Approaches to Sumerian Literature

This volume, dedicated to H.L.J. Vanstiphout at the occasion of his retirement from the University of Groningen, July 14th 2006, demonstrates the broad variety of scholarly approaches to the study of ancient Sumerian literature. It contains contributions by Bendt Alster (Ninurta and the Turtle), Nicole Brisch (In Praise of the Kings of Larsa), A.J. Ferrara (A Hodgepodge of Snippets), Alhena Gadotti (Gilgameš, Gudam and the Singer), W.W. Hallo (A Sumerian Apocryphon?), Dina Katz (Appeals to Utu), Jacob Klein (Man and His God), Piotr Michalowski (The Strange History of Tumal), Gonzalo Rubio (Šulgi and the Death of Sumerian), Niek Veldhuis (How Did They Learn Cuneiform?), and Claus Wilcke (Die Hymne auf das Heiligtum Keš).

Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the longtime editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.Niek Veldhuis, Ph.D. (1997) University of Groningen, is Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of California at Berkeley and Director of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts project (http://cuneiform.ucla.edu/dcclt). His publications include Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition “Nanše and the Birds.” With a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names (Brill/Styx 2004).