This volume contains eleven articles, demonstrating the broad variety of scholarly approaches to the study of Sumerian literature. It is dedicated to H.L.J. Vanstiphout at the occasion of his retirement from the University of Groningen, July 14th 2006.

Piotr Michalowski is George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the longtime editor of the Journal of Cuneiform Studies.
Niek Veldhuis, Ph.D. (1997) University of Groningen, is Associate Professor of Assyriology at the University of California at Berkeley and Director of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts project (http: //cuneiform.ucla.edu/dcclt). His publications include Religion, Literature, and Scholarship: The Sumerian Composition "Nanse and the Birds." With a Catalogue of Sumerian Bird Names (Brill/Styx 2004).