Description

In southern Iraq a crushing silence hangs over the dunes For nearly 5000 years the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization the Sumerians When American archaeologists discovered a collection of cuneiform tablets in Iraq in the late 19th century they were confronted with a language and a people who were at the time only scarcely known to even the most knowledgeable scholars of ancient Mesopotamia The exploits and achievements of other Mesopotamian peoples such as the Assyrians and Babylonians were already known to a large segment of the population through the Old Testament and the nascent field of Near Eastern studies had unraveled the enigma of the Akkadian language that was widely used throughout the region in ancient times but the discovery of the Sumerian tablets brought to light the existence of the Sumerian culture which was the oldest of all the Mesopotamian cultures