In this volume, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman investigate how Akkadian speakers learned Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period in areas outside major cities. Despite the fact that it was a dead language at the time, Sumerian was considered a crucial part of scribal training due to its cultural importance. This book provides transliterations and translations of 715 cuneiform scribal school exercise texts from the Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Collection at Cornell University. These tablets, consisting mainly of lexical texts, illustrate the process of elementary foreign-language training at scribal schools during the Old Babylonian period. Although the tablets are all without provenance, discrepancies between these texts and those from other sites, such as Nippur and Ur, strongly suggest that the texts published here do not come from a previously studied location. Comparing these tablets with previously published documents, Gadotti and Kleinerman argue that elementary education in Mesopotamia was relatively standardized and that knowledge of cuneiform writing was more widespread than previously assumed. By refining our understanding of education in southern Mesopotamia, this volume elucidates more fully the pedagogical underpinnings of the world’s first curriculum devised to teach a dead language. As a text edition, it will make these important documents accessible to Assyriologists and Sumerologists for future study.

This book examines a collection of twenty-two literary letters and related compositions, the Sumerian Epistolary Miscellany, studied as part of the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum, in an attempt to better understand the nature of the curriculum as a whole.

In this volume, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman investigate how Akkadian speakers learned Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period in areas outside major cities. Despite the fact that it was a dead language at the time, Sumerian was considered a crucial part of scribal training due to its cultural importance. This book provides transliterations and translations of 715 cuneiform scribal school exercise texts from the Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Collection at Cornell University. These tablets, consisting mainly of lexical texts, illustrate the process of elementary foreign-language training at scribal schools during the Old Babylonian period. Although the tablets are all without provenance, discrepancies between these texts and those from other sites, such as Nippur and Ur, strongly suggest that the texts published here do not come from a previously studied location. Comparing these tablets with previously published documents, Gadotti and Kleinerman argue that elementary education in Mesopotamia was relatively standardized and that knowledge of cuneiform writing was more widespread than previously assumed. By refining our understanding of education in southern Mesopotamia, this volume elucidates more fully the pedagogical underpinnings of the world’s first curriculum devised to teach a dead language. As a text edition, it will make these important documents accessible to Assyriologists and Sumerologists for future study.

In The Divine/Demonic Seven and the Place of Demons in Mesopotamia, Gina Konstantopoulos analyses the Sebettu, a group of seven divine/demonic figures found across a wide range of Mesopotamian textual and artistic sources in Mesopotamia from the late third to first millennium BCE. The Sebettu appeared both as fierce, threatening demons and as divine, protective, figures. These seemingly contradictory qualities worked together, as their martial ferocity facilitated their religious and political role. When used in royal inscriptions, they became fierce warriors attacking the king’s enemies, retaining that demonic nature. This flexibility was not unique to the Sebettu, and this study thus provides a lens through which to examine the place of demons in Mesopotamia as a whole.

This volume—the companion book to the special exhibition Back to School in Babylonia of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago—explores education in the Old Babylonian period through the lens of House F in Nippur, excavated jointly by the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s and widely believed to have been a scribal school. The book's twenty essays offer a state-of-the-art synthesis of research on the history of House F and the educational curriculum documented on the many tablets discovered there, while the catalog's five chapters present the 126 objects included in the exhibition, the vast majority of them cuneiform tablets.

"This sweeping history of the ancient Near East (Mesopotamia, Syria, Anatolia, Iran) takes readers on a journey from the creation of the world's first cities to the conquest of Alexander the Great. The book is built around the life stories of many ancient men and women, from kings, priestesses, and merchants to bricklayers, musicians, and weavers. Their habits of daily life, beliefs, triumphs, and crises, and the changes that they faced over time are explored through their written words and the archaeological remains of the buildings, cities, and empires in which they lived. Rather than chronicling three thousand years of kingdoms, the book instead creates a tapestry of life stories through which readers come to know specific individuals from many walks of life, and to understand their places within the broad history of events and institutions in the ancient Near East. These life stories are preserved on ancient cuneiform tablets, which allow us to trace, for example, the career of a weaver as she advanced to became a supervisor of a workshop, listen to a king trying to persuade his generals to prepare for a siege, and feel the pain of a starving young couple who were driven to sell all four of their young children into slavery during a famine. What might seem at first glance to be a remote and inaccessible ancient culture proves to be a comprehensible world, one that bequeathed to us many of our institutions and beliefs, a truly fascinating place to visit"--

This book examines education as a means to explore knowledge and literacy in the Old Babylonian period. It further employs a new method to research these topics. Contrary to numerous existing studies on the subject, the author examines elementary education globally, that is, in pursuit of Old Babylonian education in its entirety. Typically, education is examined in a piecemeal fashion. It's as if education centered on lexicography alone or mathematics alone. This work encompasses a view about educational content and knowledge systems, as opposed to only specific aspects or branches of them. In doing so, a characterization of institution and society is made possible allowing the work to open new general perspectives on Mesopotamian knowledge, literacy, and education.