GODS IN THE CLASSROOM: RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN 1ST MILLENNIUM BCE BABYLONIA

www.cambridge.org · 2026-10-05 · by Long Nguyen ·generic
GODS IN THE CLASSROOM: RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN 1ST MILLENNIUM BCE BABYLONIA

GODS IN THE CLASSROOM: RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN 1ST MILLENNIUM BCE BABYLONIA

Hostname: page-component-8678677fb7-q8n7b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-10-05T05:32:55.526Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

IRAQ

---

Article contents

Save PDF

Save PDF (0.4 mb) [View PDF \[Opens in a new window\]](https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/EB059EE81804DCBC1848CACBD6298E0B/S0021088926100576a.pdf/gods-in-the-classroom-religion-and-education-in-1st-millennium-bce-babylonia.pdf) Save to Dropbox Save to Google Drive Save to Kindle

Share

Cite [Rights & Permissions \[Opens in a new window\]](https://s100.copyright.com/AppDispatchServlet?publisherName=CUP&publication=IRQ&title=GODS%20IN%20THE%20CLASSROOM%3A%20RELIGION%20AND%20EDUCATION%20IN%201ST%20MILLENNIUM%20BCE%20BABYLONIA&publicationDate=24%20September%202026&author=Shana%20Zaia&copyright=%C2%A9%20The%20Author%28s%29%2C%202026.%20Published%20by%20Cambridge%20University%20Press%20on%20behalf%20of%20The%20British%20Institute%20for%20the%20Study%20of%20Iraq%20%28Gertrude%20Bell%20Memorial%29&contentID=10.1017%2Firq.2026.10057&startPage=1&endPage=25&orderBeanReset=True&volumeNum=&issueNum=&oa=CC-BY)

---

Abstract

While there was no separate “religious education” program in ancient Mesopotamia, the formal scribal curricula reveal several discrete learning outcomes related to religion that were conveyed through the selection of texts scribal students copied and excerpted. Using case studies from 1st millennium BCE Babylonia, this article elucidates some of these learning outcomes, including divine names and characteristics of the gods, Babylon (and Nippur) as a religious center, religious spaces and the temple cult, and the relationships between gods and humans. These all served to instill the next generation of imperial scribes, specialists, and administrators with a common set of religious traditions and ideology.

---

لآلهة في الفصول الدراسية: الدين والتعليم في بلادِ بابل خلال الألفية الأولى قبل الميلاد

شانا زايا

على الرغم من عدم وجود برنامجٍ مُنفصِل لـ “التعليم الديني” في بلاد الرافدين القديمة، إلاّ أنّ المناهج الرسمية لإعدادِ الكَتبة تكشف عن جملةِ مِن مُخرجاتٍ التعليم المتميّزة والمُتعدِّدة المُتعلِقة بِالدين، والتي تمّ نقلُها من خِلال اِختِيارِ النصوص التي قام طلابُ الكتابة بنسخها واِقتِباسها. ويوضِحُ هذا المقال بِاستِخدامِ دِراساتِ الحالة المُستمّدة مِن بلادِ بابل في الألفية الأولى قبل الميلاد، بعضاً من هذه المُخرَجات التعليمية، بما في ذلك أسماء الإلهة وخصائص الآلهة، ومكانة بابل (ونيپور) كمركزٍ ديني، والمساحات الدينية وطقوس العِبادة في المعابِد، والعلاقات بين الآلهة والبشر. وقد أسهم ذلك كله في غرسِ مجموعةٍ مشتركة من التقاليد والأيديولوجية الدينية في نفوس الجيل القادم من كَتبة الإمبراطورية والمُتخصِّصين والإداريين.

---

Information

Type Research Article

Information

IRAQ , First View , pp. 1 - 25

DOI: [https://doi.org/10.1017/irq.2026.10057 \[Opens in a new window\]](https://doi.org/10.1017/irq.2026.10057)

Creative Commons

Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (<https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The British Institute for the Study of Iraq (Gertrude Bell Memorial)

---

Identifying “Religious Education” in Mesopotamia

Although religions were “embedded” within Mesopotamian societies,Footnote 1 it was nonetheless necessary to teach members of the rising generations, particularly elites, about religious conventions and theological traditions actively and systematically, especially as many of these comprised specialized knowledge that went beyond normal or daily praxis. Many high-status professions explicitly required different forms of this expertise, ranging from career paths a modern reader would recognize as more clearly religious—priests and other cultic personnel—to practitioners (medical, astronomical, and so forth) for whom rituals and communication with the gods were central to their work. Because religious ideology was intrinsically bound up with the state, however, certain theological ideas such as the king’s relationships with and responsibilities to the gods were also instilled in rising elites who did not have explicitly religious mandates, such as scribes and officials. It is no surprise, then, that religious content was incorporated into the formal “school” curriculum followed by scribes, scholars, and other specialists. However, there was no discrete scholastic unit about religion or theology, nor was there a core text or set of texts that functioned as “holy scripture” like the Bible around which religious education could be centered.Footnote 2 Instead, texts with content related to religion or theology represent a variety of genres and were integrated into different parts of the curricula on the basis of the complexity of the skills students were meant to learn, taught amongst other socio-cultural norms and expectations. Thus, there was no distinction between “secular” and “religious” education, and even those “schools” that were found in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions. Some local “schools” produced priests because of demographics—e.g., the teacher was himself a priest—but were not seminary equivalents.Footnote 3

Regardless, it is still possible to speak of religious education in Mesopotamia, and other studies have already established the merits of this subject for the ancient world, including in Greece and Rome.Footnote 4 Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler, in an introduction to a volume about religious education in pre-modern Europe, define the concept of religious education as “models and processes of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and competences inside religious traditions,” with religion defined as “a socio-cultural praxis, a web of discourses and practices based on the assumption that there is another level of reality behind the sphere of empirically graspable everyday life.”Footnote 5 Similarly, Salvo and Scheer, introducing a volume about religious education in ancient Greece, argue that “when elements of education are specifically geared towards religion, the concept of religious education becomes a useful analytical tool,” specifically identifying four components of religious knowledge: mythology, local traditions, ritual competencies, and the “right behaviour to be directed towards the gods and to be shown to the other members of the community as a display of piety.”Footnote 6 Following these frameworks, this study will refer to “religious studies” and “religious education” with respect to education about religious systems, concepts, and practices, including ideas about the nature of gods and relationships between humans and deities.Footnote 7

In general, children and adolescents in Mesopotamia would have encountered religion and ritual practices primarily at home, and this is true even for those children who would later undergo formal education. For instance, the ancestor cult was based within the household, as family members were typically interred there, and children would grow up witnessing or taking part in the ritual, as well as rites and beliefs related to other life cycle events.Footnote 8 Moreover, there were personal and family deities, and children would have had their parents as models for and access points into religious practices in the home.Footnote 9 Visits from specialists such as healers and exorcists was another means by which children would experience the practical application of religious ideas. Children may have accompanied their parents to make votive offerings and donations to the local temples and to visit local shrines, institutions they would also have encountered simply living in the city or town.Footnote 10 The boys whose fathers were cultic personnel, in particular, likely learned about temple service long before they took over their father’s positions, either through active instruction or observing their fathers’ duties, and there is evidence that apprentices conducted some rituals.Footnote 11 Children would have also witnessed public rituals, such as festivals, and it is possible that parents would teach their children the stories and mythology behind these events on such occasions.Footnote 12 Publicly displayed monuments and religious imagery would have shaped children’s impressions as well. It is plausible that children might have grown up hearing stories about the gods and kings from their family and had more spontaneous learning experiences and opportunities, such as observing the stars in the night sky or asking their parents questions about life and the world around them.Footnote 13 Informal education about religion was likely the norm for most young men and women, and unfortunately it is not preserved in the written record.

