The Clay Tablet Book in Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia

Abstract

After a brief survey of the mechanics, media, and cultural context of cuneiform writing, I take three case studies to try to determine whether – and, if so, when, where, and how – we can talk of books in the first three millennia of recorded human history in the Middle East. Writings from a school house from the 18 th century BC city of Nippur show that Sumerian literary culture was primarily oral, with surviving tablets the ephemeral byproducts of the memorization process. In 7 th -century Nineveh, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal acquired his famous library through copying, inheritance and wartime plunder as an assertion of imperial control. Five centuries later in Hellenistic Babylonia, chief-priest-to-be Shamash- ê tir belonged to a tiny community of cuneiform-literate men who made celestial observations, calculations and rituals in a last-ditch attempt to preserve traditional temple culture.