Introduction

Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE.

The corpus contains Sumerian texts in transliteration, English prose translations and bibliographical information for each composition. The transliterations and the translations can be searched, browsed and read online using the tools of the website.

Funding for the ETCSL project came to an end in the summer of 2006 and no work is currently being done to this site or its contents.

For more information, see the About ETCSL menu or the site map.

In 2017, the Faculty of Oriental Studies IT Department carried a series of changes to the ETCSL backend, including upgrading the code to work on PHP7, the latest version of the software. Should you see any issues with the website, please contact us on the details on the General Info page.

Browsing and searching the corpus