A Study On The Sumerian Proverb Collection 7-9

The Sumerian Proverb is a masterpiece of Sumerian Wisdom Literature which is one of the oldest literary works in the world. The study of Sumerian proverbs began at the end of the 19th century. First in the 1950s, the western scholar Edmund I. Gordon made a systematic attempt to reconstruct the Sumerian proverb collections, but it is still almost absent in the field of Assyriology in China nowadays, In the last few decades, the appearance of Bendt Alster's The Proverbs of Ancient Sumer and of the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) from the University of Oxford opened the door to a new phase in the study of Mesopotamian proverbs. Thanks to their contribution, great achievement in the study of Sumerian Proverbs has been made which is also now much more accessible for scholars and even the wide public. This paper aims at presenting a Chinese translation and a brief analysis of the Sumerian Proverb Collections 7-9, based on previous studies, so that the Chinese audience, especially those who are not fluent in foreign languages, can also have the opportunity to appreciate this particular genre of wisdom literature from Mesopotamia.