A-nir was composed in August 2002, as a work for the Composition Workshop at the National Conservatory of Music. The title means "lamentation" in Sumerian language and the text is an extract of the first three paragraphs of "The Lament for Sumer and Urim", written between 2600 and 1700 A.C. The present form of the text is a transliteration from the cuneiform version, made by the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford and published at the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.
