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 ...