The Wisdom of Shuruppak

The World's Oldest Book of Proverbs

At the dawn of the twentieth century, archaeologists excavated a mound in Iraq that turned out to be the ancient city of Adab. Adab was mentioned in the Sumerian King List but was abandoned after the Neo-Sumerian period, in the period of the biblical Judges (c. 1300 BC). Among the hundreds of tablets recovered and translated was a text called The Inst…