I'm a pretty big nut when it comes to Sumerian gods and goddesses, so this book was a no brainer. I also have "Inanna: Lady of the Largest Heart," which I would highly reccommend in addition to this book for those who want to learn more about Inanna and Sumeria.
This is mostly a collection of short hymns to Inanna, and show her gentle side. Some of the hymns are rather explicit in their descriptions of sex, something kind of out of character for a goddess of love (and of war, let's not forget!). A lot of the poems are really heartwarming, for lack of a better term. I'd actually read some of these to my girlfriend for "romantic poetry," and we both enjoyed them (even though she isn't really into the Sumerian stuff).
There are a lot of copies of the ancient Sumerian tablets and images of Inanna, which will really help you get a clear picture of her.
The second half of the book is information about Inanna and Sumeria, not exactly really interesting for me, but well written. This would be the best book to pick up for those interested in Inanna, then check out "Lady of the Largest Heart."

Diane Wolkenstein revives ancient poetry that reminds us of a Goddess tradition, long lost to the Western world. In conjunction with Samuel Noah Kramer, a noted scholar on Sumer, she works with the subleties and ambiguities of the texts to reveal experiences long ago pressed into clay and forgotten.

This book is a collection of stories & hymns, translated from the cuneiform by Kramer. Wolkenstein, an expert in folktales, mythology, & storytelling, worked with his translations to craft an essence of the myths that reads coherently; confronting the reader with stories that are at once archaic and contemporary.

Numerous relief images from ancient Sumer enhance the "otherness" of the text. Rhythms and repetitive lineation loudly proclaim the exotic nature of this sacred poetry. And yet, at the heart of these stories, lie essential & archetypal material, which underlies the lives of each of us. I like this feature of the book best--I can read these ancient hymns and find a resonance within my modern soul. Wolkenstein and Kramer have well accomplished what they set out to do.

One notable feature of this poetry is the erotic content. Whether veiled in metaphor:

"At the king's lap stood the rising cedar."

or explicit:

"As for me, Inanna, / Who will plow my vulva? / Who will plow my high field? / Who will plow my wet ground?"

this erotic sacred literature of a vanished people stands in stark contrast to the purified verses of the canonical Judeo-Christian scriptures. Long before religion villified sexuality, we read--we experience in this poetry--that it was an honored sacrament, inseparable from spirituality.

The book concludes with chapters on Sumerian history, commentary on the material and translation, notes on the artwork, and a bibliography for further research. It contains an useful index.

This book is appropriate as a translated primary source for undergraduate work about the ancient Near East or mythology. It is a great source for those seeking to explore (and reclaim) the history of the Goddess, and for those who just can't get enough good Sumerian poetry! Five stars for an excellent balance of the literary with the scholarly, for breathing new life into a lost tradition.

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The result of a collaboration between Sumerian scholar Noah Kramer and folklorist Diane Wolkstein, this book is a thoughtfully annotated translation of the major Sumerian cuneiform texts devoted to the goddess Inanna-among the oldest religious texts in the world. It is illustrated with black-and-white reproductions of ancient Sumerian art, mostly on clay tablets.

Our understanding of Sumerian culture continues to grow as new texts are found and our perceptions change. This book was published in 1983, and included material unknown to the general public at the time. There are four major stories of Inanna told here: "The Huluppu Tree," "Inanna and the God Of Wisdom,"
"The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi," and the extended epic "The Descent of Inanna." Seven hymns to the goddess round out the collection.

In "The Huluppu Tree," we meet the adolescent Inanna, expectantly awaiting the attainment of her queenship. The Huluppu tree, which she has planted and tended as a symbol of her hopeful authority, becomes infested with evil creatures, like personal demons, that will not depart and bring her to despair. She eventually appeals to Gilgamesh to vanquish the demons, and they exchange gifts made from the wood of the tree, bringing them both to greater power.

In "Inanna and the God of Wisdom," Inanna, now sexually mature but still youthful and unproven, is welcomed by Enki, God of Wisdom, who acts the role of proud grandfather, giving a feast in her honor. Enki's magnamity increases as he drinks, and he ends up offering Inanna all the magical keys to human civilization. Inanna, with enthusiastic politeness, accepts the gifts, and then makes a quick exit, getting a head start before Enki thinks better of his generosity and sends his monsters in pursuit of the errant goddess. Inanna, with the help of her trusted companion goddess, gets passed the monsters and arrives in Uruk with
her magical cargo, where she comes into her full power. Enki, apparently wise enough to let go of his greed in the face of fate, acknowledges Inanna's victory and ascendance.

