Today it is virtually impossible to escape from the written word. Even when we are far from ‘civilization’ we carry it with us: on the manufacturers’ washing instructions on the labels of our clothes; on the identity cards, driving licences, and till receipts in our wallets; on the number plates of our cars and serial numbers on our bicycle tyres. The young child learns to read and write through everyday environmental exposure to words in print as much as through planned and structured lessons with parents or teachers. Those who fail to read and write competently are effectively excluded from many activities that modern society takes for granted. Without functional literacy it becomes difficult to email, shop, vote.
Imagine, instead, a world in which the literate were in the minority; in which only large public institutions and particularly wealthy families needed writing. Knowledge of writing was as restricted in ancient Sumer as the ability to understand the intricacies of the stock market is today; it was a tool for managing wealth, for proving ownership. There were different degrees of literacy, painstakingly acquired over many years. The stock-taker of a temple warehouse would have had a different level or quality of literacy from a notary specializing in family legal documents; even the members of the ruling elite might have only the shakiest grasp of reading and writing. There was, in short, an economic and a social value to every cuneiform sign recorded. Writing was not therefore something to be scattered around freely but a hard-won professional skill to be dispensed judiciously and sparingly— and usually for a fee.
Seen in this light the existence of written literature in Sumerian society is absolutely extraordinary. It had no obviously economic value or function; there was no market for leisure reading. But it must have served some purpose. What was Sumerian literature for? Who were its producers and consumers (to continue the economic theme)?
Of course, it would be naive to expect just one single context and function for Sumerian literature as a whole, or even for a single Sumerian literary work. It is instructive to look at London Airports long and varied publication history. It first appeared in 1974 in Christopher Logue’s pamphlet Mixed Rushes and was then published in a collection of his works called Ode to the Dodo: Poems 1953—1978, which came out in 1981. In the early 1990s it appeared on posters on London tube trains as part of a scheme called Poems on the Underground. Since then it has been anthologized many times and now can be found in school textbooks, on the web—and even in the introductions to books on Sumerian literature! It also travels in people’s memories and is passed on, as are many poems, through recitation and repetition. Despite its wry suggestion that literature is only fit for the rubbish bin, the poem has found a wide variety of homes: scholarly, public, scholastic, private, institutional. Sumerian literature was disseminated in all these sorts of contexts too, and in each we can detect a reason for it being there.
World History
