/lit/ - Literature

>>14371733
Also, according to ECTSL, the literary genres are:
>An initial 0 is used for ancient literary catalogues in which compositions are cited by their first lines.
>An initial 1 indicates compositions with a high narrative content, 1.1 to 1.7 being ones in which deities are the principal protagonists and 1.8 ones in which legendary heroes such as Lugalbanda play that role.
>Category 2 moves on from myth and epic to compositions referring to events and rulers that are attested elsewhere in the written record, although presenting both according to highly stylised paradigms that provide little historically reliable information. Categories 2.3 to 2.8 consist of praise of rulers and of divine hymns with prayers on behalf of rulers, grouped first by the city which then served as capital, and within that by the kings in chronological sequence.
>The primary focus of category 3 is on letters, including ones between historically documented figures and ones petitioning deities for assistance. While most of Sumerian literature can be classified as poetry on the basis of its style, a particular feature being the frequent use of syntactic parallelism, the letters between human correspondents are best regarded as prose. They are, however, classifiable as literature partly because they come from a curricular context and partly because they appear to be creative adaptations, rather than exact copies, of actual correspondence.
>Categories 4.01 to 4.33 consist of hymns praising deities and 4.80 of hymns praising temples, illustrating the central role that the divine played in Mesopotamia and the conceptual importance of the temple, the deity's earthly residence, to the functioning of society.
>Category 5 is more heterogeneous. It includes various compositions related to schooldays and scribal training (5.1); debates between personified aspects of nature in which each participant piles increasingly extravagant vitriol on the other until a deity, or sometimes king, reaches a verdict between the two (5.3); dialogues and diatribes, some of which glory similarly in invective but feature human participants (5.4); compositions celebrating the qualities of living as well as departed individuals (5.5); didactic compositions offering idealised moral and practical guidance (5.6); and lexical compositions making elaborate use of different words containing the same sound (5.5.4) or placing semantically related words within a narrative structure (5.9.1).
>The final category, 6, consists mainly of proverbs, many of which were organised into collections that also contain animal fables and folk tales.