A01=Paul Collins
ancient civilizations
antiquity
archaeology
Author_Paul Collins
bureaucracy
Category=NHC
Category=NKD
city
cuneiform
discovery
division of labor
division of labour
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
excavation
floodplains
forthcoming
history
innovation
invention
iraq
legal codes
literacy
lost
mathematics
mesopotamia
money economy
nonfiction
rediscovery
sexagesimal system
syria
technology
ur
urban
uruk
wheel
writing
Product details
- ISBN 9781836392651
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 01 Aug 2026
- Publisher: Reaktion Books
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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).
