Image Details

Yale Babylonian Collection

Sumerian Poetry accounts for most of the approximately 40,000 lines of Sumerian literature that have been reconstructed with any degree of completeness. Characteristically written in lines that run across the entire width of a column, a distance of 2.6 inches on this one column face of a clay tablet, Sumerian poetry usually takes gods or kings for its subject. Here we see lines 1–34 from Hymn E, part of a 257-line royal hymn in honor of King Shulgi of Ur (c. 2093–2046 B.C.).