Sumer

Sumer, in the far south of Mesopotamia, is the earliest civilisation whose religion can actually be read, and its basic institution is the temple household.

Each city belonged to a god: Nippur to Enlil, Uruk to Inanna and An, Eridu to Enki, Ur to Nanna the moon. The temple was not a place people visited to pray so much as an estate, with fields, herds, workshops, storerooms and a large staff, all held to be the property of the deity and administered on his or her behalf. The god was housed in a statue, fed twice daily, clothed, and taken out in procession. Writing itself appears to have developed out of the accounting this required, which makes the world's first documents temple receipts.

Sumerian scribes then used that writing for religious literature, and the corpus is substantial: hymns to the temples of every major city, laments over cities destroyed, myths of Enki and of Inanna, and a narrative of Inanna's descent to the underworld in which she passes seven gates, surrenders an item of clothing or regalia at each, and is killed. The temple hymns are attributed to Enheduanna, a daughter of Sargon installed as high priestess at Ur, which if the attribution holds makes her the earliest author in the world known by name.

A flood story, a king list of implausibly long reigns before the flood, and a paradise account also belong to this literature.

Sumerian died as a spoken language somewhere around the beginning of the second millennium BCE, replaced by Akkadian, and then continued in use for another two thousand years as a language of religion and learning.

Scribes trained in Akkadian-speaking Babylonia and Assyria learned Sumerian from grammatical exercises, sign lists and bilingual texts, and copied the old compositions for centuries after nobody spoke them. Rituals kept Sumerian formulas; incantations were written in Sumerian with an Akkadian translation running line by line beside them; temple laments were still being performed by specialist priests in the Hellenistic period. The relationship is roughly that of Latin to medieval Europe, sustained for longer.

That habit is why the material survives at all, and it is also why it survives in the form it does. Most Sumerian literature is known from copies made by student scribes in Babylonian schools around 1800 BCE, several centuries after composition, and the school curriculum determined what got copied. Compositions that fell out of the syllabus are lost.

The modern recovery has been correspondingly institutional. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature assembled composite texts and translations of several hundred compositions and made them freely available, which transformed access to a literature previously scattered across specialist publications, and the volume of untranslated tablets in museum collections remains large.