Teaching in Old Babylonian Nippur, Learning in Old Assyrian Aššur?

Abstract

Archaeologists have excavated thousands of clay tablets containing school texts from Old Babylonian Nippur, which has helped researchers to reconstruct the curriculum of scribal students and given them insights into educational practices in the first half of the second millennium. Even though literary texts describe particular school buildings and teachers, professional scribes and scholars presumably taught the art of writing in their own homes during the Old Babylonian period, mainly to their own children and other willing apprentices. Almost nothing is known about this from the Old Assyrian period at the beginning of the second millennium BC, even though literacy was presumably widespread by then. In this paper, a new approach to the subject is introduced, which is based on palaeographic studies and can reveal new insights about the Assyrians’ educational practices. In modern literature, a Sumerian riddle is often quoted when talking about schools in ancient Mesopotamia. The second part of it goes like this: ‘One with eyes not opened has entered it; one with open eyes has come out of it’. The answer is: a school. While contemporary buildings and educational structures are certainly not comparable with the respective ancient institutions, the subject of this riddle reveals that places for learning and teaching already existed 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Most of the written evidence about teaching and schools was found in the city of Nippur and is dated to the Old Babylonian period (the first half of the second millennium BC). The curriculum of that time and place has been able to be reconstructed in some detail from the content of thousands of school tablets that have survived the passage of time. It consisted of an elementary and an advanced phase. In the first phase, pupils mainly copied lexical lists to learn cuneiform || 1 See Sjöberg 1976, 159 for the full text. 2 More details can be found in Tinney 1999, Veldhuis 1997, Robson 2001 and Proust 2007, for example.