Literacy in the Old Babylonian City of Nippur

The project bridged a gap between the mathematical sciences and humanities by focusing on the acquisition, use, and development of mathematical knowledge in a distinct and remote population: the ancient city of Nippur (located in Southern Iraq). It asked, how and to what extent did education relay the practical knowledge necessary for a professional career? It answered this by examining literacy, that is prose, documentary, and numeric literacy, in Nippur and elsewhere during the Old Babylonian period (early 2nd Millennium BCE). By exploring literacy, this project explored knowledge itself. Important to this study were the institutions that relay knowledge – the education systems. However, a novelty of this project was the incorporation of economic or administrative texts as material embodiments of knowledge as well. For the first time, the project showed how the scribal education affected Mesopotamian thought and the economy. This study produced useful case studies for economic and educational researchers and policy makers to compare against future endeavors. It showed the impact of education on the economy and the value of education to society.

This project examined both educational texts from Nippur for comparison with numerous archives: temple archives like the šattukku archive that recorded temple food offerings as well as the archives of the nadītu-priestesses, royal administrations like an agricultural affairs archive, and numerous familial archives. It looked beyond Nippur to produce a background for comparison. It examined places like the small city of Lagaba in the heartland of Babylonia, royal centres like the city of Larsa, merchant centres like the city of Ur, and then it focused on professional practice by examining surveyors throughout Mesopotamia. The results of this project have been presented across Europe and the United States and will soon appear as a series of publications.

These results were extensive, taking the state of the art to a new level. To start with, the project shows that education took place in multiple environments. For instance, at Lagaba a kind of tutelage occurred: a bureaucrat named Marduk-muballiṭ, overseeing royal lands, taught an aspiring brewer, Ili-u-Šamaš, in all aspects of writing and mathematics. In the very same city, a kind of household school would take shape, where the family of Imgur-edim-anna learned all they needed to act in society. With surveyors throughout Mesopotamia, scribes probably learned at least part of their trade in a kind of apprenticeship, although it’s also clear that much knowledge associated with surveyors was taught in the edubba, the school proper made famous by scribal lore. In each learning environment, student practice appeared very similar to professional practice, to the point that these texts were mistakenly identified as real administrative documents produced by learned professionals. But in each case, the substance, makeup, appearance, and even context of the texts leads to the conclusion that they are examples of student practice in a professional setting – a kind of ‘learning by doing’.
We can postulate that learning by doing was an important aspect of scribal education, relaying the practical knowledge necessary for day-to-day professional life. We can certainly postulate that these kinds of educations existed in Nippur as well. However, at Nippur and in the other large cities, there is ample evidence for a much more rigorous education, the edubba mentioned above. Students memorized all sorts of lexical lists, metrological lists, metrological tables, and then carried out more advanced calculations and produced written compositions, to become masters at the scribal crafts, the leaders necessary to run a complex economy.
Thus, we see metrological and numerical lists and tables were memorized in the course of an elementary education at Larsa, the capital of an important kingdom during the Old Babylonian period. Proverbs and numerical tables present aspects of an advanced scribal learning in the ancient city of Ur, an important port of entry into Mesopotamia from the Persian Gulf. But only at Nippur, do we have evidence for a full scribal education – lists of basic signs, words, legal phrases, and then compositions or metrological lists and tables, multiplication, division, and square root tables. We see easier mathematical practice, multiplying length and width to produce area, and harder practices, solving second-degree equations using cut-and-paste geometry. We see full and difficult Sumerian compositions produced by aspiring scribes. The student of Nippur had access to a very good education, but did this education affect society?
We see the importance of this education in, for instance, legal texts like inheritance divisions. Fixed phrases like “mu lugal-bi in-pad3”, ‘thus he swore in the name of the king’, commonly appear in these legal documents, showing familiarity with lists like the famed Ana Ittišu, a legal “phrasebook” memorized by aspiring scribes. It’s also clear that Nippur scribes did not slavishly reproduce memorized phrases. Proof is seen in mistakes. For instance, in one text there is a grammatical mistake produced by the scribe when he composed his own variation of the phrase cited above. At Nippur, the scribes typically wrote in proper, grammatically correct, and well written Sumerian, and avoiding their own, spoken Akkadian language. This is atypical for this time. Akkadian often appears to greater or lesser degrees in texts throughout Southern Mesopotamia. However, at Nippur, Akkadian appears less frequently. Sumerian, believed to be a dead language at this time, was common.
Throughout Mesopotamia, scribes produced all sorts of economic and administrative texts, often using a prosaic format in which each entry in a text followed the next in a prose-like list, a pattern similar to modern receipts. This was a very old format, dating to the late fourth millennium BCE. At Nippur, early in the Old Babylonian period, in the šattukku archive, we see the use of a tabular layout in which data appears along multiple axes. While tabular formatting existed in the past, it never fully caught on in administrative texts. For instance, in the Old Babylonian period, the tabular layout is commonly employed in mathematical texts to express mathematical reasoning along one axis and logical associations along several axes. However, in the šattukku texts, tabular layout presents reasoning and associations in an innovative way that is not reflective of the scribal education. The application of tabular layout in administrative texts would appear elsewhere in Mesopotamia as well. This is especially true for surveyors, who would use this layout to present data resulting from complex calculations. But they are preempted by the scribes of Nippur. This record-keeping technology shows the innovative capabilities of the Old Babylonian administrators, while it’s early appearance at Nippur is testament to the creativity of the edubba graduates, the dumu-edubba of Nippur.
Education certainly affected administration at every level: bureaucratic leadership was more capable of innovative record-keeping strategies as seen in the šattukku archive while merchants were able to produce and manipulate legal phrases as they saw fit. We can also suggest a functional literacy throughout the city, augmented by learning in professional and household environments.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MESOPOLIT (Literacy in the Old Babylonian City of Nippur)

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