One great innovation of the Old Babylonian period was the bilingual format of
the lists. Until then, all lists in Mesopotamia had been in just one language, namely
Sumerian.^7 Now a second column of text (in Akkadian) was added to some lists. This
raises the sophistication of the list to a new level, as scribes had to learn how the
two columns of data interacted with each other. Not all lists contained the Akkadian
column but it can be shown that the Akkadian equivalents of the Sumerian terms
were implicitly part of the composition, despite not being put into writing. By this
time Sumerian was a dead language, retained in learned and religious circles, rather
like Latin in post-Roman Europe.
Several other lists were also used in Old Babylonian schools, although less commonly
so than the others. They included another list of professions (called Azlag = ashlaku
‘fuller’; known in several different versions), a list of diseases and a list known as
Ugumu (‘my cranium’). The latter listed human body parts ordered from head to
foot. This system of ordering is a natural one, and can be found elsewhere in Mesopo-
tamian texts, such as in medical texts, as well as in the later list Nabnitu (discussed
below).
The student would continue to meet other types of list, such as mathematical and
metrological tables and proverbs. One further category of list was also copied by a
few students. These were the old third-millennium lists discussed above. The Old
Babylonian scribes were conscious of their great heritage and copied these lists as a
matter of academic, antiquarian interest. They are found only in small numbers and
did not form a standard part of the scribal training system.
THE MIDDLE BABYLONIAN LISTSIn the latter half of the second millennium BC, we again suffer from a scarcity of
sources. Most of our knowledge about the Middle Babylonian period comes from
outside of Babylonia. During this period, Akkadian had become the lingua franca of
the Ancient Near East, and knowledge of cuneiform spread across the region. With
it went the lists. Thus we have versions of many of the lists from sites such as Hattusa
(capital of the Hittite empire) in Anatolia, Emar and Ugarit in Syria, and El-Amarna,
which, for a brief period in the fourteenth century, was capital of Egypt. We are also
aided by Babylonia’s great rival, Assyria. The Assyrians looked to the south for much
of their scholarship, and following Tiglath-pileser I’s conquest of Babylon at the turn
of the eleventh century, many tablets travelled north to Assyria. These, plus the few
sources known from Babylonia itself, taken together with the first-millennium sources,
give us a reasonable idea of what was happening to the lists in Babylonia during what
was clearly a pivotal period in their history.
We know that some of the Old Babylonian lists (and all of the third-millennium
lists) fell out of use during this period, along with much of the Sumerian literature
known from Old Babylonian schools. Some lists (particularly Aa, Ea, Urra, Lu, Izi
and Diri) survived, however. Many sources remained in monolingual Sumerian format,
although significant numbers of bilingual sources are also known, often in use alongside
the monolingual versions.
Two great innovations can be attributed to the Middle Babylonian period. The
first is the creation of yet another type of list. In the Old Babylonian period, bilingual
Sumerian–Akkadian lists had appeared in Babylonia. The peripheral sites of the
— Babylonian lists of words and signs —