Sumerian Literature
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Sumerian Literature
Sumerian literature constitutes the earliest known corpus of recorded literature, including the religious writings and other traditional stories maintained by the Sumerian civilization and largely preserved by the later Akkadian and Babylonian empires. These records were written in the Sumerian language in the 18th and 17th Centuries BC during the Middle Bronze Age. The Sumerians invented one of the first writing systems, developing Sumerian cuneiform writing out of earlier proto-writing systems by about the 30th century BC. The Sumerian language remained in official and literary use in the Akkadian and Babylonian empires, even after the spoken language disappeared from the population; literacy was widespread, and the Sumerian texts that students copied heavily influenced later Babylonian literature. Poetry Most Sumerian literature is written in left-justified lines, and could contain line-based organization such as the couplet or the stanza, but the Sumerian definiti ...
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Sumerian 26th C Adab
Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to: *Sumer, an ancient civilization **Sumerian language **Sumerian art **Sumerian architecture **Sumerian literature **Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing *Sumerian Records, an American record label based in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles See also *Sumeria (other) *Sumer (other) *Sumarian (other) Sumarian is a misspelling and may refer to: * Sumerian *Samaria or Samaritans Samaritans (; ; he, שומרונים, translit=Šōmrōnīm, lit=; ar, السامريون, translit=as-Sāmiriyyūn) are an ethnoreligious group who originate fr ... {{disambiguation Language and nationality disambiguation pages ...
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Imagery
Imagery is visual symbolism, or figurative language that evokes a mental image or other kinds of sense impressions, especially in a literary work, but also in other activities such as psychotherapy. Forms There are five major types of sensory imagery, each corresponding to a sense, feeling, action, or reaction: * ''Visual imagery'' pertains to graphics, visual scenes, pictures, or the sense of sight. *'' Auditory imagery'' pertains to sounds, noises, music, or the sense of hearing. (This kind of imagery may come in the form of onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...). *''Olfactory imagery'' pertains to odors, aromas, scents, or the sense of smell. *''Gustatory imagery'' pertains to flavors or the sense of taste. *''Tactile imagery'' pertains to physical text ...
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Bull Of Heaven
In ancient Mesopotamian mythology, the Bull of Heaven is a mythical beast fought by the hero Gilgamesh. The story of the Bull of Heaven has two different versions: one recorded in an earlier Sumerian poem and a later version in the standard Akkadian ''Epic of Gilgamesh''. In the Sumerian poem, the Bull is sent to attack Gilgamesh by the goddess Inanna for reasons that are unclear. The more complete Akkadian account comes from Tablet VI of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', in which Gilgamesh refuses the sexual advances of the goddess Ishtar, the East Semitic equivalent of Inanna, leading the enraged Ishtar to demand the Bull of Heaven from her father Anu, so that she may send it to attack Gilgamesh in Uruk. Anu gives her the Bull and she sends it to attack Gilgamesh and his companion, the hero Enkidu, who slay the Bull together. After defeating the Bull, Enkidu hurls the Bull's right thigh at Ishtar, taunting her. The slaying of the Bull results in the gods condemning Enkidu to dea ...
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Huwawa
In Ancient Mesopotamian religion, Humbaba ( Assyrian spelling), also spelled Huwawa ( Sumerian spelling) and surnamed ''the Terrible'', was a monstrous giant of immemorial age raised by Utu, the Sun / justice / truth god. Humbaba was the guardian of the Cedar Forest, where the gods lived, by the will of the god Enlil, who: "assigned umbabaas a terror to human beings." Gilgamesh and Enkidu defeated this great enemy. Description : "When he looks at someone, it is the look of death." : "Humbaba's roar is a flood, : his mouth is death and his breath is fire! : A hundred leagues away he can hear any ustling?in his forest! : Who would go down into his forest!" In various examples, his face is scribed in a single coiling line like that of the coiled entrails of men and beasts, from which omens might be read. Another description from Georg Burckhardt's translation of the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' says, : "he had the paws of a lion and : a body covered in thorny scales; : his feet had t ...
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Epic Of Gilgamesh
The ''Epic of Gilgamesh'' () is an epic poetry, epic poem from ancient Mesopotamia, and is regarded as the earliest surviving notable literature and the second oldest religious text, after the Pyramid Texts. The literary history of Gilgamesh begins with five Sumerian language, Sumerian poems about Bilgamesh (Sumerian for "Gilgamesh"), king of Uruk, dating from the Third Dynasty of Ur (). These independent stories were later used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian language, Akkadian. The first surviving version of this combined epic, known as the "Old Babylonian" version, dates back to the 18th century BC and is titled after its incipit, ''Shūtur eli sharrī'' ("Surpassing All Other Kings"). Only a few clay tablet, tablets of it have survived. The later Standard Babylonian version compiled by Sîn-lēqi-unninni dates from the 13th to the 10th centuries BC and bears the incipit ''Sha naqba īmuru'' ("He who Saw the Abyss", in unmetaphoric terms: "He who Sees the ...
