From the Poetry of Sumer

From the Poetry of Sumer: Creation, Glorification, Adoration by Samuel Noah Kramer offers modern readers a rare window into the world’s earliest recorded literature. Kramer, one of the foremost authorities on Sumerian civilization, surveys a century of philological and archaeological work that has recovered thousands of cuneiform tablets from sites such as Nippur, Ur, and Kish. These texts—myths, hymns, laments, disputations, and proverbs—preserve a literary culture nearly four millennia old. The volume moves from the painstaking story of how this forgotten corpus was reconstructed to close readings of works that illuminate Sumerian ideas of creation, kingship, and divine femininity.

Structured in three thematic parts, the book examines Sumerian cosmogony, highlighting how ancient poets envisioned the separation of heaven and earth and the creation of humankind. Kramer then turns to royal hymns, showing how they model the “perfect man” through exaltation of kings such as Shulgi. Finally, he foregrounds the adoration of goddesses like Inanna, underscoring Sumer’s distinctive portrayal of liberated female divinity. Richly documented and accessible, this study bridges philology, literary history, and comparative religion, making the oldest poetry in human history newly legible for scholars of the ancient Near East, biblical studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.