Fictional Sumerian Autobiographies

Scott B. Noegel

For many years scholars have noted the presence of a fictional autobiography genre in Akkadian literature. Longman's important monograph on the subject (1991), though a thorough and ingenious collation of research on the subject, nevertheless dismisses the possibility of Sumerian analogues. The following article posits that this dismissal is unfounded and finds four Sumerian texts to be fictional autobiographies. The existence of these four analogues suggests that a comprehensive search for this genre in Sumerian and a fresh examination of Sumerian historiography are in order.

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