The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
LATE BABYLONIAN
INTELLECTUAL LIFE
Paul-Alain Beaulieu
Late Babylonian intellectual life is known from thousands of cuneiform texts dating
between the eighth and first centuries BC and unearthed in the libraries of palaces,
temples and private houses. Most of the sources from the eighth and seventh centuries
originate in Assyria, especially in the libraries collected by king Ashurbanipal in
Nineveh. Although Assyria exerted its hegemony over the entire Near East during
that period, Babylonia remained culturally dominant and Babylonian texts of every
kind were avidly collected for the royal libraries (Parpola 1983b). Even scholarly texts
in the Assyrian script were as a rule composed in the Standard Babylonian dialect of
Akkadian and largely recorded knowledge compiled in Babylonia. Therefore it is not
surprising that after the fall of Assyria at the end of the seventh century the cuneiform
tradition retreated to Babylonia, where it had begun nearly three millennia earlier,
and continued its existence in temples and the private houses of scholars until the
Hellenistic and Parthian periods. While Babylon and Uruk stand out as the two most
important intellectual centers of the late Babylonian period, important finds were
made at other sites, notably Sippar, Borsippa and Nippur. Our sources consist largely
of texts belonging to the so-called “stream of tradition.” This is the generally accepted
term to designate the corpus of authoritative editions of texts which stood at the core
of ancient cuneiform scholarship. Another very important source is the correspondence
between the Assyrian kings of the Sargonid dynasty (721–610 BC) and the scholars
who advised them. Many of them were Babylonian and their correspondence helps
us understand how they interpreted the knowledge recorded in scholarly texts.
Cuneiform writing was the preserve of a small caste of professionals. In a letter to
his employer the Assyrian king Esarhaddon, the Babylonian scholar Asˇarēdu the
Younger alludes to the restricted diffusion of writing with a touch of wit when he
warns him that “the scribal craft is not heard about in the market place” (SAA 8:
339). Even kings were rarely literate beyond limited training in reading and writing.
Among late Mesopotamian rulers, only the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and the
Babylonian king Nabonidus laid claim to advanced literacy and learning. Yet, in
spite of limited dissemination, writing occupied a prominent symbolic place in the
Babylonian world. Marduk, the demiurge and patron god of Babylon, regulated cosmic
order through his possession of the Tablets of Destinies. His son Nabû, who even
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