Weld-Blundell Prism: The Sumerian King-List
(Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; number: AN1923.444)
What did he write?
Weld-Blundell Prism Face b
- This is the most extensive surviving list of the rulers of southern Iraq for the period from c.3200-1800BC.
- This was a time when local city-states struggled with one another for supremacy.
- This version of the list combines older lists into a continuous sequence of rulers, many of whom were in fact contemporaneous.
- Both in the sequence and in the comments in the text fact and fantasy are freely blended, particularly in the earlier sections.
- This is a work of literature, not of history as we would understand it.