One of the most curious features of the first millennium school texts is the frequent juxtaposition of various texts associated with elementary education with dedicatory prayers to Nabû, the son of Marduk, scribal god, and god of wisdom. A good example is the tablet EAH 197: The obverse contains excerpts from five texts, in curricular order: 1) basic wedge exercises (vertical, horizontal, and oblique wedges); 2) the sign A repeated; 3) excerpts from Syllabary A and Syllabary B; 4) the first nine lines of the god list An = Anum; 5) and the first seven lines of the great encyclopedic list Ur5-ra = ḫubullu.1 The reverse is reserved for a prayer which begins:
"To Nabu, [exalted s]on [… who] gathers [a]ll rites together [...], the scribe of whatever [may be …]".
The dedicatory nature of the text and the object is made clear at the end, where the scribe, Bel-erib, asks the tablet itself to intercede for him:
"O (my) tab[let!] When you enter (into the temple), intercede and bless Bel-[erib, son] of Bel-[uballissu, descendant of E]tiru, whose lord is Nabu. Nabu, have [mercy(?)… ]."
While this sort of dedication of elementary sign lists is attested in several cities and to various deities, it is particularly associated with the late 7th–6th century BC temple of Nabu-sha-Hare in Babylon, where excavations uncovered hundreds of school texts built into the walls of the temple.2 Some tablets preserve dates for the dedication, either the 4th or 18th days of the month Kislev, which suggest that the dedications were made together on a special occassion. While tablet discards were often re-used as material elsewhere, the archeological context here seems to be intentional: the rudiments of scribal wisdom formed the very bricks of which the temple was built.
The search for parallels to this use of the syllabaries as dedicatory texts has brought me back to abecedaries, texts which consist of letters of the alphabet written or inscribed in order.3 With a few exceptions, the explanation for why anybody would want to write only the alphabet tends to default to one of two reasons. The first, and most common, is schooling: the text was used to learn writing, the site where it or the object on which is was inscribed was found is associated with a school. This is the explanation given, for example, for the Dadanitic rock inscription JSLih 158, first identified by Walter W. Müller; for the alphabetic inscription on a stone disc fragment from Tall Halaf (BM 1920,1211.470); or for an 8th/9th century AD Syriac abecedary from Tikrit in Iraq, published by Amir Harrak.4 The other common explanation, treated extensively by Franz Dornseiff in 1922 (second edition 1926), is that the alphabet represents a kind of “magic”, often in apotropaic use to ward off evil spirits.5 This is the interpretation favored, for example, by Alice Bij de Vaate in her discussion of the alphabet inscriptions from Jewish graves in the necropolis of Beth She’arim.6 As she points out: “A grave is an odd place in which to do one’s homework.” Instead, the alphabet takes on mystical associations to ward evil from the grave.
Neither of these explanations is particularly fitting for the syllabaries at the temple of Nabu-sha-Hare. There are at least two cases, however, which suggest that the sacral context of the dedications there was not so unique. Ahmad al-Jallad and Ali al-Manaser published an inscribed slab of basalt found at Wādī al-Ḥašād, ca. 45 km northeast of aṣ-Ṣafawī near the northeastern border of Jordan, which combines two texts in Thamudic B, a building and prayer inscription and an abecedary in the hlḥm letter order.7 Leaving the Semitic languages and dipping into the Mediterranean gives us another example, recently discussed by Katherine McDonald. A series of bronze writing tablets and styluses found at the sanctuary of Este-Baratella in the Veneto region date to between ca. 350–150 BC. The Venetic inscriptions combine votive dedications to the goddess Reitia with abecedaries and other writing exercises.8

Another parallel might be found a bit farther away, on the Dingle Peninsula of southwestern Ireland, in the ruins of the church of Cill Maoilchéadair.9 I first visited the site on holiday several years ago, back in the days when Fungie the Dolphin was still frolicking in the waters off the Dingle (but after he had gotten his statue). The current remains of the church, long in ruins, likely date to around the 12th century AD, though the site seems to have been in use much earlier. It long served as a pilgrimage church along the Cosán na Naomh, the Saint’s Road to Mount Brandon. Next to the church entrance is an inscribed gritstone pillar. In the middle is the abbreviation DNI for domini “of the Lord,” flanked by an abecedary, with [.]⸢B⸣CDEFGHIKLMN / OPQRS on the left and TUX[..]E/T on the right. The last letters are probably the ligature of & for et “and”.10

The Cill Maoilchéadair inscription is the earliest, but not the only abecedary associated with early churches in the British Isles. From Lochgoilhead Church in Scotland we have an alphabet inscription together with an ogham inscription on a sandstone piller.11 Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth in their edition of the inscription again suggest that it may provide evidence of a local school (the same explanation given to me by a very lovely cab driver and tour guide whose name I am ashamed to have forgotten). We might also think of a funerary context: the stone seems to have been moved several times over the years, and was certainly originally placed much farther away from the entrance. Gilbert Márkus gives us another alternative.12 Márkus points to several passages where the alphabet is associated with the church. The 9th century Historia Brittonum §54 attributed to Nennius, for example, writes of Saint Patrick that:
"He [Patrick] wrote three hundred and sixty five alphabets… He also founded the same number of churches, three hundred and sixty five. He ordained three hundred and sixty five bishops…"
One way to read this statement is to link it with the use of the alphabet known from later rites of the consecration of churches. During the consecration rite, unambiguously attested in the Gallic tradition from around the 9th century on, the bishop traces the Latin and Greek alphabets into a cross of ashes laid out on the floor.13 According to Márkus, however, the primary association of Patrick’s letters, expressed in the passage by Nennius, is synecdochic: The rudiments of literacy are used as abbreviations of the entirety of the teachings of the faith, the doctrina fidei, which the building is meant to represent (and control), and for which the building forms the physical nexus.
