Sumerian Technology 
A SURVEY OF EARLY MATERIAL ACHIEVEMENTS IN MESOPOTAMIA 
By Iva Bosua 
Ricker College, Houlton, Maine 
[With 12 plates] 
INTRODUCTION 
Durine THE past hundred years the spadework of devoted arche- 
ologists has reopened for us in Mesopotamia the buried record of 
mankind’s first great civilization. The face of a forgotten people 
has reappeared from a perspective of four millennia. But even 
after it had been generally accepted that this people made the 
tremendous invention of the written word, Orientalists had not yet 
agreed upon a name for them. French scholars, recognizing that 
’ Ati, 
Figure 2.—Impression of seal cylinder, which belonged to a woman, representing the god- 
dess Baba, ‘‘Lady of the Mountain,” with a devotee. 
this was the group whose direct heirs are called Chaldeans in the 
Bible, began to use the name Chaldean for the rediscovered people. 
Later the name Accadian was used by many savants, but after a 
vigorous controversy among scholars, in which the very existence 
of this ancient group was first hotly denied by some, then definitely 
established, there emerged a general agreement to call this ancient 
people Sumerians. 
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