Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

The literature written in Sumerian is the oldest human poetry that can be read, dating from approximately 2500 BCE onwards. It includes narrative poetry, praise poetry, hymns, laments, prayers, songs, fables, didactic poems, debate poems and proverbs. The majority of this has been reconstructed during the past fifty years from thousands of often fragmentary clay tablets inscribed in cuneiform writing. Relatively few compositions are yet published in satisfactory modern editions. Much is scattered throughout a large number of journals and other publications. Several important poems must still be consulted in twenty-year-old unpublished doctoral dissertations, some with translations which have now become unusable because of progress in our knowledge of the language. And some compositions have not yet been edited in print at all. Consequently, prior to publication of the corpus, Sumerian literature had remained largely inaccessible to many of those who might wish to read or study it, and virtually unknown to a wider public. One of the main aims of the ETCSL project has been to meet the need for a coherently and systematically published, universally available textual corpus. More than 350 poetic compositions, equipped with translations and bibliographies, have been published. As our work on each composition is finished it is published on the website. There is also a broader dimension to the project. Sumerian literature is a considerable and sophisticated ancient literature which is still so far unfamiliar to scholars in other fields. Historically, a rich stream of survivals flowed on through Babylonian literature and, mediated by translations into other languages and by oral transmission, into ancient Indian, Arabic and Greek civilisation, and from there into the European tradition. Potentially, this interdisciplinary interest extends to those working in comparative literature and history of religion. Beyond this, there is a great interest in ancient literatures from a