Introduction

The heartland of the Sumerian world lay in what is today southern Iraq, an area ofparched but potentially fertile silt and marshland which lies between two great rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. Its first inhabitants were a group of people who seem to have been of mixed origins and who were probably attracted to the region by the rich reserves of game and fish, but we cannot tell what languages they spoke or where they came from as they have left few archaeological traces and no written records. By the end of the fourth millennium, when we have written records which can be read with a degree of confidence, some of these people were writing in the Sumerian language.