The Letter-Prayer (Petition to a God)
A petition addressed not to the governor but to one's god: 'Why have you let this befall your servant?'
Also: letter-prayer · letter prayer · petition to a god · prayer letter · appeal to the personal god
Some Sumerian prayers take the literary form of a letter — written, like a petition to a king or governor, but addressed to a god. The petitioner names the deity with honor, describes their suffering or injustice, protests their own devotion, and asks the god to intervene. Because Mesopotamians could write to their superiors to seek redress, it felt natural to write the same way to the divine superior who governed one's fate. These letter-prayers give us an unusually personal, almost legal voice of complaint and appeal directed heavenward.
In short
A Sumerian prayer cast in the form of a letter addressed to a deity (or to one's personal god), stating a grievance and requesting intervention, modeled on petitions sent to a human lord.
Where it’s found
Sumerian letter-prayers, e.g. 'Letter from Inanaka to the goddess Nintinuga' (ETCSL 3.3.10) and the letters to deities/kings in ETCSL group 3.3 (in corpus)
How the idea developed across Sumer, Babylon & Assyria
A distinctively Sumerian (Old Babylonian school) form; the genre overlaps with the 'man and his god' righteous-sufferer texts in its tone of aggrieved appeal to one's personal deity. The Akkadian counterpart is more the šuilla / dingiršadabba register.