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The Alphabetization of Cuneiform

A few weeks ago, we hosted a two-day symposium on “Deviant Readings: Local and Communal Variation in the Sumerian Reading Tradition” here at the MSH Mondes in Nanterre: for those interested, you can find the program here. As the Marie Curie project ScriPTS draws to a close, the symposium was specifically meant to address what variation in cuneiform readings look like once we leave the big centers in Nippur or Nineveh, and whether that variation give us evidence of something like a localized reading community, or a community of practice. I can’t thank the participants enough for the time and effort they put into their papers.

Though the papers of the symposium were looking specifically at Sumerian, the topic does take me back to one of the big questions of first millennium Mesopotamian writing. Posed roughly à la Baldrick from Blackadder Goes Forth, this might go something like this: 

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From Babylon to Dingle (and Back)

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:

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  1. 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. []

Sb and the City Vincible

What’s the Sumerian word for city again? One of the texts at the heart of the ScriPTS project is the composition known as Syllabary B (Sb), one of a class of sign-lists which include the closely related Syllabary A (and derived texts), the great sign-list Ea = nâqu, and Diri = atru. A rough composite edition of Sb yields ca. 743 lines divided across two tablets (Sb A and B), transmitted in various forms and formats. Larger library texts might contain four or five columns, including the leading DIŠ-wedge, the syllabic reading, the sign, possibly the sign name, and an Akkadian translation. The majority of witnesses are, however, school copies, consisting only of the leading wedge and the sign. The list is hardly “lexical” in the narrow sense, since it is the signs themselves and not the translation which are at the forefront. Though dry and repetitive, the text deserves closer attention precisely because it was so widely used in schools and is attested in so many tablets across such a long period of time, at almost all major sites which have yielded cuneiform.

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