In considering the specific competences transmitted to students through formal education, there are several observable learning outcomes related to religion. This study focuses on religious education in Babylonia during the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods of the 1st millennium BCE. Babylonia during this period was heir to longstanding local religious and educational traditions and the region was united under native Mesopotamian empires (first the Neo-Assyrian and then the Neo-Babylonian empires) that largely upheld these customs before being conquered by foreign kings (the Achaemenids and then the Seleucids) with whom Mesopotamians did not share religious or educational systems. These case studies are not meant to be comprehensive but illustrate a range of types of religious knowledge that students in the 1st millennium acquired in the course of their formal education. Specifically, these comprise discrete outcomes including education about the pantheon, the characteristics of gods, religiously significant spaces including temples, the theological landscapes and cultic importance of Babylon (and, to a lesser extent, Nippur), and the relationships between gods and mortals.

Formal Education in Babylonia

Most professions and vocations were passed down from father to son, who would begin working alongside his father to learn through imitation and hands-on methods until he had mastered the necessary proficiencies. While literacy and scribal knowledge were transferred between generations as well, it was more clearly formalized and structured: this process of education followed a relatively standardized curriculum and was more pedagogically comprehensive than focused, career-based training and apprenticeships.Footnote 14 Formal education was largely intended for professions that required literacy, e.g., scribes who would write texts ranging from administrative records to royal inscriptions, cultic personnel, and specialists in āšipūtu (“exorcism”), bārûtu (“divination”), kalûtu (“cultic singing”), and asûtu (“healing”). Regardless of their future professions, students followed essentially the same learning plan, with their intended profession dictating how far into the curriculum they continued.Footnote 15 Elementary education was followed by an advanced specialization stage, essentially an apprenticeship phase.Footnote 16 Exact ages are difficult to determine, but scribal students began their education young and entered their specializations or apprenticeships as adolescents, while their peers in other trades would have started working as children.Footnote 17

Formal education was essentially the privilege of boys and young men from elite or aspirational families.Footnote 18 Scribal education took place in private, household-based contexts, not dedicated educational institutions or academies.Footnote 19 The instructors were adult professionals, often the father of one or more of the boys in the “class,” to whom other prominent or upwardly mobile urban families would send their sons.Footnote 20 Because students belonged to the highest socio-cultural classes, education’s purpose was two-fold: to train students in the skills needed for their future career, as well as to impart cultural values, norms, and ideals as part of their enculturation into adult society.Footnote 21 The exercises and texts they were taught were selected to achieve both of these aims, and the “schools” were a setting in which boys socialized with peers from comparable socio-economic backgrounds and developed their identities as the future elites of their communities. Education also played an important role in transmitting information, ideas, and skills across generations.Footnote 22 This is true of the texts themselves as well: while most written exercises were disposable, many library copies of texts were composed by scribal apprentices or professional scribes at the beginning of their career, shortly after completing their education, building archival collections and preserving them for future generations to use.Footnote 23

The extant written material produced during formal education, referred to in modern scholarship as “school texts,” demonstrates how education transmitted ideas and values beyond literacy skills. School texts were either written by students and contain their class exercises and assignments or were composed by instructors for pedagogical purposes. In some cases, these texts are identified as the product of scribal education by a colophon, but they can also be distinguished by their content, which is usually excerpts of texts known to be part of the curricula, often presenting as excerpts from multiple texts on the same school tablet. Other texts have been identified as scribal exercises by their mistakes, poor handwriting, tablet shape, or archival context. Footnote 24The surviving school texts have enabled modern scholars to reconstruct the curricula taught in different areas and time periods.Footnote 25 Most studies of education are centered on the Old Babylonian period (particularly in the city of Nippur), for which there are not only plentiful texts but also literary compositions purporting to reflect on the scribal school (Edubba’a) and educational experience itself.Footnote 26

The school texts found in 1st millennium Babylonian contexts contain many of the same texts and genres as in the Old Babylonian period, but the socio-cultural environment was markedly different.Footnote 27 Most importantly, the 1st millennium BCE was an age of empires rather than of regional kingdoms or territorial states, starting with the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 1000–610 BCE), which meant a scaling up of royal infrastructure. The imperial apparatus relied on a massive administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure of scribes, officials, and professionals who were in regular correspondence with each other and the king.Footnote 28 As such, it was critical that future elites were raised within the norms, mission, and expectations of the empire.Footnote 29 Assyria’s successor, the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BCE)—which had a great deal in common with Assyria, including a largely shared pantheon and similar educational traditions that were supported even under Assyrian hegemony—adopted much of the same imperial infrastructure.Footnote 30 As the native empires gave way to the non-Mesopotamian empires of the Achaemenids and Seleucids, respectively, tensions arose between traditional ways and new socio-cultural expectations. The linguistic landscape had also changed by the 1st millennium; while Old Babylonian schools were concerned with preserving Sumerian, a language that was no longer spoken in favor of Akkadian, it was increasingly Akkadian that needed to be maintained by this point, since Aramaic developed as a lingua franca and became the official language of the Achaemenids and eventually Greek was introduced as the imperial language under the Seleucids.Footnote 31 The Neo- and Late Babylonian school texts thus largely focus on Akkadian writing, though Sumerian was still taught, particularly in bilingual Akkadian-Sumerian texts.Footnote 32

In the 1st millennium there existed (at least) two visible pedagogical spheres of influence, with implications for the content of religious education on local levels. There seems to have been a fairly standard curriculum in northern Babylonia, dominated by Babylon-oriented ideology that stemmed from that city and that was likely also perpetuated (and perhaps amplified) by Borsippa, which was closely linked to Babylon politically, religiously, and intellectually.Footnote 33 In southern Babylonian education, there were distinct traditions around Nippur, likely facilitated by the memory of its status as a center of scribal education.Footnote 34 Nippur’s extant school texts comprise the largest known 1st millennium yield, and they are remarkable for not only focusing on Nippur and its gods but also omitting the typical Marduk- and Babylon-oriented exercises that were standard in northern Babylonia.Footnote 35 In particular, Nippureans apparently eschewed the so-called “Marduk syllabus” of Babylon—containing works exalting Marduk such as the great Marduk hymns and prayers, Enūma eliš, and Ludlul bēl nēmeqi—in favor of Ninurta mythology.Footnote 36 Perhaps the best demonstration of this contrast is how the respective cities were conceptualized as religious centers in the Nippur Compendium and Tintir = Babylon, discussed below. Nippur’s educational sphere also encompassed the southern city Uruk, together forming an ideologically cooperative pair similar to Babylon and Borsippa. Urukeans studied materials from and about Nippur in their curricula, such as The Doctor from Isin, a unique pedagogical composition set in Nippur but found in Uruk.Footnote 37 This suggests at least two somewhat competing nodes of education operating in the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods: a dominant Babylon-Borsippa axis (which included other northern cities such Sippar and Kiš) and a more limited Nippur-Uruk axis.Footnote 38 Notable for this study is that the greatest divergences between these northern and southern curricula are seemingly within the sphere of religious education, particularly in terms of the literary compositions.

