A Sumerian Chrestomathy by Konrad Volk has been written for beginners studying Sumerian within the academic curriculum. The volume contains 44 texts of varying contents: royal inscriptions, legal, and economic documents dating from the Early Dynastic (ca. 2500 B.C.) to the Old Babylonian Period (ca. 1750 B.C.) when Sumerian was no longer a spoken language. Some of the autographed texts are accompanied by a version in Neo-Assyrian script so that the student can learn the Neo-Assyrian sign forms which are of fundamental importance for the use of the sign list in this book and, in general, for most Assyriological sign lists. Each inscription can be studied with the help of the sign list, which is intentionally limited to the signs that occur in this book. Reference is given to the most recent works in the field by R. Borger and C. Mittermayer. Also included are individual and detailed glossaries: General Vocabulary; Divine Names; Personal Names; Place Names; Sacred Buildings; Year Dates; Year Names; Festivals. These glossaries not only quote the lexical items found in the inscriptions but also give the Akkadian equivalents for Sumerian words and refer - wherever necessary - to the most recent Sumerological literature.

The so-called Sumerian conjugation prefixes are the most poorly understood and perplexing elements of Sumerian verbal morphology. Approaching the problem from a functional-typological perspective and basing the analysis upon semantics, Professor Woods argues that these elements, in their primary function, constitute a system of grammatical voice, in which the active voice is set against the middle voice. The latter is represented by heavy and light markers that differ with respect to focus and emphasis. As a system of grammatical voice, the conjugation prefixes provided Sumerian speakers with a linguistic means of altering the perspective from which events may be viewed, giving speakers a series of options for better approximating in language the infinitely graded spectrum of human conceptualization and experience.

Leonard Woolley, an archaeologist from Britain, returned to Iraq in 1922, almost 4,000 years after the nuclear ancient catastrophe, to uncover ancient Mesopotamia.An imposing ziggurat standing out in the desert plain drew him to the nearby site of Tell el-Muqayyar, where he began excavating. As old walls, artifacts, and inscriptions were unearthed, he realized he was digging up ancient Ur-Ur of the Chaldees. Twelve years of his work were conducted through a joint expedition between the British Museum in London and the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia. For those institutions, Sir Leonard Woolley found some of the most dramatic objects and artifacts in Ur. However, what he discovered may well surpass anything ever exhibited before. In the course of removing layers of soil deposited by desert sands, the elements, and time from the ruins, the ancient city began to take shape-here were the walls, there were the harbors and canals, the residential quarters, the palace, and the Tummal, the elevated sacred area. Woolley's discovery of a cemetery dated thousands of years ago included unique 'royal' tombs discovered by digging at its edge is the find of the century. The excavations in the city's residential sections established that Ur's inhabitants followed the Sumerian custom of burying their dead right under the floors of their dwellings, where families continued to live. It was thus highly unusual to find a cemetery with as many as 1,800 graves in it. From predynastic (before Kingship began) to Seleucid times, they were concentrated mainly within the sacred precinct. The graves were buried on top of each other, burials were interred in another grave, and some graves were apparently re-interred. To date graves more accurately, Woolley's workers dug trenches of up to fifty feet deep to cut through layers.