In "The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi," Inanna, after some initial resistance, enters into an erotic courtship with Dumuzi the shepherd. This text is strangely alluring, moving with untroubled ease from sexual frankness to touching detail. (The scene where Dumuzi knocks on the door of Inanna's house for the first time feels like it could have come straight from a modern teenager's diary). After the marriage is consummated, Dumuzi curtly informs Inanna that he's going to be very busy being king now-don't wait up, hon. This poignantly rapid slide from courtship to neglect sets the scene for events in the next narrative.

In "The Descent of Inanna," the goddess, now Queen of Heaven and Earth, finds herself drawn to enter the underworld, realm of the dead, ruled by her evil and somehow tragic sister-self, Ereshkigal. One by one, she is stripped of all the symbols of her power at seven gates, to be left naked and alone before the Queen
of the Underworld, who kills Inanna with a single blow and hangs her on a hook to dry. Inanna has planned her own rescue in advance, though, and escapes to the surface, thronged by demons intent on finding someone to take her place. Inanna will not surrender to them her loyal sons, but when she returns to find her husband Dumuzi, not in mourning, but proudly sitting on his thrown and dispensing authority, she strikes him down and sends the demons after him. The tale of Dumuzi's flight is nightmarish and filled with dream imagery. Thanks to the efforts of his compassionate and self-sacrificing sister, and the softening of Inanna's own anger, a Persephone-like bargain is reached, and Dumuzi is allowed to return to the living for half of each year.

The hymns that round out this book are an exciting glimpse of the actual religious practice of the Sumerians. Especially interesting for modern Pagans is the annual ritual wedding between goddess and king.

I'm someone who tends to be rather skeptical about the ancient precedents of modern goddess worship, but these texts caught me off my guard. They are amazingly modern (or is it timeless?) in their content. The goddess actually grows psychologically and spiritually through the series of narratives, and the
portrayal of the sexual dynamic between men and women rings uncannily true across four millennia. Inanna's story is the original heroine's journey. And, unlike most of her male counterparts, she doesn't need to kill anything to attain her spiritual victory. (Well, almost. Dumuzi gets a serious lesson in raw goddess power!). Her character seems to flow from woman to goddess and back again so smoothly, that it is impossible not to feel a living religion in these texts, one in which there was an intimate dialog between the powers of the goddess and the human experience of her priestesses.

These original texts are better than any modern retelling of Inanna's story I have come across, not just because they are more "authentic", but because they are hauntingly moving. Unlike the familiar mythology of the Greeks and Romans, which has come down to us in a more or less "literary" style, these works seem
more spiritual, even liturgical. Repetition is combined with a directness of wording, and the result is often very powerful; there is a primal intensity about them. They disarm you with their open, almost child-like language, and then leave you sitting, mute and amazed, in that timeless central cavern of the human experience.

Although I've been known to grumble at Kramer's dullness, the present book, far from being dull, ought to be of real interest to many. Professor Samuel Noah Kramer was the world's leading Sumerologist, but in this book he seems to have risen above the dry academic persona we find in some of his other books and allowed his love and enthusiasm for things Sumerian to show.

Basically the book sets out to explain and describe, using extensive quotations from Sumerian Literature, what Kramer took to be thirty-nine civilizational firsts of the Sumerians. Many new archaeological discoveries have been made since the 3rd revised edition of 'History Begins at Sumer' was published in 1981, and current thinking seems to be leaning towards the view that, far from beginning in Sumer, civilization first arose further East in India.

But whether it first began in Sumer or in India, since the Indus script hasn't yet been deciphered, and the Indians didn't write on imperishable clay tablets anyway, we have as yet no thirty-nine Vedic Indian firsts, and perhaps should give Kramer the benefit of the doubt and enjoy his splendid book.

After a brief Introduction, the thirty-nine firsts follow. Mutterings have been heard about the 'pop' overtones of the term 'firsts,' but it seems to me an interesting way of treating Sumer's history, and the book, in my opinion, is far more successful at capturing and holding one's attention than Kramer's later and more conventional study, 'The Sumerians.'