As for the Neo- and Late Babylonian curricular texts in general, there were multiple phases of training comprising increasingly complex compositions. Elementary education began with lists of basic signs, lexical lists, proverbs, and select literature, while the second stage introduced more complex lexical lists, more difficult literary works, incantations (including bilingual ones), prayers and hymns, and Tintir (in northern Babylonia).Footnote 39 The specialization phase focused on texts related to the advanced student’s chosen profession, often resulting in copies of entire compositions.Footnote 40 Much of the second stage curriculum was related to āšipūtu “exorcism.”Footnote 41 In terms of learning objectives, the goals of formal education in 1st millennium Babylonia comprised basic Akkadian and Sumerian literacy, specific writing and technical skills, professional skills (including through apprenticeships), and socialization (including cultural norms and ideology, social class group cohesion, and networking). It should be stated that what is left of formal schooling is only what was written, and it is not possible to fully reconstruct what students learned in the context of studying these texts since oral explanations are not preserved.Footnote 42 Nonetheless, it is clear that students were taught certain values through texts and that instructors made deliberate choices in which texts they had their students study, copy, and compose with specific learning objectives in mind that transmitted not only practical writing skills but also the accepted and shared socio-cultural values. Religious ideology was one of these values, and what children and adolescents learned about religion through formal schooling can be identified in the curriculum as both practical skills and worldviews.Footnote 43

Religious Education: Learning Objectives and Lessons

Divine Names and Characteristics of the Gods

The first observable learning outcome for religious education is a familiarity with both the basic and extended pantheon(s). It is unclear how much knowledge about individual deities the students would have acquired before formal education, but one might assume that they were aware of the major gods in their cities as well as any personal or familial deities. Much broader pantheons were presented in the scribal curriculum: among the lexical lists that students learned and excerpted are the so-called god-lists, which sometimes included hundreds of deities, the simplest of which listed deity names while the more complicated lists presented both the Sumerian and Akkadian names and, occasionally, pronunciations, epithets, or other identifying characteristics.Footnote 44 In 1st millennium Babylonia, students primarily learned two longstanding god-lists: the An list (previously known as the “Weidner god-list”) and the An = Anum list.Footnote 45 The former was part of the first stage of the elementary curriculum, while the latter was taught in the second stage.Footnote 46 This correlated with increasing conceptual complexity, moving from a simple list of divine names written in logograms in a single column (An) to a two-column list of equations or identifications between Sumerian and Akkadian divine names (An = Anum).

These lists represent several discrete lessons relevant to religion. First, the lists had the practical purposes of teaching students the logograms still used to write many divine names even in Akkadian texts in addition to the Akkadian spellings of the names. An focused on the Sumerian logograms, while, with An = Anum, students learned the relationships between the older Sumerian names and the Akkadian equivalents.Footnote 47 The god-lists also communicated knowledge of the broader pantheon(s) and how the gods related to one another, albeit to a lesser extent. It is important to observe that these were not necessarily “living” pantheons, however, but exercises in the historical pantheon as passed down and augmented along multiple generations, including deities whose cults had long been dormant.Footnote 48 By the 1st millennium, these lists were standardized and manuscripts have been found across numerous Babylonian cities.Footnote 49 The An list, for instance, had over 200 entries and continued to be augmented into the 1st millennium, sometimes including further explanations of the listed deities such as pronunciations or relationships to other gods.Footnote 50 The much longer An = Anum list contains almost 2000 names in seven tablets.Footnote 51 The sheer number of deities, including poorly known or rarely attested ones, suggests that the main pedagogical goal was not to teach students about the main pantheon of their city or active practices of their community but to preserve essentially a maximalist encyclopedia of known gods regardless of active status.Footnote 52 The lists are structured in such a way that there are some observable organizational principles, including associations of gods within the same divine “household” and a general progression from ancient and distant gods like An(um) to less prominent divinities, but it is not always clear to modern scholars what the logic was; presumably the teachers of the scribal school supplemented the writing assignments with oral explanations.Footnote 53 Some extant Neo- and Late Babylonian school texts excerpting An = Anum (which represent different parts of Tablets I-VI) contain excerpts of other compositions, and these are relevant for the study of religion and the roles of the gods, specifically Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, the “Counsels of Wisdom,” (both discussed below) and “Marduk’s Address to the Demons.”Footnote 54 This places the god-list in the context of broader learning objectives about religion. An, in contrast, was excerpted with other sign lists and syllabaries in an early stage of education that was very much focused on the basics of writing signs.Footnote 55

As a related (but not explicitly religious) learning outcome, lists of personal names taught in Babylonian schools built on the foundational knowledge from god-lists. Personal names were generally structured as a prayer to or evocation of a deity, with most common names containing a theophoric element. In learning to write personal names, students put to use their training in how to write divine names. These texts list men’s names organized by theophoric element, and the gods Bēl (Marduk), Nabû, and Šamaš appear especially often, as these are the most common deities mentioned in Neo- and Late Babylonian names.Footnote 56 Other deities that appear include Sîn, Nuska, Zababa, and (more rarely) gods like Uraš and Mandānu.Footnote 57 Lists of women’s names are also known, albeit less well attested, and these names feature different deities, primarily goddesses: Nanāya, Ninlil, Tašmētu, Bēltu, Ningal, Ba’u, and Banītu, for instance.Footnote 58 By copying these lists, students learned the standard ways to spell and structure common names with theophoric elements. These would be directly applicable for students who became scribes that wrote administrative documents and legal texts, which recorded names of people involved in or witnessing transactions or legal proceedings.

Mastering the names of and relationships between the gods did not inherently convey information about their natures and characteristics, though; as mentioned, it should not be excluded that teachers would have supplemented the written lessons with fuller oral explanations that were not recorded.Footnote 59 Written exercises about the personalities of individual gods took the form of prayers, hymns, and god-centered mythological texts.Footnote 60 Unsurprisingly, the range of deities that students studied more thoroughly was narrower than that contained within the god-lists; the subset comprises largely Marduk, Nabû, Ninurta, and Šamaš.Footnote 61 Prayers and hymns tend to contain numerous epithets and descriptors of the deities to whom they are directed, giving students an orientation to the gods’ powers, roles, characteristics, and relationships to other gods. For example, one of the canonical Great Hymns and Prayers is a prayer to Marduk numbering over 200 lines, which was excerpted on numerous Neo- and Late Babylonian school tablets from the second stage of education, usually with other texts.Footnote 62 Its contents venerate Marduk’s many powers and attributes, including over the prosperity of the world, justice, and redemption.Footnote 63

In general, it was important for a politically unified Babylonian religious ideology to present Marduk as the head of the pantheon. His role in the mythological composition Enūma eliš is central to instilling this concept and its implications, detailing his ascendency over other gods through heroically defeating Tiāmat and receiving divine kingship, his Esagil temple in Babylon, and extensive powers in return.Footnote 64 The Neo- and Late Babylonian school text corpus contains numerous excerpts of Enūma eliš, and all seven tablets are represented in the various student exercise tablets.Footnote 65 That this was a politically relevant text is evidenced by the Neo-Assyrian revisions during Sennacherib’s reforms, which gave Aššur pride of place over Marduk.Footnote 66 In tandem with the aforementioned Marduk hymns and other Marduk-centric texts discussed below, these exercises instilled in students the religious ideology of Marduk as the patron of the capital Babylon, and, consequently, head of the Babylonian (state) pantheon. As mentioned above, this was widespread but not universal: in Nippur the curriculum instead focused on Ninurta-centric mythology such as Angim, Anzû, and Lugale to promote local religious traditions.Footnote 67 Nonetheless, these exercises embrace the same learning objectives, instructing students in the characteristics, roles, and stories of important individual deities.

