Quick Answer
A father tells his son not to stand surety for anyone, not to judge anything while drinking, and not to buy a donkey that brays. The son is Ziusudra, the man who will survive the flood. Copies of this text were being written around 2600 BC, which makes it one of the oldest things any living person can sit down and read.
Key Takeaways
- Around 4,600 years old in its earliest copies, and still perfectly comprehensible as advice.
- The son is the flood survivor. This is presented as knowledge from before the world ended.
- It is prudential more than moral. Most of it is about not getting into trouble, and that is more interesting than it sounds.
- The parallels with Proverbs are specific, not vague, particularly on surety and on speech.
- The oldest copies are much shorter than the version you will read, and the difference is worth knowing.
🕑 15 min read
What This Text Is
The Instructions of Shuruppak is a Sumerian text in which a father gives advice to his son. It consists of short admonitions, usually one or two lines each, introduced and periodically punctuated by a formula in which the father announces that he is giving instruction and asks that it be received.
There is no narrative. There is no argument. There is a man telling a younger man how to conduct himself, in a sequence of specific injunctions, and the sequence runs to a few hundred lines in the fullest version.
Its interest is partly in what it says and largely in when it says it.
On the name: Shuruppak is both the speaker's name and the name of a Sumerian city, modern Tell Fara, which in Mesopotamian tradition was one of the antediluvian cities and specifically the city of the flood hero. The text plays on that; the speaker is in some sense the city personified as a father.
How Old It Actually Is
This deserves care because the age is the headline and the headline is usually stated imprecisely.
The earliest surviving copies come from Abu Salabikh in Iraq and date to roughly 2600 to 2500 BC. That places them among the very earliest literary tablets known from anywhere on earth, alongside the first texts that are recognisably literature rather than administration.
Those early copies are short, damaged, and written in an archaic orthography that is genuinely difficult to read. They contain a version of this text, and they do not contain the text most people encounter.
The version that translations print is Old Babylonian, from around 1800 BC. It is much longer, better preserved, and represents eight centuries of expansion, rearrangement and addition.
There are also later Akkadian versions, including bilingual copies, and a fragment found at Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast, which shows the text travelling a very long way from where it started.
So both of the following are true: this is one of the oldest literary texts in existence, and the text you will read is a version from a thousand years after the oldest copies. Popular accounts tend to state the first and omit the second.
Who Is Talking to Whom
The frame is stated at the opening and repeated throughout. Shuruppak, son of Ubara-Tutu, gives instruction to his son.
The son is named, and the name matters enormously. He is Ziusudra.
Ziusudra is the Sumerian flood hero. He is the man who is warned, builds the boat, survives the destruction of humanity, and is afterwards granted long life. He is the same figure who appears in Akkadian as Atrahasis and as Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh.
The text is therefore not simply a father advising a son. It is the last generation of the old world instructing the one person who will carry anything out of it.
The Advice Before the Flood
Once you have noticed the frame, the whole text changes character.
This is presented as antediluvian wisdom: knowledge from before the catastrophe, given to the man who would carry it across. Everything in it has, on its own account, survived the end of the world.
That is a claim about authority, and it is one of the oldest surviving instances of a move that recurs constantly afterwards. The oldest knowledge is the truest. It comes from before a break. It was preserved by a survivor. Every later tradition that claims descent from a lost antiquity, from Atlantis stories to Renaissance claims about Egyptian priestly wisdom, is doing a version of what this text does in its opening lines around 2600 BC.
What is striking is the content of the antediluvian wisdom. Not cosmology. Not the secrets of the gods. Not the names of powers. Advice about donkeys, debts, drinking and who to trust.
That gap is the most interesting thing in the text. Given the setup, a modern writer would put profound revelation in the father's mouth. The Sumerian scribes put in practical instruction about ordinary life among neighbours. Whatever else this tells us, it tells us that in the earliest surviving wisdom literature, the wisdom worth preserving across the end of the world was how to conduct yourself with the people around you.
The Shape of It
The instructions are delivered as short, mostly independent units, in the imperative or the prohibitive.
