disseminating its content beyond a narrow circle of initiates. The standard formula
reads: “The initiate may show the initiate; the uninitiated must not see; taboo of
(such and such) god” (Beaulieu 1992 ). It seems a priori difficult to ascribe any signifi-
cance to such formulas beyond the fact that they point to a certain esprit de corps
among scholars, especially in a world where higher learning had become the preserve
of restrictive clans claiming an old patrician lineage. In fact, each of the three great
disciplines is, in one way or another, characterized as secret knowledge in our sources.
However, it is undeniable that a significant portion of the texts that are labeled as
restricted belong to a particularly difficult type of scholarship which explored the
interrelations between various branches of knowledge, mainly divination. This probably
signals the emergence of a native tradition of esotericism in Mesopotamia. Increased
complexity and sophistication of Babylonian scholarship is also evidenced by the
appearance of a new genre of text in the early part of the first millennium: the
commentary (Krecher 1980 – 1983 ). Commentaries provided traditional works of
scholarship with philological explanations. In this respect they essentially adhered to
the format of word lists. Most of the surviving commentaries pertain to divinatory
series such as Sˇumma izbu and Enu ̄ ma Anu Enlil, others to medical texts, but even
some works of literature such as the Poem of the Righteous Sufferer (Ludlul be ̄l ne ̄meqi)
and the Babylonian Theodicywere provided with commentaries. The best example is
undoubtedly the commentary to the exegesis of the fifty names of the god Marduk
which conclude Enu ̄ ma elisˇ, the Babylonian Epic of Creation. Although the purpose
of commentaries was often to clarify other texts, it would be erroneous to see them
exclusively as works of scholarship on textual material that had become too old and
arcane to be understood by scribes. In fact, no commentary is known for a text
predating the latter part of the second millennium. It is possible that a number of
commentaries were more or less contemporary with the final edition of the series they
sought to explain, and served mainly as teaching tools and companion pieces. Indeed,
some commentaries are labeled as sˇu ̄ t pî masˇ’altu sˇa pî ummâni (literally “oral explanations
and questions from a master”), indicating that their purpose was to provide a written
compendium of the oral tradition for the advanced levels of teaching and learning.
In their most developed form, commentaries became highly sophisticated treatises of
hermeneutics (Maul 1999 ).
In spite of these limited trends towards complexity, the cuneiform writing system
did not become intrinsically more contrived and arcane in the same way as hieroglyphics
did during the Ptolemaic period. During that time there was a conscious effort on
the part of Egyptian priests to make monumental writing completely inaccessible to
the uninitiated by multiplying the number of signs and values almost tenfold. In
Babylonia, cuneiform had reached the same level of inaccessibility only by the mere
fact of its survival as an ancient writing system in a world where a new language
written with a simple alphabet, Aramaic, had become the dominant vernacular. Spoken
Akkadian in its late Babylonian form probably died out completely during the
Achaemenid period and survived in written form mainly for legal documents and
administrative memoranda, while Standard Babylonian continued to thrive as the
language of scholarly texts. However, transcriptions of Babylonian school texts in
Greek letters, the so-called Greco-Babyloniaca, indicate that the pronunciation of
traditional texts of Mesopotamian scholarship in the Hellenistic period followed the
phonology of the late Babylonian vernacular language, not that of Standard Babylonian.
— Late Babylonian intellectual life —