Babylon vs. Nippur as Religious Centers

The religious landscape of Babylonia as a whole was characterized by an official pantheon led by Marduk, the patron of Babylon as the political and religious capital. It comes as no surprise, then, that much of the Neo- and Late Babylonian curriculum focused on indoctrinating the next generations with the philosophies of both Marduk’s supremacy in the pantheon and Babylon’s primacy as an ancient center of the universe. This is especially visible in the selection of literature that was taught within the “schools,” which does not include many traditional mythological compositions but instead focused on those that were Marduk- and/or Babylon-centric.Footnote 68 As George has observed, this was meant “to fill the student’s mind with the theological and political ideology current in the capital” and represented “the inculcation of a world view.”Footnote 69 Emblematic of this learning goal is the Hymn in Praise of Babylon and the Babylonians.Footnote 70 This composition is a long and complex literary text (approximately 250 lines) attested in 20 manuscripts from the 1st millennium, when it was studied as part of the school curriculum.Footnote 71 It exalts, in turn, Marduk, his Esagil temple, Babylon, and then the inhabitants of Babylon themselves, elegantly tying together the various essential components of city-based religion and instilling in its students the supremacy of Babylon from a religious perspective. It was copied well into the later periods, with three exemplars possibly written in the 2nd/1st centuries BCE.Footnote 72

This emphasis on Babylon in the greater Babylonian curriculum was likely strategic: unlike the Assyrians, who venerated Aššur as the head of the Assyrian pantheon since the earliest attested periods,Footnote 73 Babylonian city-centered religion was much more visible, with people strongly identifying with their cities or regions and maintaining ancient local cults. This is due in part to the historical development of southern Mesopotamia, in which the originally Sumerian city-states and their associated patron deities were long independent and maintained their local characteristics even during periods of consolidation under territorial kingdoms.Footnote 74 Mesopotamian religions had always had local distinctions: cities had different patron and resident deities, pantheons varied between kingdoms and empires, and individual gods could become more or less popular over time.Footnote 75 It was only with the rise of Hammurabi’s Old Babylonian kingdom that Babylon became an important urban center and Marduk was promoted to the head of a regional pantheon, but individual cities’ religious traditions persisted, especially in traditional strongholds like Nippur.Footnote 76

As mentioned above, Nippur is perhaps the most visibly distinct in terms of maintaining its own pedagogical ideals about religion, and it presents a counter-image to Babylon as the uncontested religious capital of the region. Nippur’s portrayal as a religious center is exemplified in the Nippur Compendium, comparable to Tintir for Babylon (see below) but explaining Nippur, its gods, cult spaces, and other theological commentary and explanations, such as about festivals and months.Footnote 77 It is not well attested as part of the curriculum, but one Late Babylonian tablet seems to be a school exercise.Footnote 78 The excerpt tablet begins and ends with a colophon that it was dictated by a teacher (pî ummânu) as a lesson for a student.Footnote 79 As teaching material, the Nippur Compendium’s objectives seem to be to preserve the knowledge related to Nippur’s traditional religious status. As with Babylon and Marduk, the learning goals around teaching Nippur as a religious center included the promotion of its city gods, especially Ninurta.Footnote 80 The curricula instead centering Babylon in education across as much of Babylonia as possible, particularly in northern Babylonia, may have been meant to override some of these more strongly articulated city-based identities, which occasionally caused friction between different cultic personnel and established families.Footnote 81 Indeed, that northern Babylonians incorporated southern Babylonian texts (but not vice versa) suggests an intentional effort to absorb and domesticize the competing theological education, which locally resisted assimilation.Footnote 82 The continued invocation of Nippur and its religious identity, while geographically limited, may have thus become the symbol of (or shorthand for) religious pedagogy independent of Babylon, perhaps in increasing defiance of a push to harmonize diverging traditions.

Illustrative of this unifying effort is the aforementioned Tintir, which was studied in the second level of the Neo-Babylonian curriculum along with more complex lexical lists, incantations (bi- and monolingual), Enūma eliš, and prayers.Footnote 83 Neo- and Late Babylonian school text exemplars have been found in numerous cities in Babylonia, including Babylon, Kiš, Sippar, Dilbat, and possibly Borsippa.Footnote 84 Despite its early classification as a topographical text, it is now generally accepted that its primary purpose was not to describe the layout of Babylon or even its political importance as the seat of kingship but “to glorify Babylon as a great religious centre”Footnote 85 as the city was “described as well as created. It is created as a mental image, as a cosmic centre defined by a network of religiously significant points.”Footnote 86 The excerpts of Tintir that were copied in school contexts include portions that give the names and epithets of the city, the city’s shrines and names of the major temples, Marduk shrines in particular, and the names of gates and streets.Footnote 87 Students would gain systematic knowledge about Babylon’s temples and the city as an ancient center of sacred spaces, applying lessons from the elementary stage lexical lists to deepen their knowledge as well as explore the religious significance of the city. This further underscored the city’s place in the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s religio-political ideology, which these students needed to internalize as future servants of the divinely appointed king who ruled from Babylon.

While many manuscripts of Tintir are Neo- and Late Babylonian, the text was not restricted to Babylonia; copies were also found in Assyria from the 7th century, almost exclusively from Ashurbanipal’s library with one exemplar from Assur.Footnote 88 It, or at least the lexical tradition that produced it, seemingly influenced the composition of similar texts, particularly about Assur, Assyria’s own religious capital.Footnote 89 The Neo-Assyrian Empire recognized Babylon’s importance, especially for those Assyrian kings who ruled over Babylonia as well, and Tintir was so closely aligned with this worldview that “the people of Babylon” (Babilaya) even quoted it in an appeal to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, with explicit reference to the formal education he and his brother Šamaš-šuma-ukīn (who was the king of Babylonia) had undergone: “When the kings, our lords, practiced their school tablet(s) (liginnu), the gods bestowed great wisdom and magnanimity on you. ‘Dimkurkurra, Babylon, (is) the Bond of the Lands.’ Whoever enters inside it, his privileged status is secured.”Footnote 90 The line from Tintir gives the ceremonial name of Babylon as Dimkurkurra and then explains it.Footnote 91 It is surely not coincidental that these Babylonians have linked the Tintir quotation directly with formal education, appealing to a common set of religious and cultural values that were shared between them and the Assyrian royal family members by virtue of scribal education.Footnote 92 Since Tintir was integrated into Ashurbanipal’s library collection, he may indeed have studied it as a student himself. In contrast, the Babylonian curriculum never adopted the Assyrians’ Topography of Assur into its canon.Footnote 93 The shift to non-Mesopotamian empires did not affect this learning outcome, as the latest datable exemplar of Tintir (based on its colophon) comes from Babylon in 61 BCE,Footnote 94 and another manuscript includes a Greek transliteration of the Akkadian explanations on the reverse, meaning it must be Seleucid period or later.Footnote 95 Both of these exemplars excerpt Tablet I, suggesting the historical and ceremonial names of Babylon and its ancient role as the religious center par excellence were considered particularly important to preserve and teach in the late periods as the non-Mesopotamian empires shifted the base of power to other capital cities.Footnote 96

Religious Spaces and Temple Cult

Understanding the temple cult required knowledge of several different subjects, e.g., the major temples and where they were located, the personnel, and the rituals or priestly practices that took place in the temples. Practical training in temple activities was relevant only for individuals with prebends (isqu “share”), which allowed entry into the temple and an income in return for executing the cultic duties associated with the prebend.Footnote 97 In the Neo-Babylonian period, priestly prebends were generally hereditary, and sons of priests expected to take on their fathers’ roles.Footnote 98 These young men would largely have acquired their practical training for their future tasks from their fathers. While some scribal students were indeed identified as the sons of priests, others were preparing for other careers and roles that would not necessitate proficiency in or even familiarity with the inner workings of the temple cult. In general, the practicalities of conducting rituals and cultic procedures are not represented in the written curriculum.Footnote 99 Nonetheless, scribal training included some instruction related to appropriate interactions with the temple cult, both in terms of their individual behavior and with regard to expectations around the kings that they would eventually serve as professionals; in particular, royal responsibilities towards Marduk’s Esagil temple in Babylon.

