Approaches to Sumerian Literature ─ Studies in Honour of Stip H.l.j. Vanstiphout

Dutch cuneiform scholar Vanstiphout has been concerned not so much with what ancient Mesopotamian texts say, but how they produce their message. Contributors identified only by name further his structural approach in essays on such aspects of Sumerian literature as the parodia sacra, the royal correspondence of Ur reconsidered, whether Man and His God is a wisdom poem or a cultic lament, and how people learned to write cuneiform anyway. Annotation c2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the longtime editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.Niek Veldhuis, Ph.D. (1997) University of Groningen, is Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of California at Berkeley and Director of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts project (http://cuneiform.ucla.edu/dcclt). His publications include Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition “Nan?e and the Birds.” With a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names (Brill/Styx 2004).