animals etc. In other words, the types of item being recorded were those found in
the contemporary economic documents. There are no lists for wild animals, although
we see them depicted in art, no lists of gods, although there are temples to them,
nor of stars, although we can be confident that the inhabitants of Uruk observed
them. It seems likely that the list began as a practical tool to help administrators
learn the new accounting device that we now know as writing. But the lists soon
gained an aspect to their character that was to stay with them throughout their life
in the Ancient Near East. It is the case both that there are items found in the economic
texts that are not in the lists, and, more tellingly, that there are many items in the
lists which cannot be found in the economic texts. Lists always contain a more
theoretical, sometimes academic, element.
THE PRE-BABYLONIAN HISTORY OF LISTSThe very earliest lists from Uruk did not have a fixed form. The terms they contained
and the order in which those terms were listed differed from one document to the
next. They began to stabilise, however, and by the beginning of the third millennium
BCthere was a high degree of consistency. New material was generally not added to
the lists; they remained frozen. These lists spread with writing across Mesopotamia;
we have quite large numbers of such texts from Fara and Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamia
and Ebla in Syria. This was to become a second feature of lists throughout Mesopotamian
history. As the technology of writing spread, the lists travelled with it. During this
time, however, both society and the system of writing were developing. The lists were
still copied but became ever further detached from the reality of what was written in
economic documents. Through their antiquity and unchangeable form they had
acquired prestige status. Most copies from the third millennium are beautiful, well
written texts by accomplished scribes. They would continue to be treasured, and copied
faithfully, for many more centuries to come. We shall resume their story shortly. In
the meantime, in the middle of the third millennium, new lists were composed. They
were in a similar style to the early lists, containing many names of birds, fish, trees
or the like. These words were again closer to what could be found in the texts of daily
life. But they, too, were fixed and over time would become obsolete. They, too, would
live on to be revered by the scribes of the Old Babylonian period.
THE EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION OF THE
OLD BABYLONIAN PERIODAs always in the study of the ancient world, we are at the mercy of our sources. For
the last few centuries of the third millennium we possess only a few texts of the
school type. By this we mean those texts dedicated to scribal training and education
as opposed to those of direct administrative, legal or economic function, for example.
From what little we have, it seems that there was a large degree of continuity with
earlier practice. Scribes were still copying the old lists. The picture at the beginning
of the second millennium, at the start of what we call the Old Babylonian period,
was radically different. For while the Old Babylonian educational institution may
have had its roots in this earlier period, a whole new set of lists had been developed.
These were very different to the earlier lists and were used in a very different way.
— Babylonian lists of words and signs —