Sumerian Literature

This is a review of an article by D. Mandal, The World's Oldest Known Pieces of Literature Pertain to Two Ancient Sumerian Works, published in Realm of History, July 21, 2016.

According to the conventional opinion, Sumerian scribes were the group who left us the remnants of their literature. What we can lay hand is not the first attempts but part of the long written tradition. The author mentions the Kesh Temple Hymns; this is in the present state a collection of 8 hymns comprising 134 lines. Also, the hymns heap their praises to Nisaba, the goddess responsible for writing, which only emphasizes the age of recording. During the same Early Dynastic period we see a tradition of donating statuettes of believers to temples. Some of these statuettes carry short texts written on behalf of the members of the elite or even the middle class. The schools, where these literary texts were recorded, served the earliest libraries.

Another literary piece, the Instructions of Shuruppak, where the speaker is the person, not the city of the same name, is an example of wisdom literature which gives us a glimpse on the Sumerian daily life. The author is familiar with the consequences of excessive drinking. One of his pieces of advice: "Do not pass judgment when you drink beer." So we can see genres, determination, talent in service of a lengthy kiterary tradition though we cannot say how long we should hark back to its origin.

The article is not free of exaggerrations. The wheel could not be invented in Sumer as I showed in my history book "Dawn and Sunset: A Tale of the Oldest Cities in the Near East", p. 131. Due to the lack of hard wood, Sumer was an unlikely place as a testing ground for an array of experiments that should have preceeded this revolutionary invention. The glyph for a wheel appears among the earliest writing signs but the wheel may have been imported in its completed form. In Sumer it was attached to a cart dragged by oxen in religious context.