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The people at the dawn of civilization

Sumerian language and culture take center stage in a new anthropological analysis "A narrative history of the early Near East is virtually impossible," confessed archaeologist Paul Collins, the curator for the ancient Near East at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in his 2016 study, Mountains and Lowlands: Ancient Iran and Mesopotamia. The Sumerians, Collins's latest contribution to the Lost Civilizations series, eschews narrative in favor of separate chapters on, for example, "The first cities" and "The first writing." Even the book's opening chronology refers to "Sumerian" only as a descriptor of language and script, not as a people, state, dynasty, or empire.