Many take a two-part form: an instruction followed by a consequence. Do not do this, because that will follow. Others are bare prohibitions. A smaller number are observations rather than commands, statements about how things are that carry an implied instruction.
The sequence is loosely organised. Related items cluster, but there is no argument developing across the text and no structure of the kind the Egyptian instruction texts sometimes have. It is closer to a collection than to a treatise, which is one reason Alster's classic study treated it as a proverb collection.
The repeated formula, in which the father announces that he is giving instruction and asks that it be heeded, breaks the sequence into sections and does the work that chapter divisions do elsewhere.
Do Not Stand Surety
Of the specific injunctions, the one about standing surety is the most striking, because of how long it lasts.
The instruction is not to guarantee another person's obligation. The reason given is that doing so places you at risk from something you do not control, and that it will come back on you.
Now consider where else this appears. The Book of Proverbs returns to it repeatedly and with unusual urgency, warning against striking hands in pledge for a neighbour's debt and advising anyone who has done so to go and get free of it immediately. Ancient Near Eastern legal collections deal with the practice extensively. It recurs in later instruction literature.
Four and a half thousand years, several languages, multiple civilisations, and the same warning: do not attach your solvency to someone else's decisions.
What that persistence indicates is not that the advice is metaphysically profound. It is that surety was a standard feature of credit arrangements across the whole region for millennia, that it ruined people reliably, and that everybody who wrote instruction literature had seen it happen.
Speech Will Wait for You
A cluster of the instructions concern the mouth, and they are consistently the sharpest lines in the text.
Do not speak improperly, because what you have said will lie in wait for you. Do not curse violently, because it returns on the one who spoke it. Do not boast in the drinking house. Do not repeat what you have heard about a quarrel.
The image behind several of them is that speech is not an event but a thing released, which continues to exist and can come back. A word is not over when the sound stops.
There is also a fine line about the danger of slander around a young married woman, warning that the trouble is out of proportion to whatever occurred. The concern is with reputation as a mechanism, and with the fact that it operates independently of the facts.
The Palace Is Slippery
The advice around power is uniformly wary, and this is one of the strands that reads as entirely current.
The palace is described as a slippery place, difficult to stand on. Proximity to authority is treated as a hazard rather than an opportunity. The recommended posture is caution and distance.
Set that beside the general assumption in later wisdom literature, and particularly in the Egyptian instruction texts, which are frequently addressed to men making careers at court and offer advice about how to succeed there. This text is more interested in not being destroyed by it.
There is a related instruction about not beating a farmer's son, on the grounds that he is the one who dug your irrigation channels. That is not sentimentality about the poor. It is a hard-headed observation about who your water depends on.
Donkeys, Fields and Beer
A great deal of the text is agricultural and domestic, and this is the part that makes it feel real rather than antique.
Do not buy a donkey that brays too much. Do not site a field beside a road, because everyone who passes will help themselves and the traffic will ruin it. Do not make judgments while drinking beer.
The donkey line is the one everybody quotes and it is genuinely funny. It is also good advice about buying livestock and about a certain kind of purchase generally: the obvious defect on display is usually attached to defects not on display.
The field-by-the-road instruction is about a real feature of Mesopotamian agriculture, where fields were strips along canals and roads, and it generalises immediately to anything valuable placed where it is easy to take.
The beer line requires no translation at all.
A way to read it that works: take the text ten lines at a time and, for each instruction, ask what conditions would have to exist for that advice to be necessary. A society where surety ruins people has a particular credit system. A society warning about fields beside roads has a particular land arrangement. A society warning about the palace has a particular relationship to power. You can reconstruct a great deal about how people lived from what their fathers told them to avoid.
The Lines That Are Not Prudence
It would be a misreading to present the whole thing as self-protection, because a minority of the instructions are doing something else.
There is a line about the loving heart maintaining a family and the hating heart destroying one, which is not advice about avoiding trouble but a statement about what holds a household together.
There are straightforward prohibitions on theft and on breaking into houses, which are moral rather than tactical.
There is material about the treatment of dependants and about not exploiting weakness.
