==An early literary catalogue==

{{ http://cdli.ox.ac.uk/images/P275014_detail.jpg?200}}

//Artifact//: Clay tablet\\ 
//Provenience//: Unknown\\
//Period//: Ur III (ca. 2100-2000 BC)\\ 
//Current location//: Yale Babylonian Collection, New Haven (YBC 03654)\\ 
//Text genre, language//: Administrative text; Sumerian\\ 
[[http://cdli.ucla.edu/P275014|CDLI page]]; [[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.0.1.2&display=Crit&charenc=gcirc#|ETCSL]]\\ 

//Description//: There are just two tablets known so far that can be considered literary catalogues dating to the Ur III-period, a period where we have near to no Sumerian literature in written form preserved. This tablet in the Yale Babylonian Collection is the more extensive of these two. Such catalogues or inventories collect the //incipits// of (literary) compositions. The tablet is written in a very fine script with a couple of erasures here and there. It gives us two totals. The first part contains 32 //incipits// of "royal songs" (en8-du lugal). To these the list adds ten "old"(?) songs (en8-du IGI./SZE3-am3). Although assigning //incipits// to literary compositions is quite possible for Old Babylonian text inventories (see [[http://cdli.ucla.edu/P255993|CDLI-Page]] or [[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.0.2.01&display=Crit&charenc=gcirc#|ETCSL]]), just three of the entries in the Ur III-text can be identified so far. One of them - dumu-an-na, "heavenly child" - may very well coincide with the //Adab//-song of Baba (see [[http://cdli.ucla.edu/P345505]] or [[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.2.3.1&display=Crit&charenc=gcirc#|ETCSL]]). The sign-forms on that particularly small tablet can be dated to either the Early Old Babylonian period or even to the end of the 3rd millennium. One might suggest that our difficulties in identifying the //incipits// lie in the fact that the textual integrity was still in flux at the end of the 3rd millennium. (Klaus Wagensonner, University of Oxford) 

//Lineart//: Hallo 1963, 171 - 2.

//Edition(s)//: Hallo, W.W. 1963. "On the Antiquity of Sumerian Literature," //Journal of the American Oriental Society// 83, 167 - 76. 

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