Position in chronology
Utu-hegal 4 (The victory of Utu-hegal)
Translation — scholar edition
ETCSRI(1) Enlil, the king of all lands, entrusted Utu-heĝal, the powerful man, king of Unug, the king of the four quarters, the king whose orders cannot be countermanded, with wiping out the name of Gutium, the fanged snake of the mountains, who acted with violence against the gods, who carried off the rule over Sumer to a foreign land for himself, who filled Sumer with wickedness, who took away spouses from the married and took away children from parents, who made wickedness and violence normal in the Land. (24) He went to his lady, Inana, and prayed to her: “My lady, lioness in the battle, who…
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions — scholar edition (Vienna).
Scholarly note
Sumerian royal inscription, published in the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI) by Gábor Zólyomi and collaborators. Translation reproduced from the ETCSRI edition. ORACC text Q000376.
Attribution
Image: .
Translation excerpted from Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Royal Inscriptions (ETCSRI), University of Vienna, edited by Gábor Zólyomi et al. https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/etcsri/Q000376/.
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One of the earliest specimens of human writing. Not literature, not law — accounting. The need to keep track of grain in a temple bureaucracy is what pushed marks-on-clay into a system that could one day carry epics.
Marks the boundary between proto-writing and writing. We can see signs being used systematically — but not yet phonetically. The leap to recording speech itself comes a few centuries later.
The earliest historical document in human history. Before this, we have lists, accounts, and dedications. Here, for the first time, a ruler tells us what happened — with names, places, and consequences.