Samuel Noah Kramer

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Samuel Noah Kramer (1897–1990) was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language.

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[edit] Biography

Kramer was born on September 28, 1897 in Kiev in the Ukraine, the son of Benjamin and Yetta Kramer. In 1905 as a result of the anti-Semitic pogroms of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, his family emigrated to Philadelphia, where his father established a Hebrew school. After graduating from high school and obtaining a bachelor's degree, Kramer tried a variety of occupations, including teaching in his father's school, becoming a writer and becoming a business man.

He later stated in his autobiography, concerning the time when he began to approach the age of thirty, still without a career: "Finally it came to me that I might well go back to my beginnings and try to utilize the Hebrew learning on which I had spent so much of my youth, and relate it in some way to an academic future" [1].

He enrolled at Dropsie College of Philadelphia for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, and became passionately interested in Egyptology. He then transferred to the Oriental Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania, working with the "brilliant young Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, who was to become one of the world's leading figures in Near Eastern Studies" [2]. Speiser was trying to decipher cuneiform tablets of the Late Bronze Age dating from about 1300 BC; it was now that Kramer began his life-long work in understanding the cuneiform writing system.

Kramer earned his Ph.D. in 1929, and was famous for assembling tablets recounting single stories that had been distributed between different institutions around the world. He retired from formal academic life in 1968, but remained very active throughout his post-retirement years.

In his autobiography, published in 1986 he sums up his accomplishments as follows: "First, and most important, is the role I played in the recovery, restoration, and resurrection of Sumerian literature, or at least of a representative cross section . . . Through my efforts several thousand Sumerian literary tablets and fragments have been made available to cuneiformists, a basic reservoir of unadulterated data that will endure for many decades to come. Second, I endeavored . . . to make available reasonably reliable translations of many of these documents to the academic community, and especially to the anthropologist, historian, and humanist. Third, I have helped to spread the name of Sumer to the world at large, and to make people aware of the crucial role the Sumerians played in the ascent of civilized man" [3].

Kramer died on November 26, 1990 in the United States.

[edit] Bibliography

  • History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine "Firsts" in Recorded History (1956)
  • The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character, Samuel Noah Kramer, Publisher: University of Chicago Press (1971) ISBN 0-226-45238-7
  • Sumerian Mythology: Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C, Samuel Noah Kramer
  • Inanna : Queen of Heaven and Earth, Samuel Noah Kramer and Diane Wolkstein (New York: Harper & Row 1983) ISBN 0-06-090854-8

Autobiography:

  • In the World of Sumer, An Autobiography, Samuel Noah Kramer, Wayne State University Press, ISBN 0-8143-1785-5

[edit] External links

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Kramer, Samuel Noah [1988]. "From the Talmud to Cuneiform", In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (in English). Wayne State University Press, 20. ISBN 0814321216. 
  2. ^ Kramer, Samuel Noah [1988]. "From the Talmud to Cuneiform", In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (in English). Wayne State University Press, 21. ISBN 0814321216. 
  3. ^ Kramer, Samuel Noah [1988]. "With the End in Sight", In the World of Sumer: An Autobiography (in English). Wayne State University Press, 240. ISBN 0814321216.