German excavation at Warka, the site of ancient Uruk, has run since 1912, and the archaic tablets recovered from the Eanna precinct have been published progressively in a dedicated series ever since. The corpus is the oldest substantial body of writing known anywhere.
It is almost entirely administrative and lexical. The tablets record quantities, commodities, officials and institutions, and standardised word lists used in training scribes. They can be read as accounts without being read as language, because proto-cuneiform notation of this period does not yet write connected speech: the signs record what was counted and how much, not sentences about it.
That is the difficulty the corpus presents to anyone asking about religion. The tablets show an institution of great size administering herds, grain, textiles and personnel from monumental buildings in a precinct that later belonged to Inanna. They tell us how it was run. They do not state whose it was, because a ledger has no occasion to say so, and no dedicatory inscription has been recovered from those levels.
The lexical lists deserve separate notice. Standardised sequences of signs, copied and recopied for scribal training, they are among the earliest evidence anywhere for education as an institution, and they preserve vocabulary in fixed order across centuries. They are also, for the same reason, a poor guide to belief: a list of professions or vessels tells us what a scribe was taught to write, not what anyone in Uruk thought was true.