Or maybe that poem was a joke, or doggerel or something. "You make me happy even without beer" still sounds pretty close to the mark. Is there anything to suggest it was an important work, or is it just momentous because it's really old and still legible?

The fact that it was put on a tablet at a time when only important things were put on tablets, indicates that it was not a joke. As to its quality, I have no idea.

As for the other part, the problem I see is that if you imply that certain objects have inherent beauty, then why wouldn't all objects have inherent beauty? If all objects are beautiful, then what is art and what isn't art? Is everything art? Is nothing art? If all art is inherently beautiful, is all art equally potent? If the viewer is unable to perceive the inherent beauty, should the artist try something new or simply try again? Should the viewer try again? Should the viewer have to try at all?

Anyway, I don't think 'beauty' is requisite of art, which is why I used the term potency. Furthermore, art objects don't "do" anything without the viewer and so cannot be said to make "apparent the beauty behind that first generative idea" since it cannot be known what that generative idea was; instead, meaning must be inferred (unless the artist explicitly states intention to set the piece up or something). Potency must be relative, since it can't be absolute. Also, art is culture and culture is more than language and since language is imperfect as is understanding, already we can see that there is decay in the potency of ideas, even in attempting to communicate them.

And no, I don't think it's a cop out. Sure, we might be able to feel the potency of a work of art from another time, for any number of reasons but language poses a problem. Allow me a quick illustration. Let's take a color word, for example: blue. Already, you as an English speaker are aware that this word has more than one meaning and that it evokes things on the level of cultural experience as well as social memes. Blue can mean a wide range of colors, evoking the navy, royalty, midnight, the sky, eyes, water, blueberries, bruises. These evocations exist in two places as well. We have the visual or physical recall of these things which are colored blue, but also in our language they are described as blue or often used in conjunction with blue: navy blue, royal blue, blue-blood(ed), midnight blue, sky blue, blue sky, blue eyes, clear blue water, blueberries, black and blue. It can also mean "sad" or "down" or "sexually frustrated". In English, it just so happens that "blue" is a homophone of "blew" which has a variety of meanings as well.

Every language has these kinds of connections that are unique and which shape a speaker's ideas of the world. Nothing colors your experience like your mother tongue does. Learning another language to the same degree of intimacy as one's mother tongue is incredibly difficult and of course, does not shape experience in the same way that the mother tongue does, as our understanding of it grows as we grow physically and mentally in a way that feels "natural" to us, even though there is very little about it that is natural at all. And why should there be? Language is technology.

So, that poem. In English it is rendered "You make me happy even without beer." In Sumerian? Who knows? What we do know is that 'beer' in the Sumerian sense is not beer in the contemporary American sense. Beer was a necessity, a supplement to the diet in the form of safe calories and a way of safely ingesting water as well as a way of unwinding. The "you" is even less certain. We do not know the sex of the person being referred to, or if it is a person at all. For all we know, "you" could be the translation of any number of possible pronouns, each with their own, specific meanings.

So the inherent beauty is what? A comparison? Are comparisons inherently beautiful? I suppose some may be, but certainly not all. To contemporary eyes, this poem would be an insult, or a joke. In the past? It could have been an incredible feat of finely nuanced poetry, but personally I have no way of knowing or more importantly, experiencing it. If I had read that poem without any context, I don't think that I would have recognized it as such, if I were able to read it at all.