Most of the chapters are centered on a Sumerian text, some quite brief and others fairly long, which Kramer envelopes with his full and interesting commentary. Often we are given a line drawing of the actual cuneiform tablet from which the text was taken, and these have a special fascination all of their own. Besides the 28 line drawings, the book is further enriched with 34 halftones - sculptures, cuneiform tablets, stelae, artefacts, archaeological sites - which greatly add to the interest of the book.

Among the firsts covered are such things as: The First Schools, The First Case of Juvenile Delinquency, The First "War of Nerves," The First Bicameral Congress, First Historian, The First Case of Tax Reduction, The First Legal Precedent, The First Pharmacopoeia, The First Moral Ideals, The First Animal Fables, The First Literary Debates, The First Love Song, The First Library Catalogue, The First "Sick" Society, The First Long-Distance Champion, The First Sex Symbolism, Labor's First Victory, and so on.

Many of these and other chapters are memorable, and once having read them you'll never forget them. You'll never forget them because, in fact, they are about yourself. What I mean is that one of the more important things we learn from Kramer's fascinating book is that, whether we realize it or not, we are all, in a sense, Sumerians.

The patterns that were perhaps first laid down in Sumer - urbanization, monumental architecture, kingship, writing system, distinct social classes, laws, lawyers, lawcourts, taxes, formal education, libraries, a regular army, organized warfare, labor disputes, etc. - are still very much with us today. We usually refer to the whole package as 'Civilization,' without realizing how indebted to the Sumerians we all are. Or are we?

I say this because the second important thing I think we have to learn from Sumer, though it seems to have escaped most, including Kramer, is the simple fact that Civilization doesn't work. It doesn't work because 'Civilization' is a euphemism for exploitation. Sumer, after a relatively brief efflorescence, crashed in ruins.

Here are a few lines from Kramer's 'Sumerian History, Culture and Literature': "In the course of centuries Sumer became a "sick society" ... it yearned for peace and was constantly at war; it professed such ideals as justice, equity and compassion, but abounded in injustice, inequality and oppression; materialistic and shortsighted, it unbalanced the ecology essential to its economy.... And so Sumer came to a cruel, tragic end" (in Diane Wolkstein and S. N. Kramer, 'Inanna - Queen of Heaven and Earth,' page 126).

Perhaps the third and most important thing we can learn from 'History Begins at Sumer' is that, rather than persisting in this obviously unworkable and unjust and outmoded Sumerian pattern, we should be thinking about replacing it with a true civilization, one based not on the exploitation of one's fellow humans but devoted to realizing the full human potential of all men and women and children - a Civilization that would be about humans as humans, and not about humans as 'owners' and 'units of production.'

But perhaps you'd better read Professor Kramer's fascinating and thought-provoking book, and then you can make up your own mind about all this. It's a book you won't easily forget.

Our views of history have barely caught up with the archaeological revolution of the twentieth century. The sources of our traditions in Classical antiquity always had a murky prelude, the world of the Assyrians, a late Mesopotamia with an unknown provenance. And yet the sources of all this remained obscure, as if we had forgotten the Greeks behind the Romans. Now the full scope of the complete historical cycle of civilizations beginning in Sumer (and Egypt) has come into view throwing the whole of world history into its real pattern. For we see that the Sumerians were the real creators laying the foundations for what was to come. Our perceptions of the evolution of civilization have yet to catch up.

We owe much of our knowledge on Ancient Sumerian civilization to Mr Samuel Kramer. As one of the specialists on Sumerian cuneiform and written culture, he traced the clay tablets of Ancient Mesopotamia in various places and brought together the parts of puzzles that belonged to very early Sumerian myths. In this legendary work, Mr Kramer presents us the "39 firsts" of history, including "The First Farmers Almanac", "The First Law Codes", "The First Noah", "The First Resurrection" and so on. The book does not follow a chronological order but presents the achievements of the Ancient Sumerians in an "item-by-item" basis. You not only learn the historical basics on Ancient Mesopotamia in various chapters of this brilliant work, but have fun by reading the fascinating original Sumerian myths, including "Inanna's voyage to the land of the dead". If you're into ancient history, this book should be on your "Top 10" list. If you need further reading from Mr Kramer, "Sumerian Mythology" may well follow the suit.

