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Certain cultures have been, for a variety of reasons, accorded an unfairly important status in history; an example of this in British history is the overbearing nature of the Roman Empires given importance. Admittedly, it was a major cultural and military force and is of great importance in the understanding of our own past, but it has managed to eclipse the wealth of contributions made by the Celtic peoples who preceded them and the English settlement period that saw the rise of the Saxons after them. The 400 years of Roman rule has been seized upon as being the major formative thrust that has shaped Britain's destiny and it is only in more recent times that these toga wearing usurpers place in history is being re thought and other cultures are being given a fair hearing. The reason I move along what may at first seem like an unrelated thread is that the ancient near east suffers from a similar problem. Whilst explorers, antiquarians and archaeologists have concentrated their efforts on the glories of dynastic Egypt, an older, more mysterious and possibly more important nation remained unexamined, unexplored and lost to the history books, the people I am talking about are the Sumerians.

Since Napoleons invasion of Egypt, which was as scientifically motivated as it was military, most of the prominent recorders and examiners of the ancient regions past over the next 150 years seem to have been based in this culture. Admittedly there had been a number of historians interested in the artefacts and cities of the cultures based further east in the land formerly known as Mesopotamia but their work seems always to have been excised by the evocative nature of the pyramids and pharoahs, gods and temples of the Nile lands. It was not until the 1950s that the Sumerians began to emerge from their rivals shadow and in 1963 Samuel Noah Kramer really put them back on the map with his groundbreaking book, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character. Kramer was acknowledged as one of the few authors qualified to write such a book, but it was a book that was long overdue, what he produced then was not only a timely and much needed arrival it did for the first time open an up until now academic bastion to a wider readership.

But first a few geographic and historical references so we know when and where we are talking about. The ancient near east, more specifically the lands now occupied by Iraq, where home to a number of important civilizations, the oldest of which is known

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