century colonial academic types as if a direct conduit to an ancient past…

Time capsules rather than documents, damaged but far from decomposed consciousnesses…

The vast majority, though (at least according to the translator-scholar and writer of this monograph, Samuel Noah Kramer), of all extant Sumerian texts are legal documents: contracts and ledgers and agreements and IOUs and legal records and minutes and so on… Beyond this are the historical documents and the personal letters and communications, and then an even tinier portion fall into Kramer’s area of interest: myths.

This monograph (am I using that word correctly?) is a consideration of the mythologies of Sumeria as had been discovered and translated by the time of Kramer’s first edition of this book (1944), plus additional notes and an additional preface tacked on to subsequent editions (1961 and 1972) to bring the details right bang up to date (for then) based on subsequent archeological discoveries as well as changes in contextual understanding bolstered by developments in linguistics as well as more historians having translated more of the incredibly large (though ultimately finite) collection of extant Sumerian texts. I should have made that into sentences.)

Kramer explores, quickly (and with a presumption of more knowledge than I have retained from episode 8 of Fall of Civilizations Podcast) the history of the Sumerians (the timelines of which have shifted by a couple of hundred years between first and later editions of Sumerian Mythology), before sketching out the history of research and scholarship on this civilisation and its writings. The reader learns a bit about key archeological sites, about other key scholars/translators, and also about which institutions have ended up with massive collections of Sumerian artifacts and why. (Hint: it’s not because they were local.)

After all this, we then get descriptions of how the myths have been put together (literally, in some cases, scholars completing stories by combining parts of tablets jigsaw-like after rediscovering them in different museums), when and where fragments and lines and sections were found and collated and first translated, and then Kramer offersr summaries of the plots of the myths and some excerpts of translations of the verse.

Honestly, the narratives aren’t much to get excited over (Charlaine Harris they ain’t), though in spite of the formalised repetition favoured by Sumerian poets and Kramer’s rarely knee-trembling poetic translations, some of the little snippets of poems have great images, great moments, great bursts.

What it means then – and, yes, it’s trite to say but I am trite and so are you, probably – one thing Sumerian Mythology does document (besides the theft-loving project of anthropology) is to remind those of us who need reminding (like me, like me, it’s always me I’m talking about when I kinda generalise in a weird way) that humanity is fucking ancient and we’re basically all the same and we’ve been basically all the same for thousands and thousands of years… We all feel lust and rage and regret and hunger, we all feel low and high and needy and confused, we all feel like the world has barely begun but it’s already ending, we all feel like there’s just too much time but never enough…

It’s a weird book to have read, yes, but also one I would weirdly don’t not recommend. Maybe more melancholic for me because it reminded me of all the esoteric early Christian texts I read in 2013-2014 when I researched and wrote a sadly (happily?) unpublished hypersexual novel about the life of John the Baptist.

It’s an academic history book rather than a pop history one, and though I’ve read a few of these and sometimes found them disappointingly dry and/or inconsistent, this one maintains a tone and a focus throughout, and I really think I kinda liked it!

Buy direct from University of Pennsylvania Press here

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If you like good books and you haven’t already done so, you really should click here to get yourself a copy of my 2020 masterpiece, the pleasure of regret. And I should really stop with all this blogging and write something publishable…