Books: Children of the Gods

SUMER: THE DAWN OF ART (397 pp.) —André Parrot—Golden Press ($20).

"If Delacroix, a hundred years ago, had been shown the works illustrated in this volume, he would not have seen them," writes André Malraux in his introduction. "They lay outside his range of vision and, had his attention been directed to them, they would have seemed to him devoid of any esthetic value." Half a century ago, the civilization of Sumer was scarcely known; more important, the vision of even Europe's finest artists was almost entirely bound by their own tradition. It has long been Malraux's thesis that only lately has...