Sumerian, although there are indications of Akkadian in the ordering of entries. And
the scribe was trained to translate back and forth between Sumerian and Akkadian. The
long lists of words were designed to be internalized. There was much greater flexibility
in terms of the content and ordering of what the student had to learn, and many devices
were used to help him commit this great bulk of knowledge to memory. Unlike the third
millennium lists, the Old Babylonian lists were the most elementary tools. They are
commonly found on crudely made tablets or written with crudely made signs.
Lessons at school sometimes included the copying of old inscriptions. These
stretched back to the Old Akkadian period, through Ur III period and into the more
recent Old Babylonian period itself. There are two interesting features of these texts.
First, copies survive of inscriptions by a Gutian king, indicating not only that the
monuments of these rulers, elsewhere in the literature derided as the “fanged snake of
the mountains” were preserved and respected, but also that they were considered worth
studying. Second, it is perhaps surprising that there is not a prevalence of pious frauds,
with similar inscriptions made up for famous old Sumerian rulers such as Gilgamesh.
This was part of an enculturation process, but in this instance at least, there was a clear
distinction between rhetoric and reality.
Letters could sometimes still be written in Sumerian, although perhaps this is more akin
to the nineteenth-century academic habit of publishing in Latin, or to King Sargon of
Assyria’s insistence that his officials write to him in Akkadian, not the vernacular Aramaic.
In the linguistically mixed situation of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, all scribes were
trained in Sumerian, whatever their mother-tongue. It was the mark of an educated man.
Just as the Uruk traditions were maintained for over 1 , 000 years, so too the Old
Babylonian traditions would in turn be faithfully nurtured until the end of cuneiform
almost another 2 , 000 years later. Again the lists traveled with the writing system, as the
appropriate means of education. Like their Early Dynastic predecessors, the scribes of
second millennium Syria–Palestine (and even Anatolia and Egypt) would learn lists of
words for plants, animals and places that bore little relation to the world around them.
The great libraries of first millennium Mesopotamia contained copies of these same
lists, even though their contents were becoming archaic and difficult to understand;
one response was to create new texts to help interpret them. The tradition was not
broken by either the Persian conquest or the Greek one. Some of the latest known
cuneiform texts are the product of Greeks learning Sumerian by copying these lists
(most recently Westenholz 2007 ). On one side of the tablet is the old text, on the other
the sounds of the Sumerian and Akkadian words spelled out in the Greek alphabet.
Much of the Old Babylonian literature fell out of use, although some texts would live
on for centuries to come.
REFERENCES
Biggs, R.D., 1974. Inscriptions from Tell Abu Salabikh(OIP 99 ). Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Burrows, E.R., 1935. Archaic texts(UET 2 ). London, printed by order of the Trustees of the British
Museum and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania
Cavigneaux, A., 1991. [No title] in A. Cavigneaux, U. Finkbeiner, U. Seidl, H. Siewert, Baghdader
Mitteilungen, vol. 22 , pp. 1 – 163
Cooper, J.S., 1986. Presargonic Inscriptions.New Haven, CN: American Oriental Society
Damerow, P., Englund, R. and Nissen, H., 1993. Archaic Bookkeeping: early writing and techniques
of economic administration in the ancient Near East. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
–– The first scribes ––