Concerning their own interactions with temples, students had supervision in preparing and making offerings to the temple as part of their formal studies. This practice is embodied in the school texts dedicated to individual gods and deposited at the temple as votive offerings. The tablets had typical school exercises on one side, with prayers to the god and requests for blessings on the other, and were often decorated with borders or rows of wedges.Footnote 100 The recipient was usually (but not exclusively) Nabû as the patron of scribal arts, and votive school texts were deposited in numerous temples in Babylon, Sippar, Borsippa, Nippur, and Uruk.Footnote 101 For instance, E-niggidru-kalama-suma, the temple of Nabû ša ḫarê in Babylon, has yielded a few thousand such school tablet fragments.Footnote 102 There is no evidence of a “school” on the temple grounds, and students were therefore visiting the temple with the express purpose of depositing their prepared votive tablets, some of which were placed in pigeonholes called gunnu or given to the temple’s doorkeeper.Footnote 103 Completing this task introduced the students to the temple grounds and provided them with experience in making votive offerings, with some visits possibly taking place on festival days.Footnote 104

In one such dedicated scribal tablet, MS 5007, the student describes in the colophon how he collected the clay for the tablet:Footnote 105

For Nabû, august, majestic and awesome heir, firstborn son of Asarre, foremost of all, who bears the tablet of destinies of the gods, whom the Igigi gods respect most in the entire universe, my lord, I, Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, son of Šamaš-iddina, the baker of Šamaš and Aya, with joy in my heart went out to the open countryside. I picked up some clean clay and brought it from the holy clay-deposit. I loaded(!) it on my shoulder and transported it. For my good health, for a long life, for well-being, for the well-being of my father’s household, my own stability and my successful raising(!) of a family, I(!) wrote (this) tablet. I(!) sent it in to the gunnu\-container, to the porter of the door of E-babbarra. O tablet, when you enter, \[intercede(?)\] for Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, son \[of Šamaš-iddina! … \].Footnote 106

The procedure for acquiring the clay was itself ritualized, and teachers or āšipu specialists would guide young students, probably at dawn, through the steps of consecrating the clay with incantations at a special clay-pit outside of the city, before the student collected the clay for his votive tablet.Footnote 107 Many tablets specify that the clay came from special locations, including a sacred precinct in Babylon near the Ea temple called “the Garden of the Apsû.”Footnote 108 The collection of the clay was an important skill for future scribes, and students could observe where and how the clay was acquired, including the rituals and offerings needed to properly prepare it for offering purposes. This was particularly salient knowledge for future _āšipu_s, who used essentially the same procedure for clay they fashioned into ritual figurines.Footnote 109

The student then inscribed the clay with his school exercises and dedication and took the finished tablet to the temple, where he placed it as a votive for the god, taking part in an active ritual offering that linked his religious education and developing professional identity with the cultic space and the veneration of the divine.Footnote 110 This excursion could take place quite early in a student’s education, as some of the tablets feature colophons written by a more senior student or teacher and others are designated as ṭuppi meṣḫerūti “tablet of youth” (i.e., students who were still beginners) and many have the hallmarks of free composition by a novice.Footnote 111 George suggests that the task was “a recognized rite of passage, and maybe they marked formally the boy’s completion of an initial stage of his education.”Footnote 112 Indeed, most of the votive exercise tablets contain school exercises from the most basic stages of scribal education.Footnote 113

Royal ideology and expectations related to cultic spaces was also represented. One of the most important and public duties of the Babylonian kings these students would serve as adults was patronage of the temples, particularly the Esagil temple of Marduk in Babylon. This relationship between king and cult was perhaps most clearly taught in the curriculum via the so-called “Esagil Chronicle,” a literary text purporting to be a historical letter between early 2nd millennium kings that is known from the first stage of Babylonian scribal education.Footnote 114 It was still taught into the Achaemenid period: an exemplar from the Ebabbar temple archive in Sippar bears a colophon seemingly belonging to a student or apprentice active during Darius’ reign, though the many notations about breaks and hope that a later scribe will be able to restore the missing texts implies that some of the knowledge was lost in transmission, at least in this geographic and temporal context.Footnote 115

In the composition, the final king of the First Dynasty of Isin, Damiq-ilīšu (ca. 1816-1794 BCE), gives advice to Apil-Sîn (ca. 1830-1813), the king of Babylon and grandfather of Hammurabi, about the expectations around kings’ behavior towards Marduk’s cult and the Esagil temple. The aspects he highlights include not only performing its rituals but also temple maintenance (representing renovation projects), bringing food and wine offerings (representing the daily cult and first fruits offerings), and supporting the temple financially (a sentiment found in royal inscriptions, also under the Assyrians).Footnote 116 He does this by describing how a number of 3rd millennium kings either patronized the cult or acted irresponsibly, detailing the consequences, whether blessings or curses that usually resulted in death.Footnote 117 The 3rd millennium setting is anachronistic for Marduk’s importance, but focusing on him and his temple is consistent with the learning objectives for the 1st millennium Babylonian curricula.Footnote 118 Similar to other curricular texts is the monologue-style advice format and historical-literary letter genre, which is also represented in the first stage of education by a fictional letter about sacrilege sent by Samsuiluna to his officials and priests.Footnote 119 The didactic framing also links to the corpus of “wisdom literature” discussed below. The Sippar exemplar, written in Standard Babylonian, the dialect of scribal professionals, appears to have parallels to Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions and the composition may furthermore have been used as a historical source for the “Chronicle of Early Kings.”Footnote 120 These students would have later taken on professions that were part of the royal infrastructure and the expectations concerning the king’s behavior towards Marduk’s temple cult were a central component of Babylonian royal ideology, which they internalized along with other lessons about kingship and Marduk theology. As with the texts about Babylon above, this learning outcome became all the more important for Babylonian elites to maintain, at least amongst themselves, under non-native kings who did not share these priorities.Footnote 121

Relationships between Gods and Humans

Relationships between the mortal and divine world and actors were communicated in the written curriculum primarily through literary works that are human- (rather than god-) centered, which included Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the “Counsels of Wisdom.” Both of these compositions are instructive for understanding interactions between deities and ordinary humans.Footnote 122 They portray this knowledge as nēmequ “wisdom,” which is itself associated with gods; in these texts, wisdom is linked with Marduk and Ea, respectively.Footnote 123 Both compositions were taught in the advanced Babylonian scribal curricula and exemplars for Ludlul bēl nēmeqi have been found in Babylon, Sippar, and Kiš, while the “Counsels of Wisdom” was found in the same cities plus Borsippa and Nippur.Footnote 124 These texts show standardization of pedagogy across geography—with the latter even crossing the northern-southern divide, presumably because Marduk has an unremarkable role amongst the few deities invoked by name—indicating a common set of values being communicated.Footnote 125 The use of these compositions in scribal school curricula would have exposed students to how the divine played an active role in their daily lives, theological perspectives on illness that those students who became exorcists or medical practitioners would have been consulted to resolve, and behavioral expectations that were relevant for all imperial elites.

Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, also known as the “Tale of the Righteous Sufferer,” is a first-person narrative describing how the protagonist Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan was abandoned by his personal gods when Marduk became angry with him, and the resulting hardships he suffers.Footnote 126 The story is fundamentally about the gods’ roles in misfortune and illness befalling a person (even someone who believes he has acted correctly towards the gods) and the inscrutable nature of divinely inflicted suffering, which can occur without a clear cause. The first part of the composition is a hymn to Marduk, who is the punishing and redeeming deity, and the remaining four parts describe in sequence Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s social ostracism and bad fortune, his reflections on his actions towards the gods and what he could have possibly done wrong, his resulting mental and physical afflictions that confound even exorcists and diviners, and finally his redemption and recovery, concluding with praise and offerings for Marduk and the gods of Esagil. Ludlul’s prologue includes the protagonist’s statement lušalmidma nišī qitruba gamālšin “let me teach the people that their salvation is near,” giving an educational framing to the protagonist’s following monologue detailing his experiences, itself reminiscent of other didactic texts.Footnote 127 The speaker himself seems to have had a pedagogical role: “I instructed (ušāri) my land to observe the god’s rites, the goddess’s name did I drill my people to esteem. I made my praises of the king like a god’s, and I taught the populace respect for the palace. I wish I knew that these things were always pleasing to a god!…Where might mere human beings have learned (ilmadā) the ways of the gods?”Footnote 128 By means of Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s musings, the narrative teaches readers appropriate veneration towards the gods as well as the punishments the gods could impose on them. Tablet II 12-30 in particular mentions as proper conduct food and drink offerings, prayer and prostration, festivals and holidays, conducting rites, upholding sworn oaths, teaching others the correct ways of worship, and praying for the king. These actions, however, do not preclude accidentally angering the god and being punished for them, an acknowledgment that even the righteous endure illness and misfortune.Footnote 129

