638 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1959 
The discovery of the Sumerians brought many surprises; their 
material and moral civilization appeared, in the light of the ex- 
humed documents, far higher than anything expected from a group 
of such antiquity. The few scholars who were able to recognize 
Sumerian achievement across the span of millennia, in spite of a 
script hard to decipher and a mysterious agglutinative language, 
expressed their admiration in no uncertain terms. Stephen Langdon, 
Ficure 3.—Seal of Ur-Engur, king of Ur city. The earthly ruler is depicted as presented 
by benevolent goddesses to the moon god. 
in the first volume of the Cambridge History, writes that human 
civilization begins with the Sumerians and that they were the most 
talented and humane of all known early peoples. And indeed, 
Sumerians were talented. Without doubt, we owe to them the in- 
vention of cuneiform signs from which developed the Phoenician 
alphabet and the principle of writing, the means by which man may 
speak to fellow men across the ages. 
We know, also, that the Sumerians were nonageressive. Though 
sometimes obliged to defend their homeland from barbarian onslaught, 
they were not hostile to others. Keen and warm-hearted observers 
of nature, they directed their energies in the service of human life 
against the destructive forces of nature. Their irrigation system, 
completed in the fourth millennium B.C., created unprecedented 
wealth and freed “the shaven-headed people” from want. Sir Leon- 
ard Woolley, discoverer of ancient Ur, in his book on the Sumerians 
(1928), voiced “the claim of Sumer”: if any people can be regarded 
as “first cause” of civilization, that people is the Sumerian. 
Excavation on Sumerian sites, Tello, Warka, Nippur, and especially 
Ur, dating back to the third millennium B.C., revealed the antiquity 
of some of our technological processes. Radiocarbon tests helped to 
establish the earliest dates of human history. It became obvious that 
many great inventions credited to later nations must be traced back to 
