The hymn to Ninhursag's temple at Kesh, mentioned in passing as one of her honours, deserves fuller notice on its own terms: the Kesh Temple Hymn is among the oldest pieces of literature preserved anywhere in the world, with copies attested on tablets from the Early Dynastic period, roughly the twenty sixth century BCE, found not only in Sumer itself but as far away as Ebla in Syria, showing that the text was already circulating well beyond its own region within a few centuries of the invention of writing. Remarkably, the hymn continued to be copied by scribes for well over a thousand years afterward, appearing in later curricular collections used to train scribes in Old Babylonian schools around 1800 BCE, alongside other early Sumerian literary works, so that Sumerian students were still learning to write by copying out praise of Ninhursag's temple many centuries after the hymn was first composed and long after Sumerian itself had ceased to be anyone's native spoken language, surviving purely as a learned, literary and liturgical language.
The hymn praises Kesh and its temple in lavish cosmic terms, comparing the sanctuary to the very foundations of the universe, and its longevity in the scribal curriculum reflects both Ninhursag's enduring importance as one of the four great deities of the Sumerian pantheon and the broader Mesopotamian educational practice of using venerable religious poetry as the basic material through which literacy itself was transmitted from one generation of scribes to the next, tying Ninhursag's cult directly to the mechanics of how Mesopotamian civilization preserved and passed on its own writing system.