The Electronic Text Corpus ofSumerian Literature
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The literature written in Sumerian is the oldest human poetrythat can be read, dating from approximately 2100 to about 1650 BC.The main 'classical' corpus can be very roughly estimated at 50,000lines of verse, including narrative poetry, praise poetry, hymns,laments, prayers, songs, fables, didactic poems, debate poems andproverbs. The majority of this has been reconstructed during thepast fifty years from thousands of often fragmentary clay tabletsinscribed in cuneiform writing.
Relatively few compositions are yet published in satisfactorymodern editions. Much is scattered throughout a large number ofjournals and other publications. Several important poems must stillbe consulted in twenty-year-old unpublished doctoral dissertations,some with translations which have now become unusable because ofprogress in our knowledge of the language. Major compositions havenot yet been edited at all. The slow progress of research, withlittle organised collaboration until recently, means that Sumerianliterature has remained inaccessible to the majority of those whomight wish to read or study it, and virtually unknown to a widerpublic.
There was thus an acute need for a coherently and systematicallypublished, universally available textual corpus. One of the mainaims of this project has been to produce a 'collected works' ofover 400 poetic compositions of the classical literature, equippedwith translations and bibliographies. As our work on eachcomposition is finished it is published on the website. Thisprocedure is described in more detail in the section oncreating the corpus. The interest thatthis corpus has generated is indicated by the fact that the websiteis now accessed up 60,000 a month from over 90 differentcountries.
The existence of a consistent textual corpus which can bequickly and efficiently searched has enabled us to initiateresearch on the style, lexis, grammar, and register of Sumerianliterature. These four strands of research, now the main focus ofthe ETCSL project, are described in more detail in the section oncurrent work. We shall also continueto publish further Sumerian literary compositions here on the ETCSLwebsite.
There is also a broader dimension to the project. Sumerianliterature is a considerable and sophisticated ancient literaturewhich is still so far virtually unknown to scholars in otherfields. Historically, a rich stream of survivals flowed on throughBabylonian literature, mediated by translations into otherlanguages and by oral transmission, into ancient Indian, Arabic andGreek civilisation, and from there into the European tradition.Potentially, this interdisciplinary interest extends to thoseworking in comparative literature and history of religion. Beyondthis, there is a great interest in ancient literatures from a widegeneral public, who are as much drawn to their exotic and aliencharacter as struck by their undeniable connection to the moderntradition.
Page created on 7.ix.2001 by ER. Last revised on 7.ix.2001 byER.