And the Sumerians wrote about all this, and set up schools, and set down laws, all for the first time.

From Coming of Age in Sumeria: Gilgamesh and Other Lives in Clay by Colin Campbell.

Who were the Sumerians? Why do they matter? Samuel Noah Kramer showed no impatience at simple questions. "The Sumerians," he said, "unlike the ancient Egyptians, were a rather skeptical, analytic, litigious, you might even say quarrelsome sort of people." They were surely no democrats, but they did not deify their king, either. "Certainly the Sumerian elite felt they were as good as the king, and he'd better behave." Life was good, though uncertain; the land of death was bad - "when you went there, you stayed there." And the Sumerians wrote about all this, and set up schools, and set down laws, all for the first time.

"On the other hand," he added, "the Sumerians, and the Mesopotamians as a whole, never invented a genre of literature in which human beings are portrayed in their ordinary lives. Oh, there were a few things, lullabies and so on. But they never did it in the way that, say, David could weep for Jonathan." New literary forms eventually arose in the Semitic languages of the Akkadians and the Hebrews, and in hindsight Sumerian literature seems stiff in places. Yet in general the Sumerians remain strikingly natural. Mr. Kramer opened a book on Sumerian art and sculpture. "Look at this little fellow,'' he said of one wide-eyed face. It was smiling. "That could have been me as a little guy in Russia."