The composition includes various ailments that could befall someone, which require an āšipu to resolve, and it shows parallels to incantations, another genre (particularly relevant for āšipūtu) studied in formal scribal education, sometimes excerpted on the same school tablets as Ludlul.Footnote 130 Symptoms are described at length, including migraines, neck weakness, convulsing back muscles, gastrointestinal distress, coughing, fatigue, paralysis, and many others, which Marduk systematically overturns with his incantation (tâšu), with some description of how the symptoms gradually resolve.Footnote 131 While it is not an instruction manual, that many of the Babylonian students studying this text would become professionals in āšipūtu means that this text orients them to common medical symptoms and the incantations they would learn and implement (following the model of Marduk himself) as well as gives them a complementary patient-forward perspective into suffering caused by malady and hardship. It does not offer clear answers about why a deity would punish an otherwise virtuous person, only that it does happen, and maps the progression of disease and recovery. Several passages also mention an āšipu and his work directly, and the sufferer’s final recovery was aided by, among others, an āšipu from Babylon sent by Marduk to him in a dream, contextualizing the future professional duties of these students and their patronage by the god.Footnote 132 Other professionals, including divination specialists (bārû) and dream interpreters (šā’ilu), are also mentioned; at least the former was also trained through formal scribal education.Footnote 133

The “Counsels of Wisdom” provides guidance on the proper behavior of humans towards the divine among other lessons about appropriate actions, moral expectations, and socio-cultural norms that were relevant for literate professionals, especially scribes and administrators, working for the empires.Footnote 134 The composition’s format is a didactic monologue by a scholar (ummânu) directed towards a student (called māru “son”), who is commanded to learn these instructions and study his tablets well:

“pay heed to the instructions of E\[a\], take my advice and excel in virtue… On the basis of what you have learned, read from the tablet: ‘Reverence begets benevolence, sacrifice prolongs life, and prayer atones for guilt. He who reveres a god, benevolence will not elude him. He who reveres a \[godde\]ss, he will enhance his well-being. He who reveres the Anunna-gods, he will prolong (his) days.’”Footnote 135

Like Ludlul, the “Counsels of Wisdom” discusses religious praxis and forms of personal devotion, but in this case explicitly transferring a religious ideology and worldview intergenerationally.Footnote 136 It is more straightforward in its lessons, including that one must perform daily veneration, offerings, and prayer in order to remain in good standing with one’s personal deity and reap the rewards of this relationship, while cautioning against specific actions that anger the gods, including interpersonal behaviors unrelated to cult practices.Footnote 137 For instance, the student is warned against excessive drinking, gossiping, slacking off work, doing or plotting evil against others, and treating those who are less fortunate with contempt, with several lines affirming that these actions will anger the gods in addition to alienating him from his peers, relatives, and the royalty he serves.Footnote 138 These were particularly important values and behaviors to teach the next generation of scribes, administrators, and other imperial professionals. The text furthermore includes proverbs, a genre students studied in formal education as well.Footnote 139 The “Counsels of Wisdom” and Ludlul Bēl nēmeqi are thus prime examples of curricular texts in which students learned about the relationships between gods and humans, including appropriate conduct and divinely inflicted consequences of transgressing these norms.

Applications of Religious Education

A final aspect to address is what observable impact this education had on students’ careers and adulthood. The shift between learning and implementation began already with the apprenticeship or specialization phase for those students who entered relevant professions.Footnote 140 In some cases, application of acquired knowledge was straightforward. For example, several of the cases discussed above concern the āšipu_s; as mentioned, much of the second-stage curriculum was geared towards training future exorcists, including learning the incantations that they would use as professionals.Footnote 141 These lessons could be implemented directly in the line of duty. However, there are other visible, practical applications of the scribal curriculum that are less direct and demonstrate more creativity; for instance, _Tintir was utilized for the Babylonian royal inscriptions and other genres.Footnote 142

Religious education also became the basis for introducing and implementing religious changes within the empire, driven by the professionals who had undergone scribal training. The literate elite in Mesopotamia were agents of theological changes or transmitters of religious traditions in the 1st millennium more broadly and were in a unique position of power when it came to the creation and dissemination of religious ideology. The king is often perceived as the main driver of state-level religious policies, but it was the intellectual classes who had direct access to and control over written traditions and ritual procedures. While the king’s authority means that, in most cases, innovations came by royal order, these specialists designed their actual implementation.Footnote 143 Scribes and priests were educated and trained in traditional customs and texts, which they could use for two opposing purposes: either to uphold longstanding practices or to exploit them as a means by which to hide a change behind the veneer of antiquity. In making changes, specialists had considerable agency, even when it was done on the king’s behalf.

A common motif is that innovations and changes, particularly in the religious sphere, were framed as a return to ancient and venerable customs or a continuation of longstanding practices, however artificial this claim may have been in reality. Many studies have addressed antiquarianism and invocations of the past in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian inscriptions, which take the form of describing deeds of past kings, using antique place names, claiming that a building project restored a temple or city to ancient specifications, and many more.Footnote 144 Modern scholars often perceive religious conventions in Mesopotamia as conservative, which they by and large were, but breaking from convention in religious ideology and practice was acceptable as long as it was portrayed as conservative. The shift to non-native rule starting in 539 BCE with the conquest by the Achaemenid and, later, the Seleucid Empire provides an opportunity to see traditional scribal education applied in practice in this way. In general, the less involved the king was, the more clearly one can observe priests and scribes’ initiatives to effect religious changes that were designed either to persuade the king to act as their patron or to position one priestly community above the others for some tangible benefit for their cult. Many of these strategies hinged on the religious education these specialists received during their formal training, which seemed to remain largely consistent despite changes in imperial structures around them.Footnote 145

For the priestly community of the Anu temple in Uruk, starting in the Achaemenid period, the freedom to innovate came not only from the disengagement of the kings, but also from political circumstances. After a series of revolts early in Xerxes’ reign, he harshly retaliated against Babylonia’s elites, removing the officials in charge of major temples including Ištar’s Eanna temple in Uruk.Footnote 146 The power vacuum left by Uruk’s most prominent temple largely ceasing operations and Xerxes’ lack of interest in (re)shaping the cultic landscape of Uruk meant that a local Anu cult was able to grow until it dominated the city in the Seleucid period.Footnote 147 This cult’s community produced texts that argued for their important role and for the antiquity of their temple: the An/Anu temple was one of the original temples in 3rd millennium Uruk but was consistently secondary to Inana/Ištar’s and had become a minor cult by the 1st millennium.Footnote 148

To achieve this revival, Urukean priests and scribes exploited their formal training and extensive historical knowledge, recreating ritual texts and copying historical and historical-literary texts, often adapting the originals for a Seleucid context.Footnote 149 Significantly, their archives contained god-lists that were part of the Neo- and Late Babylonian curriculum, particularly An = Anum, as well as the related list An = Anu ša amēlu, which both put Anu at the very top of the pantheon and were used to justify elevating him and giving him universal qualities.Footnote 150 Ištar was demoted this way as well, as she was moved to a lower place in the pantheon and became an aspect of Anu’s consort Antu, who absorbed Ištar’s characteristics. She is listed in An = Anum Tablet I line 28 as dnin.šar6 = an-tum d iš-tar.Footnote 151 Commentaries on these god-lists and other texts in the archives pushed these claims even further, with one Seleucid period example from an Urukean āšipu’s private house (possibly itself a site of education) establishing Anu’s supremacy and power over all existence:

3´. \[…\] d geš 2 : lugal <<:>> kiš-šat : geš2: d a-nu-um

\[…\] Anu (d60) means “king of totality”; 60 means Anu

4´. \[dingir\] : i-lum : dingir : be-el :: dingir : šar-ri

\[dingir\] means “god”; “dingir” means “lord”; “dingir” means “king”

…

6´. \[…\] : ba-nu-u_2 : dingir.meš : ṣal-mat_ <<:>> sag.du

\[…\] \[Anu\] (is) creator of the gods (and) black-headed (people)

…

9´. \[…\]-meš an\-e u ki\-tim

\[…\] of heaven and earth.Footnote 152

Many of these compositions were part of the local scribal curriculum, which would have perpetuated the new ideas until they could become traditional. This program of religious innovation was entirely driven by the educated elite families in Uruk with the aim to promote their god, and thereby their professional community and themselves, above others.

