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Rather, Inana may be humiliating Su-kale-tuda one last time by reminding him of the existence of her lover, the shepherd-god Dumuzid. But Inana’s words do capture here the importance of Sumerian literature  xlvii for its royal patrons. A good literary work will survive, one hopes, long after the individual patron is dead. Thus immortality of a kind is achieved. Sulgi and Isme-Dagan’s commissions lived on in House F and elsewhere for centuries after they had died, and long after their dynasties had collapsed— and we are remembering and celebrating the literature they patronized some four thousand years later.

What did Axe and other literary works mean to those who wrote, copied, read, heard, and thought about literature in ancient Sumer? Readership and literacy Today it is virtually impossible to escape from the written word. Even when we are far from ‘civilization’ we carry it with us: on the manufacturers’ washing instructions on the labels of our clothes; on the identity cards, driving licences, and till receipts in our wallets; on the number plates of our cars and serial numbers on our bicycle tyres.

From schools such as House F there are predominantly two different types of literary source: small tablets like UM 55-21-327, our source C of Axe, which contain 20–30 lines of a composition; and larger ones which may contain the whole composition (or a group of shorter works, like Collection B), or a half of it, or a third. Often these large tablets (and prisms, like source D of Axe) look very beautifully written but are full of errors and inaccuracies. It appears that the students learned Sumerian literary works in 20-30 line passages by writing them out, committing them to memory, and writing out again all the passages of that work learned so far.