And there is a recurring sense that fate is unstable and that a person can slip, which gives the prudence its background. The advice is careful because the world is understood to be slippery, and the appropriate response to a slippery world is to keep your footing rather than to move fast.
Where the Genre Goes
This text is the earliest surviving example of a form that had an extraordinary run.
An older authoritative figure, usually a father or a senior official, addresses instruction to a son or a successor. The advice is practical and moral together. The authority is personal and generational rather than divine.
Egypt developed the form independently and elaborately, in the Instruction of Ptahhotep and its successors, addressed to young men entering official life. The Aramaic Ahiqar, an Assyrian court sage advising his nephew, circulated across the Near East for centuries. Biblical Proverbs is built around a father addressing a son. Medieval Europe produced mirrors for princes on the same model.
The form survives because it solves a real problem. A young person needs to be told things that experience teaches too slowly, and the only authority that reliably licenses telling them is the authority of having lived longer.
Compare the Chinese tradition, which does something structurally similar: The Great Learning and the Analects also transmit conduct through an older voice to a younger, though with far more theoretical apparatus around it.
The Proverbs Question
The resemblance to the Book of Proverbs is close enough to require comment.
Shared concerns include standing surety, the dangers of another man's wife, the perils of careless speech, the folly of judgment impaired by drink, and the general structure of a father addressing a son.
What follows from that is not that Proverbs copied a Sumerian tablet. The relationship is far looser and more interesting. Instruction literature was a shared genre across the ancient Near East for over two thousand years, circulating in multiple languages, taught in scribal schools, adapted and reworked continuously. Proverbs itself contains a section widely recognised as drawing on the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope, which is the clearest documented case of transmission in this literature.
Israelite wisdom writers were working inside an established international tradition and doing something distinctive with it, principally by attaching the whole to the fear of the Lord as its stated foundation, which Shuruppak does not do.
What Is Hard About It
Three honest difficulties.
The text is broken. Lines are missing, sections are damaged, and the recensions differ from each other in content and order. Reading a continuous English version conceals a considerable amount of editorial reconstruction.
Some lines are genuinely obscure. Sumerian is a language isolate with no living relatives, and a number of these instructions use vocabulary or idiom that is not securely understood. Different translations of the same line can differ so much that they appear to be different instructions.
And it is embedded in conditions that no longer exist. Irrigation agriculture, a specific credit system, a particular relationship between household and palace, and social arrangements around marriage and dependency. Lifting the sayings out and presenting them as timeless removes exactly what makes them evidence.
Which Edition, and Who Should Read It
Bendt Alster is the scholar to follow. His study of the text, and the expanded treatment in Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, give the text with transliteration, translation and the commentary needed to know what is secure and what is reconstructed.
The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, produced at Oxford, provides a scholarly translation freely available online, and for most readers that is the right place to start. It costs nothing and it is more reliable than most print editions in circulation.
Be careful with cheap reprints. Print-on-demand editions of ancient texts are frequently assembled without scholarly involvement, sometimes with garbled attributions, and the edition linked below is one of a family of such volumes. Use it for convenience if you want it on paper and check anything important against Alster or the corpus.
Read it if you are interested in wisdom literature and want to see where the genre begins. Read it alongside Atrahasis, since the two texts sit either side of the same catastrophe and share a protagonist under different names. Read it if you want a reliable jolt: there is nothing quite like reading a line of practical advice and realising it was written closer to the invention of writing than to the birth of Christ.
Do not read it expecting profundity. Do not read it as a self-help text. And do not repeat the donkey line without mentioning the surety line, which is the one that has actually saved people money for four and a half thousand years.
The most useful thing here is not any individual instruction. It is the shape of the whole. Faced with a son who will outlive the destruction of everything, a father does not hand over cosmology or the names of the gods. He says: be careful what you guarantee, be careful what you say, keep away from power, do not judge anything while drinking, and notice that a loving household holds and a hating one comes apart. Whatever the oldest surviving wisdom literature knows, it thinks the material worth carrying across a flood is how to behave among neighbours. Four and a half thousand years of subsequent religious and philosophical writing has not clearly improved on that ranking.
