Lament for Uruk
A Sumerian city lament for Uruk, Gilgamesh's city, destroyed in the collapse around 2000 BCE. Composed by unnamed temple scribes.
- Original byline
- Anonymous
- Published
- Date not recorded
- Form
- Poems
- Authorship
- Still unknown
- Reason for anonymity
- Unrecorded
- Copyright
- Public domain
- Reference
- Wikipedia · Wikidata
The authorship story
The Lament for Uruk mourns the city of Anu and Inanna, Gilgamesh's own Uruk, caught in the general catastrophe that ended the Ur III age. The gods decree destruction, the people are scattered, and the poem pleads for restoration of the rites. Like its companion laments for Ur, Eridu, and Nippur, it is liturgical poetry composed in the early second millennium BCE by temple scribes whose names the tradition never recorded. The city that gave literature its first hero received its elegy from an author without a name.
Questions readers ask
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