A Study On "Proverbs Of Ancient Sumer Collection 10-13"

The cuneiform tablets inscribed with Sumerian literature unearthed in Mesopotamia and its vicinity are the world's earliest literary works in which the Wisdom Literature is the masterpiece among the ancient literature compositions. Sumerian proverbs and fables are the important genre of the Sumerian Wisdom Literature. Many proverbs arose from the speech of daily life of the ordinary people while a few of them originate from the classical literary works. In the board sense of these proverb collections, a handful of them also included animals fable.The tablets with the earliest Sumerian proverbs come from the site of Abu-(?)alabikh, including the "Early Dynastic proverb collection" and the "Early Dynastic versions of Suruppak's Instructions". A large number of round school tablets inscribed with a single or a few proverbs date from the first half of the second millennium B.C. (Isin-Larsa period 1900-1800 B.C.). The largest group of these tablets comes from Nippur, with the second largest from Ur, others from Kish, Sippar, Susa, Uruk and some are of unknown provenance. There are also a few bilingual tablets (in Sumerian and Akkadian) dating from Assurbanipal's (668-627B.C.) library in Nineveh.Until now, the Chinese translation of Sumerian proverbs is basically missing. Also a prospective study of their literary merit and ideological value from the point of view of the ancient Near East is absent in Chinese academic circles. Lacking of the monograph of Sumerian proverb and with only a few numbers of papers relevant to that, the study of this topic is almost in blank in China. The reconstruction of this composition is significant not only for the further study of literature of the ancient Near East, but also for a deeper insight of its culture. Thus the Institute for the history of ancient civilizations of Northeast Normal University has launched a long-term project aimed to provide and complete the voluminous work of translating the Sumerian proverbs into Chinese.Among the publications related to Mesopotamian civilization, the collation and reconstruction of these Sumerian proverb collections are still lacking in China. This paper is constituted as a part of the above-mentioned project based on the study of Alster's Proverbs of ancient Sumer, attempts to provide a relatively systematic Chinese translation of Sumerian proverb collection 10-14 and the summarization of some common public values between the world's earliest civilization---Mesopotamian civilization and the ancient Chinese civilization.