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Paul Collins is Jaleh Hearn Curator for Ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, specializing in the art and archaeology of Mesopotamia and Iran. He is the author of Assyrian Palace Sculptures (2008) and Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia (2016).
[A] stimulating new book. . . . The Sumerians, for all their doubtful status as a formal society, have a remarkable list of achievements to their credit. Besides being the world's earliest attested civilization in the fourth millennium BCE, they invented cuneiform-the world's earliest writing-and the sexagesimal system of mathematics. Their cities, such as Uruk and Ur, were the headquarters of the world's earliest city-states, with bureaucracies, legal codes, divisions of labor, and a money economy. . . . A civilization made vivid by Collins's clear and expert text. -- Andrew Robinson * Science * A highly readable, fully authoritative account of all aspects of the ways of life of the Sumerians, one of the most important peoples of the ancient world. Collins also covers the issue of the discovery and rediscovery of the Sumerians very effectively, bringing to life not just the Sumerians themselves but also the early travelers and antiquarians who first engaged with them. The book, too, is superbly illustrated. -- Roger Matthews, Professor of Near Eastern Archaeology, University of Reading
