Lone Heroes or Collaborative Communities? On Sumerian Literature and its Practitioners
Eleanor Robson · British Academy eBooks · 2013
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), a ten-year project to edit and analyse ancient Sumerian literature, came to an end on 31 August 2006. Like Egyptian, Sumerian is one of the world's oldest written literatures, with a classical corpus comprising some 500 compositions attested in many thousands of manuscripts from the early second millennium bc. This chapter reflects on how ETCSL has changed the practice of literary Sumerology, what it has not been able to achieve, and what could and should still be done. In particular, it argues that the collaborative working that projects like ETCSL foster has brought Sumerological practice much closer to ancient ideals of literacy — ideals that have themselves come to light through quantitative analysis of the ETCSL online corpus.