Quotes & Sayings About Sumerians

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. — John Maynard Keynes

What a vapid job title our culture gives to those honorable laborers the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians variously called Learned Men of the Magic Library, Scribes of the Double House of Life, Mistresses of the House of Books, or Ordainers of the Universe. 'Librarian' - that mouth-contorting, graceless grind of a word, that dry gulch in the dictionary between 'libido' and 'licentious' - it practically begs you to envision a stoop-shouldered loser, socks mismatched, eyes locked in a permanent squint from reading too much microfiche. If it were up to me, I would abolish the word entirely and turn back to the lexicological wisdom of the ancients, who saw librarians not as feeble sorters and shelvers but as heroic guardians. In Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian cultures alike, those who toiled at the shelves were often bestowed with a proud, even soldierly, title: Keeper of the Books. - p.113 — Miles Harvey

The data-processing system invented by the Sumerians is called 'writing'. — Yuval Noah Harari

Personal God To judge from the covenant between God and Abraham-note, too, the reference to a "god of Nahor" in Genesis 31:53-the ancient Hebrews were familiar with the idea of a personal god. The belief in the existence of a personal god was evolved by the Sumerians at least as early as the middle of the third millennium B.c. According to Sumerian teachers and sages, every adult male and family head had his "personal god," or a kind of good angel whom he looked upon as his divine father. This personal god was in all probability adopted by the Sumerian paterfamilias as the result of an oracle or a dream or a vision involving a mutual understanding or agreement — Samuel Noah Kramer

It was a music of the spirit, seeking peace, not emotional release, expressing the hunger of the soul rather than the heart. A way of sequencing notes so ancient it might be music's mother lode, its Fertile Crescent. It wouldn't have grated, I felt, on the ears of ancient Greeks or Egyptians or Mesopotamians or Sumerians - or even on the august auditory equipment of the Buddha or Lao-tzu. — Tony Hendra

So the Sumerians worshipped Enki, and the Babylonians, who came after the
Sumerians, worshipped Marduk, his son."
"Yes, sir. And whenever Marduk got stuck, he would ask his father Enki for
help. There is a representation of Marduk here on this stele
the Code of
Hammurabi. According to Hammurabi, the Code was given to him personally by
Marduk."
Hiro wanders over to the Code of Hammurabi and has a gander. The cuneiform
means nothing to him, but the illustration on top is easy enough to understand.
Especially the part in the middle:
"Why, exactly, is Marduk handing Hammurabi a one and a zero in this picture?"
Hiro asks.
"They were emblems of royal power," the Librarian says. "Their origin is
obscure. — Neal Stephenson

Driving forward is the chief characteristic of western man since the Sumerians. His dread triad of vices is property-holding, voraciousness, and lust. — Antonio Gramsci

to itself, is arid, wind-swept, and unproductive. The land is flat and river-made, and therefore has no minerals whatever and almost no stone. Except for the huge reeds in the marshes, it had no trees for timber. Here, then, was a region with "the hand of God against it," an unpromising land seemingly doomed to poverty and desolation. But the people that inhabited it, the Sumerians, as they came to be known by — Samuel Noah Kramer

Naturally, since [the Sumerians] didn't know what caused the flood anymore than we do, they blamed the gods. (That's the advantage of religion. You're never short an explanation for anything.) — Isaac Asimov

The African versions were created by beings from a nomadic, artificial planet known as Niburu, or Marduk. These Reptilian-like beings travel in a manufactured world looping our solar system. The Sumerians called them Annunnakki. — Stewart A. Swerdlow

The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far - the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now, and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. — Elon Musk

About 120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity. — Sam Harris

120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. — Sam Harris

Every age has its own way of mythmaking. Ancient Egypt had its myths, the Sumerians and the Assyrians, the Christians and the Muslims, the North and the South
the style of creating myths always varies. What myths are being created as a shelter even in the chaotic atmosphere of today! Until doomsday humanity will create these shelters. What else could people do when they come from one darkness and travel to another? And with so much deprivation? Man remains man so long as he dreams. — Yasar Kemal

Cataloguing is an ancient profession; there are examples of such "ordainers of the universe" (as they were called by the Sumerians) among the oldest vestiges of libraries. — Alberto Manguel

Whether Hindus or Greeks, Egyptians or Japanese, Chinese, Sumerians, or ancient Americans
or even Romans, the most "modern" among people of antiquity
they all placed the Golden Age, the Age of Truth, the rule of Kronos or of Ra or of any other gods on earth
the glorious beginning of the slow, downward unfurling of history, whatever name it be given
far behind them in the past. — Savitri Devi

Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than at any time since the Sumerians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain ... few people are aware of the enormity of this shift and fewer of them are lawyers or public officials. — John Perry Barlow

Darwinism is a pagan religion whose roots go back to the Sumerians and Ancient Egypt. — Harun Yahya

In Celtic Ireland the name Leo was Lugh, another solar hero and mystic. In Wales he was Llew, to the Romans Lugus, to the Sumerians Lughal. Its not the same dude on walkabout, it's the Astrological sign of Leo. In the Christian iconography we have one of the Evangelists represented by a Lion. In the Nativity scenes we see 4 animals around the cradle of the Son/Sun king. One of these is also a Lion. Christians probably believe that there was one in the area and just happened to wander into the inn to take a peek at sleeping Jesus. Good thing it wasn't very hungry. — Michael Tsarion

Despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue. — Sam Harris