This resulted in clear changes in the religious practices and landscapes of Uruk. Of particular influence was the Ah’ûtu family, which held power in both the religious and political spheres of the city. In 244 BCE, one member of this family, governor Anu-uballiṭ (Nikarchos) built a large temple complex for Anu and his consort Antu which he called the Bīt Rēš, the “main temple,” supplanting Eanna as the most important local temple.Footnote 153 Another member this family, Anu-uballiṭ (Kephalon), who served as an administrator of the city and temples, renovated the Bīt Rēš in 202 BCE. He commemorated this project with stamped bricks, and the inscription stressed the ancient nature of the (still relatively new) temple using the trope that it was built by the mythical sage Adapa (Oannes), who lived before the ancient flood and was credited in the Epic of Gilgameš—itself still part of the school curriculum at this time—with helping to found Uruk in the first place due to his role as one of the seven sages.Footnote 154 Moreover, in referencing earlier construction works on the temple, Anu-uballiṭ’s scribes used the very same techniques used in earlier royal inscriptions, which they would have had access to and the ability to read and exploit.Footnote 155 This program’s success was not in attracting the attention of the Seleucid kings—there is no evidence any of them ever invested in the city’s cults—but rather in producing texts attesting to Anu’s antiquity and his historical role at the head of the pantheon that put the Anu-affiliated elite families in such politically and theologically powerful roles that they were able to act as their own patrons in Uruk.

Another, smaller cult used similar strategies to make a home for itself in Uruk: the Anšar temple, an Aššur cult that survived the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. When Sargon II conquered Babylon, the king may have been looking for a way to establish Aššur’s uncontested supremacy over all gods, especially Marduk. His scribes cleverly reinterpreted the god Anšar as Aššur by simply changing the writing of the name Aššur to an.šar2. The identification took hold and Aššur’s name was frequently written as an.šar2 in the Sargonid period Assyrian royal inscriptions.Footnote 156 Anšar was one of the primordial gods in Enūma eliš and an ancestor of Anu in the god-lists, so this identification meant Aššur outranked most other deities (including Marduk) in age and status. The initial change was endorsed by the kings, but it lived on because of its utility for the post-Assyrian Aššur temple in Uruk, which may have been founded by immigrant, refugee, or deported Assyrian priests.Footnote 157 With no Assyrian king left to set religious ideology, this cult was entirely driven by the priests. However, historically, Aššur was an exclusively Assyrian god, one not shared with the Babylonians, and closely linked to his patron city of Assur and the Assyrian Empire. Aššur may not have been a very welcome or natural presence in Babylonia, and the cultic personnel needed to make him palatable to the Urukeans. Thus, these priests and scribes invoked what had once been an innovation but, by this point, was an older convention: this equation between Aššur and Anšar, as the latter was an acceptably recognizable god for their southern colleagues, who also studied Enūma eliš and the relevant god-lists in their curricula. Therefore, a change facilitated initially by religious education was perpetuated through it as well, despite having to cross cultural borders.

Repurposing, repackaging, or even recreating older texts and customs to evoke a real or imagined past was the established method by which priests and scribes could innovate within the religious arena in the 1st millennium, what varied is to what end and to what extent. These were not theoretical changes but ones that sought a specific outcome, such as to advance a royal agenda, to persuade the king to act as patron to the cult, or to establish and promote a temple’s personnel within in their community. The scribes and priests, due to their formal training and access to historical documents, had the toolbox and blueprints to change traditions in acceptable but creative ways, and the scribal curriculum was a means for them to perpetuate both ancient and reimagined customs. Their religious education, in particular, equipped these specialists well for preserving or reshaping conceptions of the gods, cultic practices, and even entire religio-political communities.

Conclusion

While religious education was not a discrete “track” or discipline in Mesopotamian formal education, the case studies from Babylonia demonstrate that the texts scribal students copied during their training oriented them to a relatively broad set of learning objectives related to the pantheon, religious spaces, and the relationships between mortal and divine worlds. Some, like the god-lists, were based on longstanding curricular traditions using standardized texts passed down for generations, a method of orienting students to the extended theoretical pantheon. Others were targeted more towards religious praxis, such as activities related to the temple cult and religious spaces. Compositions such as Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the “Counsels of Wisdom” were meant to instruct scribal, specialist, and royal elites in a unified set of normative behaviors related to piety and humans’ interactions with the gods, bringing the focus of the learning outcomes to a markedly individual and personal level and cultivating a specific image of what made for a proper and loyal servant of the empire. These texts instrumentalized religious beliefs, particularly what was deemed pleasing or displeasing to the gods, as a powerful means by which to communicate, regulate, and enforce daily and routine behaviors as well as professional standards. These lessons did not exist in a vacuum but supplemented students’ experiences with religion in their daily lives and their preparations for independent praxis outside of the “school” environment. Moreover, these lessons were not simply internalized in youth but actively applied by these elites later as part of their professional activities.

In 1st millennium BCE Babylonia, it was also critical to instill in these future elites the core beliefs around Marduk and Babylon’s centrality, initially to support the official ideology of the empire (in the case of reigns of the Neo-Babylonian kings and, to a lesser extent, the Neo-Assyrian kings who ruled over Babylonia) and, later, to continue to transmit traditional Babylonian religio-political values and knowledge under the non-Mesopotamian empires of the Achaemenids and the Seleucids and beyond. Indeed, the apparently increasing intensity in the contemporaneous religious curriculum regarding Marduk and Babylon, already set in motion by the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s reclamation of Babylonian independence after the end of Assyrian hegemony in the region, may have been catalyzed by the socio-political developments of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, which endangered this identity. As discussed above, much of the “Marduk syllabus” is attested only in Neo- and Late Babylonian manuscripts—especially in terms of school text exemplars, either for the first time or with increased production—and continue to be produced well beyond the end of native Babylonian rule, with exemplars from the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. In contrast, much of the Nippurean curriculum maintained its longer roots, having already weathered minority status under both native and non-native rule. For many generations, Marduk and Babylon had been consistently core to a pan-Babylonian ideology, particularly within the political arenas, but the remarkably strong insistence upon them in Late Babylonian education suggests an active and defensive response to external factors challenging or threatening this supremacy, otherwise it would not be necessary to expand the pedagogical materials to underscore Marduk and Babylon’s standing in this way. Incorporating these compositions into the school curriculum may have thus been a concerted effort to preserve a certain religio-political ideology and ensure its continuation among new generations being raised in a changing world where even longstanding traditions could no longer be taken for granted as the status quo.

Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to Aino Hätinen and an anonymous reviewer for their careful reading, thorough comments, additional references, and astute corrections. They have greatly improved the quality of this study and inspired me to explore additional lines of inquiry. Any remaining faults are my responsibility.

Abbreviations

SAA 10 = Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Online SAAo editions.

SAA 18 = Reynolds, F. 2003. The Babylonian Correspondence of Esarhaddon and Letters to Assurbanipal and Sîn-šarru-iškun from Northern and Central Babylonia. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Online SAAo editions.

---

Footnotes

1 On “embeddedness” and its limitations, see Nongbri Reference Nongbri2008. The term is used here to denote that religious ideologies, praxis, and traditions did not occupy a separate sphere from politics, culture, and daily life. There is also no single “Mesopotamian religion,” though many religions in Mesopotamia had shared features; see further Zaia 2024a.

