The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature

Now, I swear by the sun god Utu on this very day -- and my younger brothers shall be witness of it in foreign lands where the sons of Sumer are not known, where people do not have the use of paved roads, where they have no access to the written word -- that I, the firstborn son, am a fashioner of words, a composer of songs, a composer of words, and that they will recite my songs as heavenly writings, and that they will bow down before my words......

King Shulgi (c. 2100 BC) on the future of Sumerian literature.

The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature is in preparation at the University of Oxford. Its aim is to make accessible, via the World Wide Web, over 400 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennia BC.

At this site you will find a catalogue of these works, together with a Sumerian text, English prose translation and bibliographical information for each composition. New material, and new user facilities, are added to the site regularly. Although minor corrections will be made, no major changes are planned for the editions presented here until the end of the first phase of the project in late 2000. If you wish to use or cite the corpus, please use the following form of citation:

Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (http://www-etcsl.orient.ox.ac.uk/), Oxford 1998- .

Contents of this site

About the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, updated on 30.iv.99
Catalogue of Sumerian literary compositions, updated on 30.iv.99
How to use this site, updated on 30.iv.99
Call for co-operation and list of desiderata, updated on 30.iv.99
Technical information, including editing protocols and DTDs, updated on 30.iv.99

Available compositions

The compositions available to read are accessible in three ways:

via the full catalogue which lists the entire corpus;
via a list of available compositions sorted by catalogue number;
via a list of available compositions sorted by date of publication on this site.

If your browser supports frames, soon you will be able to select two pages for simultaneous viewing. You may wish to compare the composite text and translation of a particular composition, for instance, or the translations of two different compositions.

Links to other Web sites

ABZU (the gateway to all ancient Near Eastern sites on the Web) at the University of Chicago
The Sumerian Lexical Archive at the University of Chicago
The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary Web site at the University of Pennsylvania
The Sumerian Text Archive (administrative documents and royal inscriptions) at Leiden University
Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative at UCLA
The Achaemenid Royal Inscriptions Project (Old Persian, Akkadian and Elamite inscriptions from Persepolis) at the University of Chicago
The Perseus Project (Greek and Latin literature) at Tufts University

Acknowledgements

We are extremely grateful to all those who have contributed source material to the project: Bendt Alster, Miguel Civil, Andrew George, Gerd Haayer, Bram Jagersma, Joachim Krecher, Steve Tinney, Herman Vanstiphout, Konrad Volk, Claus Wilcke, and Annette Zgoll. Further details of the electronic sources used are listed in the bibliography of each composition.

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Written by Eleanor Robson. Updated on 14.v.1999.