Samuel Noah Kramer (1897 - 1990) was one of the world's leading Assyriologists and a world-renowned expert in Sumerian history and Sumerian language. After high school he attended Temple University before Dropsie and Penn. Kramer earned his PhD in 1929, and was famous for assembling tablets recounting single stories that had become distributed among different institutions around the world. He retired from formal academic life in 1968, but remained very active throughout his post-retirement years.