Composition (language) in the context of "Sumerian king list"

Composition studies (also referred to as composition and rhetoric, rhetoric and composition, writing studies, or simply composition) is the professional field of writing, research, and instruction, focusing especially on writing at the college level in the United States.

In most US and some Canadian colleges and universities, undergraduates take freshman or higher-level composition courses. To support the effective administration of these courses, there are developments of basic and applied research on the acquisition of writing skills, and an understanding of the history of the uses and transformation of writing systems and writing technologies (among many other subareas of research), over 70 American universities offer doctoral study in rhetoric and composition. These programs of study usually include composition pedagogical theory, linguistics, professional and technical communication, qualitative and quantitative research methods, the history of rhetoric, as well as the influence of different writing conventions and genres on writers' composing processes more generally.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text, either through deliberate compositional strategies such as quotation, allusion, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche or parody, or by interconnections between similar or related works perceived by an audience or reader of the text. These references are sometimes made deliberately and depend on a reader's prior knowledge and understanding of the referent, but the effect of intertextuality is not always intentional and is sometimes inadvertent. Often associated with strategies employed by writers working in imaginative registers (fiction, poetry, and drama and even non-written texts like performance art and digital media), intertextuality may now be understood as intrinsic to any text.

Intertextuality has been differentiated into referential and typological categories. Referential intertextuality refers to the use of fragments in texts and the typological intertextuality refers to the use of pattern and structure in typical texts. A distinction can also be made between iterability and presupposition. Iterability makes reference to the "repeatability" of certain text that is composed of "traces", pieces of other texts that help constitute its meaning. Presupposition makes a reference to assumptions a text makes about its readers and its context. As philosopher William Irwin wrote, the term "has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Julia Kristeva's original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence".

The Sumerian King List (abbreviated SKL) or Chronicle of the One Monarchy is an ancient literary composition written in Sumerian that was likely created and redacted to legitimize the claims to power of various city-states and kingdoms in southern Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennium BC. It does so by repetitively listing Sumerian cities, the kings that ruled there, and the lengths of their reigns. Especially in the early part of the list, these reigns often span thousands of years. In the oldest known version, dated to the Ur III period (c. 2112 – c. 2004 BC) but probably based on Akkadian source material, the SKL reflected a more linear transition of power from Kish, the first city to receive kingship, to Akkad. In later versions from the Old Babylonian period, the list consisted of a large number of cities between which kingship was transferred, reflecting a more cyclical view of how kingship came to a city, only to be inevitably replaced by the next. In its best-known and best-preserved version, as recorded on the Weld-Blundell Prism, the SKL begins with a number of fictional antediluvian kings, who ruled before a flood swept over the land, after which kingship went to Kish. It ends with a dynasty from Isin (early second millennium BC), which is well-known from other contemporary sources.

The SKL is preserved in several versions, the first fragment of which was published in 1906 by Hermann Volrath Hilprecht, and the second in 1911 by Jean-Vincent Scheil. Most of these date to the Old Babylonian period, but the oldest version of the SKL dates back to the Ur III period. The clay tablets on which the SKL was recorded were generally found on sites in southern Mesopotamia. These versions differ in their exact content; some sections are missing, others are arranged in a different order, names of kings may be absent or the lengths of their reigns may vary. These differences are both the result of copying errors, and of deliberate editorial decisions to change the text to fit current needs.

A style guide is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. A book-length style guide is often called a style manual or a manual of style. A short style guide, typically ranging from several to several dozen pages, is often called a style sheet. The standards documented in a style guide are applicable for either general use, or prescribed use in an individual publication, particular organization, or specific field.

A style guide establishes standard style requirements to improve communication by ensuring consistency within and across documents. They may require certain best practices in writing style, usage, language composition, visual composition, orthography, and typography by setting standards of usage in areas such as punctuation, capitalization, citing sources, formatting of numbers and dates, table appearance and other areas. For academic and technical documents, a guide may also enforce best practices in ethics (such as authorship, research ethics, and disclosure) and compliance (technical and regulatory). For translations, a style guide may even be used to enforce consistent grammar, tone, and localization decisions such as units of measure.