Letter from the High Priest Lu'enna to the King of Lagash (Girsu, c.2400 BC).In this letter, the hig

Letter from the High Priest Lu'enna to the King of Lagash (Girsu, c.2400 BC).In this letter, the high priest informs the king (possibly Entemena)of his son’s death during a fight against sixty Elamites who hadinvaded and plundered the territory of Lagash. On the back is a listof the booty taken (or taken back) from Elam. This terracotta tabletis 7.8cm high, 7.8cm wide, and 2.2cm thick.The Sumerians were the first civilization to develop the art ofwriting. Early pictograms conveyed basic information, such as “twosheep – five goats – Kish,” but wasn’t able to give details. This system developed further, primarily in the city of Uruk, and bythe Early Dynastic Period (c. 2900 BC) the system that would produceworks like the Epic of Gilgamesh was firmly in place.The Sumerian language became the lingua franca of Mesopotamia – alanguage adopted as a common tongue between speakers of differentnative languages. Although the Akkadian language replaced Sumerianat some point, the Sumerian cuneiform system was still used by otherlanguages (including Akkadian).Early texts have personal names in other languages, showing thatother languages were still spoken at the time. Mesopotamia was neverlinguistically or culturally homogenous.Sumerian writers influenced later writers, including those who wrotethe books of the Bible. The Myth of Adapa was an influence on thelater Garden of Eden; the Eridu Genesis has similarities to the Fallof Man, and the Atrahasis was an earlier version of the Great Floodmyth.The high priestess Enheduanna was the world’s first author known byname. She composed over 40 hymns for use in temple worship – thefirst authored liturgy.Mesopotamian fables were later popularized by Aesop, and the Epic ofGilgamesh inspired works like the Iliad and the Odyssey.Sumerian influence on later civilizations was not limited toliterature and writing. The concept of the gods living in the city’stemple, and the shape and size of Sumerian ziggurats, may haveinfluenced later Egyptian beliefs about their gods, and thedevelopment of the pyramid.The Sumerian concept of time (using a base-60 system) was adopted byother civilizations. The cylinder seal, an individual’s sign ofpersonal identification, remained in use in Mesopotamia until c. 612and the fall of the Assyrian Empire. -- source link

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