If you enjoy being bored to tears, buy this book. If you like nothing better than to read the dry and uninspired prose of a bloodless, superficial, and unimaginative pedant, you'll love it. But be warned. Kramer will kill forever any budding interest that you may have had in the Sumerians, convinced as he is that they were a bunch of simple-minded boobies who simply stumbled upon the ideas which set the pattern for all future civilization. As a non-Semitic people, he assures us that the Sumerians were nowhere near as smart as the Semitic peoples (Babylonians, Assyrians, Kramer, etc.,) who followed after them.

Sad to say, Kramer positively drips with arrogance, and with the extreme subjectivity which passes for 'objectivity' in the world of conventional learning. Whatever does not fit in with his thesis (Semites are smarter), and with his narrow and superficial view of things, he either belittles or altogether ignores.

I struggled vainly for a long time to read his book, have re-started it several times, and once even got as far as page 150 before shuddering yet again to a despairing halt. Happily the gods intervened at that point and directed me providentially to Zechariah Sitchin's 'The 12th Planet.'

Chapter 2 of Sitchin's book, 'The Sudden Civilization,' gives a wonderful overview of the Sumerians and their achievements from which you will learn far more than from Kramer, for Sitchin, though every bit as learned as Kramer, gives us scholarship minus prejudice plus a welcome and generous helping of the insight and imagination which Kramer so evidently lacks, all written up in a lively and vigorous style and with far more facts. He may even leave you, as he did me, with a desire to set about learning the language of this amazing people. But Kramer simply irritates and bores, though his book does contain some useful appendixes and interesting photographs.

This should be viewed as a companion to History Begins At Sumer (which is the better book and should be read first). A quality introduction to this great topic.

This book describes the history, society, religion, literature, education, and character of the ancient sumerains. The book is written in a style that is easy to understand for the layman.

The literature and religion chapters (which is the bulk of the book) contain many excerpts from different sumerian texts which I personally found interesting. I was also attracted to the chapter on the sumerian school. In the essay "Schooldays" one gets a sense of what a bad day in a sumerian school was like. The book ends with the chapter of "Legacy of Sumer" which is self explanatory and also touches upon the indirect influence on Hebrews.

The book also contains appendixes A - I. Appendixes A and B are about Sumerian writing and language. Appendix C contains an thirty-five votive inscriptions based on Arno Poebels work. Appendix D includes some sample "date-formulas". Appendix E is a revised translations of the Sumerian King List. Appendix F - G contains information on the votive inscriptions. Appendix H contains "The Code of Lipit-Ishtar." Appendix I is a translation of the Farmer's almanac

Although now somewhat outdated in certain aspects of interpretation, this book surely will remain as one the pillars for the study of ancient Egyptian religion, and, in fact, is one of the never-absent bibliographic references. I do not agree in toto with Frankfort's ideas about several subjects, but I must confess that it is one of the most interesting studies that I ever read about the matter. There are many thought-provoking ideas! Buy it, read it, learn from it. Both for the learned and the newcomer!

Any piece of scholarship that has a preface that baldly states that quite a bit of the following translations are wrong immediately throws out warning signals.
However, this is quite a useful handbook, even if the author pointedly tells the reader that "History begins at Sumer" is more accurate. It has that touch that encompasses all ancient historical secondary sources written in the early part of the twentieth century - a narrative style, whereby it is just as important to provide both a description of actions and a background of the people and methods that got the several thousand clay tablets translated.
Given today's somewhat dry "facts, facts, facts" attitude of most ancient historians, it is most refreshing because understanding those who compiled the work gives a better understanding of the translation.
The book excellently gives a rundown of the pantheon of Sumerian Gods, the acculturation of Sumerian mythology into Semitic and translates a goodly portion (sometimes inaccurately as the preface warns!) of the tablets.
Whilst any serious Sumerian scholar must move on to latter translations and works, this is a good starting point, particularly for those wanting to see a 'decipherment' in progress.

While Kramer's theories and interpretations are truly interesting and provide good material for scholarly research and thought, the book has one major flaw: poor quotation of the texts themselves. If one can find other translations or read the originals themselves, one starts to wonder if Kramer is reading the same materials. Should be read as general information by specialists but not for the layperson or for anything beyon inspiring further research.