Sumerian Literature

The world’s oldest literature—poetry as well as prose—belongs to the Sumerians, that fascinating, enigmatic people who settled over 5,000 years ago on the shores of the Persian Gulf¹ and in the lower (southern) part of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in present-day Iraq. There the Sumerians founded the world’s oldest civilization. They invented, for the first time, a means of communicating language in a preserved, instead of transitory, form—in writing. The writing system they invented is called cuneiform, a wedge-shaped script formed by pressing a stylus into clay tablets that were then baked in the sun or in a kiln. Later, other peoples adapted cuneiform writing to their own languages. The best known and most widely used of these written languages is Akkadian.