A father, a son who will survive the flood, and advice about donkeys.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak. This text is available free in a scholarly translation from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, and Bendt Alster's Wisdom of Ancient Sumer is the edition to own if you want the apparatus.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the Instructions of Shuruppak?
A Sumerian wisdom text in which a father named Shuruppak gives practical and moral advice to his son. It survives in copies from as early as around 2600 BC and in a fuller version from about 1800 BC, and it is among the oldest works of literature that can still be read.
Who is the son being advised?
Ziusudra, who in Sumerian tradition is the man who survives the flood, the counterpart of the Akkadian Atrahasis and of Utnapishtim in Gilgamesh. The text therefore presents itself as advice given in the last generation before the world was destroyed.
How old is it exactly?
The earliest surviving copies come from Abu Salabikh and date to roughly 2600 to 2500 BC. Those copies are short and difficult. The version most translations print is Old Babylonian, from around 1800 BC, and is considerably longer. Both statements about its age are true and they are not the same statement.
What kind of advice does it give?
Mostly practical and prudential. Do not stand surety for someone. Do not judge anything while drinking. Do not buy a donkey that brays. Do not put a field beside a road. Do not steal or break in. Watch your speech, because it will be waiting for you later.
Is it moral or just practical?
Both, with the balance toward the practical. A good deal of it is about staying out of trouble rather than about being good. There are genuinely ethical lines, including one about a loving heart sustaining a household and a hating heart destroying one, but the dominant register is prudence.
Does it resemble the Book of Proverbs?
Closely, in form and in several specific concerns. Both warn against standing surety for debts, against involvement with another man's wife, against careless speech, and against judgment impaired by drink. The instruction genre was shared across the ancient Near East for two thousand years before Proverbs was compiled.
What is the instruction genre?
A form in which an authoritative older figure, usually a father or an official, addresses advice to a son or successor. It runs through Egyptian texts such as the Instruction of Ptahhotep, through Shuruppak and Ahiqar, into biblical Proverbs, and eventually into the medieval mirrors for princes.
Why does the flood framing matter?
Because it makes the text antediluvian. This is presented as knowledge from before the destruction, carried across it by the one man who survived. Whether or not readers believed that literally, the framing is a claim about the authority of very old knowledge, and it is the oldest surviving instance of that claim.
Is the text complete?
No. It is fragmentary, the recensions differ, some lines are broken and a number are obscure enough that translators disagree substantially about what they mean. Any continuous English version involves editorial decisions that are not visible on the page.
Is the advice timeless?
Some of it. A good deal is specific to Sumerian conditions: irrigation agriculture, the legal practice of standing surety, the dangers of proximity to the palace, and social arrangements that no longer exist. Reading it purely as universal wisdom flattens what makes it interesting.
What does it say about the palace?
That it is a slippery place. The advice around power is consistently wary: proximity to authority is treated as dangerous rather than desirable, and the recommended posture is caution. This is one of the notes that has aged best.
Which edition should I read?
Bendt Alster's work is the standard, particularly his Wisdom of Ancient Sumer, which gives the text with transliteration and commentary. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford provides a free scholarly translation online, which is where most readers should start.
Read something older than almost everything
This one is free and it takes twenty minutes. Find the translation, sit down, and read a father telling his son not to guarantee other people's debts, in a text that was already being copied out by scribes four and a half thousand years ago. Nothing else available to you is that old and that immediately comprehensible. Most encounters with deep time are abstract. This one is a specific person being specifically sensible, and you can follow every word.
Sources & References
- Alster, B. The Instructions of Suruppak: A Sumerian Proverb Collection.
- Alster, B. (2005). Wisdom of Ancient Sumer. CDL Press.
- The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, University of Oxford, for the freely available scholarly translation.
- The Abu Salabikh tablets, the earliest surviving copies of the text.
- The Instruction of Ptahhotep and the Instruction of Amenemope, for the Egyptian branch of the genre.
- The Book of Proverbs, and scholarship on its relationship to Near Eastern instruction literature.
- The Sumerian flood tradition and the figure of Ziusudra.