Mesopotamian Literature

The world's oldest known literature comes to us from Mesopotamia, the region bounded by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in roughly the same area as modern-day Iraq and Kuwait.

When writing was invented in Mesopotamia toward the end of the 4th millennium B.C.E., it was for purely practical purposes: to track trade in livestock, commodities, and raw materials. Over the centuries that followed, the cuneiform (literally "wedge-shaped") writing system progressed from simple notations of nouns and numbers to a fully developed method for recording every syllable of the region's spoken language. Eventually scribes began to use cuneiform to record a wide variety of texts, including royal inscriptions, personal letters, legal documents, and literature.

Hundreds of literary works written in Akkadian, a Semitic language related to Arabic and Hebrew, and Sumerian, a linguistic isolate unrelated to any other known language, have been unearthed over the past century and a half. From epic tales of heroes and gods to whimsical debates between everyday objects, these sophisticated texts shed light on the creative and intellectual lives of ancient peoples.