The Mesopotamian tradition is often explicit in associating the fundamentals with the broader aims of education, famously expressed in line 12 of the school dialogue “Examenstext A”: “The beginning of the scribal art is a single wedge.”14 The Middle Assyrian tablet KAR 4 extends this symbolism by combining part of another school text, the Syllable Alphabet A, on the left with the bilingual Sumerian-Akkadian text of a creation myth on the right: the juxtaposition encompasses the whole of scribal wisdom, from the basic signs of cuneiform writing to the creation of the world.15 In the same sense, the syllabaries which formed the backbone of cuneiform education could be dedicated to the gods by students and scribes of all levels as symbols of their mastery of scribal wisdom. Though there are obvious differences in religious context, Cill Maoilchéadair is another example to show that the symbolic associations aren’t unique. For me, it’s also a nice reminder this winter break that vacations are sometimes worth taking.
- Antoine Cavigneaux, “Un Colophon de Type Nabû ša Ḫarê,” Acta Sumerologica Journal 18 (1996): 23–29; Petra Gesche, Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr., Alter Orient und Altes Testament 275 (Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2001), 153–166. [↩]
- S. Maul, “tikip santakki mala bašmu…: Anstelle eines Vorworts,” in Festschrift für Rykle Borger zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 24. Mai 1994: Tikip santakki mala bašmu, ed. Stefan M. Maul, Cuneiform Monographs 10 (Groningen: Styx Publications, 1998), xvi. [↩]
- A good overview is provided by Holger Gzella, “Abecedaries,” in Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, Volume 1: A–F, ed. Geoffrey Khan (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 6. [↩]
- See Fokelien Kootstra, The Writing Culture of Ancient Dadān, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 110 (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 68; Rainer Degen, “Ein aramäisches Alphabet vom Tell Halaf,” Neue Ephemeris für Semitische Epigraphik 3 (1978): 1–9; Amir Harrak, Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions of Iraq, Répertoire des inscriptions syriaques 2 (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2010) FA.01.16. I owe the last reference to Simon Brelaud. [↩]
- Franz Dornseiff, Das Alphabet in Mystik und Magie, Στοιχεîα, Studien zur Geschichte des antiken Weltbildes und griechischen Wissenschaft 7, 2e édition (Leipzig: Teubner, 1926). [↩]
- Alice Bij de Vaate, “Alphabet-Inscriptions from Jewish Graves,” in Studies in Early Jewish Epigraphy, ed. Pieter W. van der Horst and Jan Willem van Henten, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 21 (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 148–161. See already the similar conclusions reached by Menahem Haran, “On the Diffusion of Literacy and Schools in Ancient Israel,” In Congress Volume Jerusalem 1986, ed. J. A. Emerton, Vetus Testamentum Supplements 40 (Leiden: Brill, 1988), 81–95. [↩]
- Ahmad al-Jallad and Ali al-Manaser, “A Thamudic B Abecedary in the South Semitic Letter Order,” in Semitic Languages in Contact, ed. Aaron Michael Butts, Studies in Semitic Languages and Linguistics 82 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1–15. [↩]
- Katherine McDonald, “Education and Literacy in Ancient Italy: Evidence from the Dedications to the Goddess Reitia,” Journal of Roman Studies 109 (2019): 131–159. [↩]
- A good summary can be found in Peter Harbison’s Pilgrimage in Ireland: The Monuments and the People (Syracuse University Press, 1991). [↩]
- Elisabeth Okasha and Katherine Forsyth, Early Christian Inscriptions of Munster: A Corpus of the Inscribed Stones (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 165–169. [↩]
- The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, Argyll: An inventory of the monuments: Volume 7: Mid-Argyll and Cowal: Medieval and Later Monuments (Edinburgh: Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, 1992). [↩]
- Gilbert Márkus, “What Were Patrick’s Alphabets?,” Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 31 (1996): 1–16. [↩]
- Cécile Treffort, “Opus litterarum: L’inscription alphabétique et le rite de consécration de l’église (IXe–XIIe siècle),” Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale 53 (2010): 153–180. [↩]
- Åke Sjöberg, “Der Examenstext A,” Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 64 (1974): 137–176. [↩]
- Antoine Cavigneaux and Margaret Jaques, “Peut-on comprendre le Silbenvokabular?,” in Von Göttern und Menschen. Beiträge zu Literatur und Geschichte des Alten Orients. Festschrift für Brigitte Groneberg, ed. Dahlia Shehata et al., Cuneiform Monographs 41 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–16. [↩]
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Christian W. Hess (28 décembre 2023). From Babylon to Dingle (and Back). ScriPTS. Consulté le 13 mai 2026 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/vtd0
