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Democracy in the Sumerian City States: The Assembly, the Elders, and the King

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The Origins of Democracy in Tribes, City-States and Nation-States

Abstract

Samuel Noah Kramer, Thorkild Jacobsen, and teams of archaeologists, historians, and linguists successfully deciphered the hundreds of tablets found buried in the sands of the Tigris-Euphrates valley. From these tablets emerged the startling facts that: one, the Sumerians, not the Babylonians, founded the civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates area, and two, the Sumerians had tribal-democratic institutions – which survived into the city-state era – similar to those of the Homeric Greeks, but existing millennia before the Greeks.

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Glassman, R.M. (2017). Democracy in the Sumerian City States: The Assembly, the Elders, and the King. In: The Origins of Democracy in Tribes, City-States and Nation-States. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51695-0_36

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51695-0_36

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-51693-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-51695-0

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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