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.