THE SUN THE LION： EARLIEST HYMN TO THE SUN FROM EBLA AND ABU-SALABIKH （2600- 2500）

A hymn that praises the Sun god belongs to the earliest literature work of Mesopotamian civilization and it expressed a hearty praise of the absolute being, the Sun, the god of brightness of the ancient Akkadian people of 3^rd millennium. It is one of the earliest religious and literature heritages written in Semitic language （2600-2500 B.C） by the Akkadian people, the Semitics in the early Mesopotamia, who began to borrow the Sumerian cuneiforms to write their own speeches. The two exemplars of the hymn were excavated from two distant places： one came during 1963-65 from Tell Abu-Salabikh, the ruin of an unknown ancient city, 12 miles from the northwest ofNippur. A photograph of the main but damaged text, OIP 99 - IAS, no 326, without a handwritten copy, and a hand copy of a fragment of the hymn, OIP 99 no 342, were published by American scholar R. Biggs in 1974I. The language of Abu-Salabikh is the earliest Semitic （c. 2500 B.C）, possibly related to the later Old Akkadian （2300-2100 B.C）. In 1974-1975, a generally complete text of this hymn but rewritten by the local Semitic scribes in Ebla dialect was discovered in the ancient city Ebla （Tell Mardikh）2 in Syria by an Italian archaeologist team. German scholar D. O. Edzard hand-copied the original text in 1984 as The Archiv Reali di Ebla Testi V, no 6 and did an initiative transliteration3. In 1989,