The Library
1774 works catalogued century by century, from the literature the Bible was written among to the present — each with a note on what it is, why it lasted, and where to read it.
2100–2001 BC
1 work
c. 2100 BC
Sumerian
The court of Ur-Nammu
The oldest surviving law code, opening with a king who claims to have removed the crooked measure and stopped the powerful from seizing the widow's ox, then setting fines in silver for injuries — a broken bone, a severed nose — rather than demanding the matching mutilation.
2000–1901 BC
1 work
c. 2100–1800 BC
Sumerian
Anonymous
A list of kings and their reigns, beginning when kingship came down from heaven and giving the earliest of them reigns of twenty-eight thousand years and more — then, after a line recording that the flood swept over, dropping to lengths a human being could manage.
1700–1601 BC
2 works
c. 1700 BC
Akkadian
Anonymous
The lesser gods strike over the work of digging the canals, so humanity is made from clay mixed with the blood of a slain god to take the labour. Then people multiply and their noise keeps Enlil awake, and he sends plague, drought, and finally the flood — from which one man is warned to build a boat.
c. 1700 BC; Sumerian original earlier
Akkadian
Anonymous
Ishtar goes down to the land of no return and is stripped of one garment at each of seven gates until she stands naked before her sister and is hung on a hook. While she is below, no bull mounts a cow and no man lies with a woman, and she is ransomed only by sending Dumuzi down in her place.
1400–1301 BC
1 work
c. 1400 BC
Akkadian
Anonymous
Adapa, the first of the seven sages, breaks the wing of the south wind and is summoned before Anu. His god Ea warns him not to eat the food offered in heaven, since it will be the food of death. It is the food of life, and by obeying he loses immortality for himself and for humankind.
1200–1101 BC
1 work
standard version c. 1200 BC; older material from c. 2100 BC
Akkadian
Sin-leqi-unninni
A king and the wild man sent to match him become friends, kill a monster and a bull, and then one of them dies. Gilgamesh, unable to accept it, crosses the waters of death to find the survivor of the flood, who tells him how the gods sent it, how he built the boat and sent out the dove, the swallow, and the raven — and who cannot give him what he came for.
6 of 1774 works