Formal debates were a popular entertainment at the court of the kings of the Third Dynasty of Urim. Records survive indicating that payments were made to the performers who took part. Typically, the contest is between two natural phenomena, animals, or materials that are significant in human life: Winter and Summer, Bird and Fish, Sheep and Grain, Tree and Reed, Date Palm and Tamarisk, Hoe and Plough, Silver and Copper. The debate progresses as each contestant, personified, speaks alternately, often with considerable acrimony. Each tries to persuade the audience that it is more beneficial to mankind than the other. Consequently, although the debates give a fascinating insight into Sumerian attitudes to the environment, they reveal an exclusively human-focused set of assessments. Conventionally one of the contestants is in due course adjudged the winner by a god or the king.
The debate between Sheep and Grain is of added interest because it begins with a short ad hoc creation myth (1-42) which portrays a world before sheep and grain, when the gods lived on the Holy Mound, a mythical location where heaven and earth were as yet unseparated from each other. Mankind, it seems, lived at the foot of the Mound, and eventually the gods bestowed sheep and grain on them too.
The personifications of Sheep and Grain begin quarrelling after drinking wine and beer. Sheep is useful for its meat, milk, wool, and gut, and its skin can be turned into leather waterskins and sandals. Its oil is used to make perfumes. Grain, of course, produces bread as well as the mash that is used in making beer; and it is also used for feeding—sheep.
The god Enki finally recommends to the god Enlil that Grain should be judged the winner, implying perhaps that mankind could live without domestic animals but not without bread. However, the balance of arguments on each side is in reality fairly equal.