The Babylonian World - Historia Antigua

— Paul-Alain Beaulieu —
surpassed him in popularity to become the most important god of the pantheon
during the time of the Neo-Babylonian empire (626–539 BC), was the god of the
scribal craft. Scribes endowed the written word with great power. Even texts that
may appear straightforward on the surface were made to convey deeper meanings
through a complicated exegesis which fully exploited the resources of Sumero–Akkadian
bilingualism (Maul 1997) and the infinite possibilities of the cuneiform script for
phonetic and logographic permutations (Bottéro 1977). More important, after the
political demise of Babylon with the Persian conquest of 539 BC, traditional education
in cuneiform became a badge of cultural identity for the Babylonians, now threatened
by the imposition of foreign rule and the rise of new official vernaculars such as
Aramaic. Such factors even increased the symbolic importance of cuneiform writing
as the civilization that had supported it for three thousand years entered its twilight.
However, our complete dependence on the textual record to study ancient intellectual
life should not obscure the fact that the Babylonians lived largely in an oral world.
Only a small part of the body of knowledge was ever committed to writing. Entire
fields of technical learning were transmitted exclusively by oral tradition, and a
number of significant intellectual activities, such as the production of art, were almost
never discussed in the written record. Our knowledge of Babylonian intellectual life
is also impeded by the fact that the writings themselves tend to be succinct and nondiscursive.
Even in the late periods, Babylonian scholarly literature still adhered to
the basic format of lists, whether they were lists of words, of omens, or of scientific
observations. This trait has often and erroneously been invoked in the past to argue
that the Babylonians lacked analytical skills. Yet this peculiarity simply stems from
the fact that writing in the Ancient Near East was essentially an aid to memory. If
lists were explained, analyzed, and provided with a theoretical foundation, this was
done orally. At any rate, the existence of analytical thinking leading to the formation
of theoretical statements is proven by such clues as, for instance, the appearance of
grammatical terms in the late lists of Sumerian verbal forms known as the Neo-
Babylonian Grammatical Texts (Civil 1994: 84–85). Canonical or authoritative editions
of texts were mostly organized into series (isˇkāru), such as the series Sˇumma izbu
(teratological omens) and Enūma Anu Enlil (astrological omens). Together with a
corpus of supplemental texts which were extraneous (ah ˘ û) to the series, they formed
the backbone of Babylonian learning (Rochberg 1984: 137–144). The textual record
often refers to the tradition handed down by the masters as sˇa pî ummâni, which
means literally “that of the mouth of a master.” It is debatable whether this expression
refers specifically and always to the oral tradition. Nevertheless, it seems certain that
ongoing discussions and exegeses of the texts by the scholars were the main element
bringing cuneiform learning to life, its flesh and blood.
The oral tradition occupied such a prominent place that in order to attain the rank
of scholar, basic training in the scribal craft and the ability to read texts were
insufficient. One must learn personally from the masters. This, however, began after
a period of initial schooling. The curriculum of late Babylonian education has been
reconstructed from hundreds of fragmentary school exercises (Gesche 2001). Two
options were available to students. Those students whose goal was to serve in the
royal administration learned the fundamentals of the cuneiform script, the basic corpus
of lexical and metrological texts, lists of personal names, and how to write legal and
administrative documents. They also studied a selection of traditional texts and works
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