and students doing work in many major cities, including Ur,
Uruk, Nippur, Shuruppak, and Abu Salabikh. Between 2000
and 1500 b.c.e. Mesopotamian students did enough school
exercises to leave archaeologists hundreds of clay tablets con-
taining their work with directions from and corrections by
their teachers.
Mesopotamian schools had several purposes. Th e most
basic was to create scribes by teaching children how to read
and write. Th e government, the temples, and businesses all
needed people who could read and write letters and inven-
tories and do arithmetic. A more philosophical purpose was
to create an educated, thoughtful citizenry. Mesopotamian
writers are the fi rst in the world to mention the concept of
“humanity” as a condition of people who have been elevated
above the animals by learning to think. Another reason to
educate children was so that they could read of past events,
interpret them in the present, and in their turn write down
the events of their lifetimes and thus leave a record for future
generations.
Sumerian schools were private, not public. Only wealthy
parents, such as government offi cials, businessmen, scribes,
priests, and military offi cers, sent their children to school.
Almost all students were boys; the only female students were
the daughters of royalty and girls being prepared to become
priestesses. Still, most Mesopotamian boys and girls never
went to school at all, instead spending their childhoods help-
ing their parents and learning the tasks they would perform
as adults. Schools met from sunrise until sunset, and students
ate lunch at school. Students attended for several years, fi nish-
ing in their teens. A school would typically contain students
of many diff erent ages and levels of academic achievement.
Th e older students helped instruct the younger ones; they
were called “big brothers.” All the pupils called themselves
their school’s “sons.”
Teachers were scholars in various fi elds, including math-
ematics, language, and surveying. Th ey took their salaries
from the fees parents paid as tuition. Parents would some-
times try to persuade teachers to give their children favorable
treatment; in one ancient Sumerian school story, a lazy boy’s
parents invite their son’s teacher to dinner and give him a
ring as a present, whereupon the teacher lavishes praise upon
the lad. Most schools had a disciplinary offi cer who beat un-
ruly students with a stick. Infractions were similar to those in
modern schools; they included speaking without permission,
standing up or leaving without permission, not speaking cor-
rect Sumerian, and dressing inappropriately.
Th e fi rst thing Mesopotamian students learned was the
cuneiform writing system. Th is system was extremely com-
plex and required readers to recognize subtle diff erences in
patterns of tiny triangles made with a reed pen, or stylus, on
clay tablets. It took years to memorize all the characters and
learn to read quickly. Writing cuneiform presented its own
diffi culties. Students had to learn how to make clay tablets by
mixing and molding the clay and how to fi re the clay tablets
so they hardened.
Teachers taught reading and writing by writing a sen-
tence at the top of a tablet and requiring their students to
copy it over and over. Th e teacher or an older student would
review the work and correct it, and all the students were
expected to study their day’s work at home that night. Th e
next day they had to write the previous day’s lesson correctly,
aft er which they would receive a new writing exercise. Ar-
chaeologists have found numerous clay tablets containing
these exercises, including teachers’ corrections; one tablet
was apparently so disastrous that the teacher crossed out
everything the student had written. Older boys wrote out
longer texts than younger ones. Sometimes teachers gave les-
sons based on stories, some of them humorous. As students
grew more advanced, they began reading and reciting their
lessons aloud. Students might specialize in various fi elds, in-
cluding architecture, engineering, astronomy, botany, geog-
raphy, medicine, and zoology.
Mathematics was very important to Mesopotamians, who
were expert architects and carefully collected and distributed
their people’s grain. Students practiced mathematical skills
with word problems that presented situations a professional
man might face, such as plotting the movements of the stars,
calculating the supplies needed for a military campaign, col-
lecting taxes, determining how many bricks were needed to
build a palace, or measuring plots of land and estimating how
much grain they would produce.
Sumerian schools also taught languages. Students were
expected to learn Sumerian. As time went on, people stoppedCuneiform tablet with schoolwork, Old Babylonian, about 1900–1700
b.c.e., probably from southern Iraq. (© Th e Trustees of the British
Museum)education: The Middle East 379