Sumerian disputations

In their own language, the texts are described as adamin in the doxologies at the end of the poem, which literally means "contests (between) two".

[2] The genre outlived its Sumerian form and continued to resonate in texts written in Middle Eastern languages for millennia.

The disputation section ends when the contenders decide to appeal to a higher authority, perhaps a god (e.g. Enlil in Hoe and Plough) or man (e.g. Shulgi in Tree and Reed), to elect the winner.

[9] With the exception of the Hoe and the Plough, all these poems also contain a Sumerian cosmogony describing the creation of the cosmos and its creatures (including the two contenders) by the gods.

[12] Nevertheless, some remarkable phraseological continuity is attested, such as between Hoe and Plough with the Akkadian Palm and Vine, even though two millennia separate their composition.

The transliterations and translations subsequently became available on the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) in the early 2000s: as of 2017, only the content of Tree and Reed is not publicly available in a database.