Summary of Thomas Cahill's The Gifts of the Jews

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The written word was an invention born of necessity: how else were the Sumerians to keep their accounts straight. The novel agglomeration of human beings and their possessions into a city such as Uruk cried out for a new way of counting shipments and recalling transactions. #2 The first written language was invented in Sumer, and it was used to record business transactions. Sumer had risen to dominate all of Mesopotamia by the time the first word was incised on a small clay tablet. The city-states seemed to be uniform, but the nomads outside the city-states saw them as a collection of shining things they did not possess. #3 The first civilization, Sumer, was led by a society of nomads who did not possess any of the things that the Sumerians had. The Sumerians were a practical people who were more interested in calculating the extent of their fields and the capacity of their warehouses than anything else. #4 The worldview of a people can be found in their stories, myths, and rituals. The stories of Sumer, as resurrected from their clay tablets, possess a burnished splendor that cannot be missed.