Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta

Anonymous / tradition · c. 18th century BC (Old Babylonian copies of an older Sumerian composition) · Nippur (Iraq) · epic

A dispute between the kings of Uruk and Aratta escalates until Enmerkar's messenger can no longer hold an increasingly elaborate demand in memory, and the poem stages this breakdown as the very moment writing had to be invented, arguing that literacy was born from a message too complex for speech alone.