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Decad (Sumerian Texts)
The Decad is a name given to a standard sequence of ten scribal training compositions in ancient Sumer. Sources and evidence The grouping of compositions known as the Decad is attested in several literary catalogues of tablets dating to Mesopotamia's Old Babylonian period. Sumerian literary catalogues were lists of literary compositions recorded by their initial lines or incipits. While literary catalogues were normally used for administration of a library, the Decad is argued to have been written on curricular tablets. The best attestation of the Decad is on a tablet originating in ancient Nippur and now stored at the University Museum in Philadelphia (referred to in this article as P). This tablet lists sixty-two Sumerian literary compositions in all (fifty-five of which have been identified and translated.), organized into six groups of about ten entries each. The first group of ten compositions comprises the Decad. Another curricular list (L), of unknown origin and cur ...
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Eduba
Edubba ( sux, ) is the Sumerian for "scribal school." The eduba was the institution that trained and educated young scribes in ancient Mesopotamia during the late third or early second millennium BCE. Most of the information known about edubas comes from cuneiform texts dating to the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000-1600 BCE). Spelling and etymology Edubba is written ''e2-dub-ba-a'' in Sumerian. The literal meaning is "house of tablets". Archaeological evidence Archaeological evidence for the Old Babylonian school system suggests that scribal education was small-scale and usually took place in private homes. School tablets have been found in private residences in many sites across Mesopotamia. Some houses, where particularly large numbers of school tablets were unearthed, have been interpreted by archaeologists as "school houses" or homes in which scribal education almost certainly took place. The best example of this is House F in the city of Nippur. Nearly one and a hal ...
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Wisdom Literature
Wisdom literature is a genre of literature common in the ancient Near East. It consists of statements by sages and the wise that offer teachings about divinity and virtue. Although this genre uses techniques of traditional oral storytelling, it was disseminated in written form. The literary genre of mirrors for princes, which has a long history in Islamic and Western Renaissance literature, is a secular cognate of wisdom literature. In classical antiquity, the didactic poetry of Hesiod, particularly his ''Works and Days'', was regarded as a source of knowledge similar to the wisdom literature of Egypt, Babylonia and Israel. Pre-Islamic poetry is replete with many poems of wisdom, including the poetry of Zuhayr bin Abī Sūlmā (520–609). Ancient Mesopotamian literature The wisdom literature from Sumeria and Babylonia is among the most ancient in the world, with the Sumerian documents dating back to the third millennium BC and the Babylonian dating to the second millennium BC ...
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Electronic Text Corpus Of Sumerian Literature
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) was a project that provides an online digital library of texts and translations of Sumerian literature. This project's website contains "Sumerian text, English prose translation and bibliographical information" for "over 400 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) during the late third and early second millennia BCE." It is both browsable and searchable and includes transliterations, composite texts, a bibliography of Sumerian literature and a guide to spelling conventions for proper nouns and literary forms. The purpose of the project was to make Sumerian literature accessible to those wishing to read or study it, and make it known to a wider public. The project was founded by Jeremy Black in 1997 and is based at the Oriental Institute of the University of Oxford in Britain. It was funded by the University along with the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research ...
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Assyriologists
Assyriology (from Greek , ''Assyriā''; and , ''-logia'') is the archaeological, anthropological, and linguistic study of Assyria and the rest of ancient Mesopotamia (a region that encompassed what is now modern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and northwestern and southwestern Iran) and of the related cultures that used cuneiform writing. The field covers Sumer, the early Sumero-Akkadian city-states, the Akkadian Empire, Ebla, the Akkadian and Imperial Aramaic speaking states of Assyria, Babylonia and the Sealand Dynasty, the migrant foreign dynasties of southern Mesopotamia, including the Gutians, Amorites, Kassites, Arameans, Suteans and Chaldeans. The large number of cuneiform clay tablets preserved by these Sumero-Akkadian and Assyro-Babylonian cultures provide an extremely large resource for the study of the period. The region's (and indeed the world's) first cities and city-states like Ur are archaeologically invaluable for studying the growth of urbanizat ...
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Miguel Civil
Miguel Civil (Miquel Civil i Desveus; May 7, 1926 – January 13, 2019) was an American Assyriologist and expert on Sumer and Ancient Mesopotamian studies at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute. According to his colleague, Christopher Woods, at the time of his death, Civil knew the Sumerian language better than anyone since it was last spoken 4000 years ago. Early life Civil was born in 1926 in Sabadell, Barcelona, Spain. He studied Sumerology in Paris and was associate researcher at the University of Pennsylvania from 1958 to 1963. From 1964 until 2001, he was Professor of Sumerology at the Oriental Institute in the University of Chicago. He was also associate director of studies of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, epigraphist of thNippur Expedition to Iraq a member of the editorial board of thChicago Assyrian Dictionary and main editor of the series Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon (in which he published several volumes). He is widely considered the ...
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Title (publishing)
The title of a book, or any other published text or work of art, is a name for the work which is usually chosen by the author. A title can be used to identify the work, to put it in context, to convey a minimal summary of its contents, and to pique the reader's curiosity. Some works supplement the title with a subtitle. Texts without separate titles may be referred to by their incipit (first word), especially those produced before the practice of titling became popular. During development, a work may be referred to by a temporary working title. A piece of legislation may have both a short title and a long title. In library cataloging, a uniform title is assigned to a work whose title is ambiguous. In book design, the title is typically shown on the spine, the front cover, and the title page. History The first books, such as the Five Books of Moses, in Hebrew Torah, did not have titles. They were referred to by their incipit: ''Be-reshit'', "In the beginning" (Genesis), ''Va-yik ...
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