Samuel Noah Kramer

Kramer was born on September 28, 1897 in Zhashkiv near Uman in the Kiev Governorate, Russian Empire (modern day Ukraine), the son of Benjamin and Yetta Kramer. In 1905, as a result of the anti-Semitic pogroms under Czar Nicholas II of Russia, his family emigrated to Philadelphia, where his father established a Hebrew school. After graduating from South Philadelphia High School, obtaining an Academic Diploma, Kramer tried a variety of occupations, including teaching in his father's school, becoming a writer and becoming a businessman.

Concerning the time when he began to approach the age of thirty, still without a career, he later stated in his autobiography, In the World of Sumer: "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".[2]

The Lament for Ur at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The Lament was one of several literary works that Kramer studied.

He enrolled at Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning in Philadelphia, 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".[3] Speiser was trying to decipher cuneiform tablets of the Late Bronze Age dating from about 1300 BC; it was now that Kramer began his lifelong work in understanding the cuneiform writing system.

Kramer earned his PhD in 1929, and was famous for assembling tablets recounting single stories that had become distributed among 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: "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".[4]

Kramer died of throat cancer at age 93 on November 26, 1990 in Philadelphia.[5]

• Inanna
• Sumerian literature
• Lament for Sumer and Ur
• Eridu Genesis

• Kramer, Samuel Noah. Sumerian Mythology: Study of Spiritual and Literary Achievement in the Third Millennium B.C. 1944, rev. 1961.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man's Recorded History. 1956/1e (25 firsts), 1959/2e (27 firsts) 1981/3e. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 0-8122-7812-7.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963. ISBN 0-226-45238-7.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah and Diane Wolkstein. Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. ISBN 0-06-090854-8.
• Kramer, Samuel Noah. In the World of Sumer, An Autobiography. Wayne State University Press, 1988. ISBN 0-8143-1785-5.

• Samuel Noah Kramer Institute of Assyriology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Aramco article on Samuel Kramer
• New York Times Obituary