Product Description: Oubliee pendant de longs millenaires, l'histoire de la Mesopotamie est reconstituee progressivement par les chercheurs depuis le milieu du XIXe siecle. Loin du despotisme oriental et des fastes exotiques, trois civilisations, Sumer, Assur et Babylone, revoient le jour grace aux efforts conjugues des historiens et des archeologues...read more

Product Description: As the first known system of writing, the cuneiform symbols traced in Sumerian clay more than six millennia ago were once regarded as a simplistic and clumsy attempt to record in linear form the sounds of a spoken language. More recently, scholars have acknowledged that early Sumerian writing—far from being a primitive and flawed mechanism that would be "improved" by the Phoenicians and Greeks—in fact represented a complete written language system, not only meeting the daily needs of economic and government administration, but also providing a new means of understanding the world...read more