The First Children's Literature? The Case for Sumer

Children's literature, as the term is generally understood today, cannot be said to exist before the eighteenth century and the advent of printed books marketed to children for their enjoyment. Some scholars, however, believe that works from earlier periods routinely associated with children, even if their purpose is didactic or they were not written specifically for children, can also be classified as children's literature. Standard bibliographies of children's literature begin with texts from the medieval period; in addition, recent scholarship has focused on medieval and renaissance literature associated with children.¹ In fact, works just as closely associated with children are to be found at a much earlier period, in the oldest written literature so far recovered in any significant quantity, the Sumerian. This investigation of the Sumerian child's literary world will describe these works and attempt to demonstrate how they reflect certain values found in Sumerian culture as a whole and how they are an important means for transmitting those values to the more influential members of Sumerian society.

Extant Sumerian literature consists of more than thirty thousand lines of text found in over five thousand tablets and fragments. It was composed by a people who lived in Mesopotamia (now the southern half of Iraq), between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. By the fourth century B.C., the Sumerians had developed an urban society organized into nine city-states headed by kings, who in turn were supported by a powerful priesthood and the scribal bureaucracy needed to administer an agricultural economy based on an elaborate, state-centered irrigation system. Although the earliest literary documents date from around 2400 B.C., before the conquest of Sumer and neighboring areas in 2334 B.C. by Sargon of Akkad, most of the texts discussed here come from the time of the Sumerian renaissance, which was ushered in by the founding of the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2112 B.C. The end of the Sumerian period and the beginning of the Babylonian are marked by the accession of Hammurabi, King of Babylon, to the throne in 1792 B.C. Nevertheless, the culture of Mesopotamia, if not the language, remained predominantly Sumerian, and Sumerian language and literature continued to dominate the school curriculum until about 1000 B.C.²

I

Songs and lullabies provide the first literary experiences for many children. A "chant," purported to be created by the wife of Shulgi, a ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur, is the first lullaby known, according to Samuel Noah Kramer (History 327).³ Apparently troubled by the ill health of one of her sons, the Queen begins (trans. Kramer, History 329-31):

U-a a-u-aIn my ururu-chant may he grow big,In my ururu-chant may he grow large,Like the irina-tree may he grow stout of root,Like the shakir-plant may he grow broad of crown.

After several lines she continues:

Come Sleep, come Sleep,Come to where my son is,Put to sleep his restless eyes,Put your hand on his painted eyes,And as for his babbling tongue,Let not the babbling tongue shut out his sleep.

She goes on to promise her son lettuce and cheeses to make him feel better and toward the end of the chant wishes he may have a family, food, happiness, and the good will of the gods:

May the wife be your support,May the son be your lot,May the winnowed barley be your bride,May Ashnan, the kusu-goddess be your ally,May you have an eloquent guardian angel,May you achieve a reign of happy days,May the feasts make bright your forehead.

This lullaby fulfills the definition of the genre in the Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, "a song or chant designed to soothe babies or young children to sleep," and predates by at least a thousand years the Roman lullaby "Lalla, lalla, lalla" there referred to (326). The Oxford Companion adds that the beginning of the term is said to derive from "lu" and "la"; the Sumerian lullaby begins...