It contains a disputation poem between two litigants, Palm (designated by the rare name arḫānû) and Vine (Akkadian karānu), each of which praises its own merits and many uses, and discredits those of its rival.
Fifty-four lines from the middle section of the text are preserved, which begin in medias res with a long speech of Palm, immediately followed by Vine's rejoinder.
The Palm and Vine, for example, contains remarkable phraseological similarities with the Debate between the hoe and the plough, even though the latter is attested from manuscripts which predate it by two millennia.
Internal evidence, however, suggests that the poem is not a Hellenistic composition, but an older text preserved only in later manuscripts.
Vines, by contrast, are not native to the Uruk area: to Mesopotamian ears, a dispute between a palm and a vine (or between date beer and wine) may have sounded like a debate between the South and the North, or between native and imported produce.