Sumerian literature

Mesopotamian literature originated with the Sumerians, whose earliest known written records are from the middle of the 4th millennium bce. It constitutes the oldest known literature in the world; moreover, inner criteria indicate that a long oral-literary tradition preceded, and probably coexisted with,…

…poetry is that of the Sumerians. Its origin has been traced to a preliterate heroic age, not later than 3000 bce, when the Sumerians had to fight, under the direction of a warlike aristocracy, for possession of this fertile Mesopotamian land. Among the extant literature of this highly gifted people…

…lamentations, and hymns in both Sumerian and Akkadian are extant, addressed to deities such as the goddess Ishtar, the moon god Sin, the sun god Shamash, the great triad Anu, Enlil, and Ea, and the Babylonian patron god Marduk. The Sumerian “Lament for the Destruction of Ur” bemoans the city’s…

…lost their political identity, and Sumerian gradually disappeared as a spoken language. It did, however, continue to be written to the very end of the use of cuneiform writing. This is the last stage of the Sumerian language, called Post-Sumerian.

The great Sumerian poems, whose origins or first written version, respectively, can now be traced back to about 2600, were copied again and again. After 2000, when Sumerian as a spoken language rapidly receded to isolated regions and eventually disappeared altogether, texts began to be translated, line…