2 George Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 21.

3 For example, the local “school” run by the šangû (“head priest”) Qurdī-Nergal in Sultantepe during the late Neo-Assyrian period. It is also important to note that “priest” is a misnomer; these are cultic specialists with temple-related duties rather than pastoral or spiritual leaders, see further George Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 21.

4 Relevant studies include Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler Reference Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler2012b, Salvo and Scheer Reference Salvo and Scheer2021, and Auffarth Reference Auffarth, Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler2012.

5 Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler Reference Tanaseanu-Döbler, Döbler, Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler2012a: 2. Some Assyriological studies have isolated other subject-specific and specialized competencies in the curriculum in similar ways, such as “mathematics education” (Robson Reference Robson, Robson and Stedall2008).

6 Salvo and Scheer Reference Salvo and Scheer2021: 6.

7 The latter is often considered “theology” in other contexts, but the distinction is not productive for Mesopotamia.

8 George Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 27–29, including that these rituals likely comprised offerings, libations, prayers, invoking the names of the deceased, and a meal. For family religion and ancestor cult, particularly in the Old Babylonian period, see also van der Toorn Reference Van der Toorn1996: 11–147 and 2008.

9 See Garroway Reference Garroway2017 for a study of children participating in household religion in ancient Israel using archaeological and material culture data. Other ritual practices related to daily life and personal practices are described in the hemerological-menological corpus, see Kikuchi Reference Kikuchi2024 and Hätinen Reference Hätinen2023b and Reference Hätinen2024b. Practitioners could also use domestic spaces for their profession; for instance, the house in Assur belonging to the āšipu Baba-šumu-uṣur had a “ritual performance space” within it (Robson Reference Robson2019: 130). For the role of the eldest son in the ancestor cult, see van der Toorn Reference Van der Toorn, Bodel and Olyan2008: 26.

10 According to George (Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 27), “There is evidence to suggest that family gods were worshipped locally, in the small shrines and chapels that were dotted about the streets of Babylonian towns. In contrast to the great temples of the major gods, these structures were accessible to the general public, for typically they were located at street corners and open to the public gaze.” On laypeople making donations to the temples, see George Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 30–31. The topography of Mesopotamian cities was such that there were not usually separate districts for “religious” and “secular” buildings or structures associated with gods (such as walls and gates); see George Reference George1992: 13–29 on the physical topography of Babylon.

11 See Löhnert Reference Löhnert2007 for the Neo-Assyrian data. The Neo- and Late Babylonian prebendary system is discussed below.

12 For the general populace’s participation in public rituals, particularly those related to lamentation, see Mirelman Reference Mirelman, Hezser and Edelman2021. For further discussions of public ritual performances and the involvement of private citizens, see Robson Reference Robson2019: 105, 190, 215 and Krul Reference Krul2018: 226–232.

13 George (Reference George2003: 36) writes “oral versions of the legends of Gilgameš, Sargon and Narām-Sîn were probably well known to Babylonian children, and their early exposure to written texts about these fabled heroes of remotest antiquity in the first level of schooling sought to take advantage of this familiarity.”

14 Formal education and the curricula in the 1st millennium BCE are discussed, i.a., in Gesche Reference Gesche2001, Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2003, George Reference George2003: 37, Kleinerman Reference Kleinerman and Vita2021.

15 Gesche Reference Gesche2001, George Reference George2003/2004.

16 Gesche (Reference Gesche2001: 213–219) refers to this stage as Fachausbildung and highlights the specialties mentioned above as well as music (nārūtu), astronomy, law and economy, and mathematics. George (Reference George2003/2004: 37, 404) suggests the likelihood that many literary compositions belong to this stage.

17 Schmidhuber Reference Schmidhuber2019: 409–411 with further bibliography.

18 There is (limited) evidence for women’s scribal education, see May Reference May, Budin, Cifarelli, Garcia-Ventura and Millet Albà2018, Lion Reference Lion, Justel Vincente, Vita and Zamora López2008; Lion Reference Lion, Radner and Robson2011: 100–101. In the Old Assyrian period, women were literate enough to read and write letters (see Michel Reference Michel, Fares, Briquel-Chatonnet, Lion and Michel2009). In the Neo-Assyrian Empire, literate women belonged to the elite classes, including royal family members and women working in the palace as administrators (i.e., the šakintu, see Svärd Reference Svärd, Lion and Michel2016). On women active in religious cult, see May Reference May, De Graef, Garcia-Ventura, Goddeeris and Nakhai2022, though these women did not necessarily undergo formal scribal education.

19 The “schools” thus far identified were based in other institutions such as temples or private houses (Kleinerman Reference Kleinerman and Vita2021: 38–40, George Reference George and Sefati2005, Robson and Stevens Reference Robson, Stevens, Barjamovic and Ryholt2019, Jursa Reference Jursa1999).

20 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis, Roest and de Varennes1999: 102–103; Robson Reference Robson2019: 255.

21 Volk (Reference Volk1996) describes this as a dual purpose of Erziehung (upbringing) and Ausbildung (education).

22 On education as an important means of knowledge transfer, see Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis, van Egmond and van Soldt2012.

23 George Reference George2003: 37.

24 See Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 43–57, 153–166 for identifying school texts.

25 It is important to note that the extant curricula represent only written assignments. Much was likely communicated and learned orally without being rendered into the text, see Elman Reference Elman1975 and Rubio Reference Rubio, Barreyra Fracaroli and del Olmo Lete2009 for discussion. See also the footnote below for texts that contain indications of oral explanations.

26 Selected publications include Volk Reference Volk1996 and Reference Volk2011, George 2005, Robson Reference Robson2001, Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis1997, Delnero Reference Delnero2010, Kleinerman Reference Kleinerman2011, Crisostomo Reference Crisostomo2019, and Gadotti/Kleinerman Reference Gadotti and Kleinerman2021.

27 Robson (Reference Robson2019: 34) argues “We can now see that scribal education – which, for Oppenheim, was what fed the ‘stream of tradition’ – was neither unchanging nor purely ‘operational’. It did far more than simply impart the conventional technical skills necessary for the smooth transmission of ancient written knowledge. It adapted to socio-political upheaval by creating new traditions to stabilise itself, traditions that settled into custom in quieter times. Now, over half a century after Oppenheim, it would be eccentric to maintain that the choice of curricular material was entirely independent of current social forces, as he then had it, and was purely utilitarian in aim.”

28 Radner Reference Radner and Radner2014.

29 Zaia forthcoming b.

30 See Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis, van Egmond and van Soldt2012 on Babylonian education in Assyria and Frahm Reference Frahm2023: 294–296 on Ashurbanipal’s interest in collecting texts and recruiting experts from Babylonia. Data for Neo-Assyrian education are relatively sparse, with schools identified in Sultantepe in the Assyrian periphery and in Assur and Nimrud in the core. Nonetheless, the basic structure in Babylonia that was reconstructed by Gesche was probably similar in Assyria, with some variation in the texts that were studied or modifications to the texts themselves. Some of these differences are addressed below, where relevant.

31 Zaia forthcoming a for an overview with further literature.

32 See Kleinerman Reference Kleinerman and Vita2021: 55–60 for an overview of the curriculum and the emphasis on Akkadian writing skills. Much of the Sumerian curriculum known from earlier Babylonian periods had dropped out of use by this time.

33 The Borsippa curriculum is problematic to navigate as extant school texts cannot be definitively identified as being from this city, though Gesche (Reference Gesche2001: 37–38) already posited that many school texts attributed in museum collections to other locations (particularly in the Sippar collection), may have originated in Borsippa, see also Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 42. A high similarity in curricular materials between the two cities would further complicate distinguishing place of origin in the absence of certain provenance. On Borsippa and Babylon as “twin cities,” see Waerzeggers Reference Waerzeggers2010: 4–6.

34 Nippur as a hub of traditional pedagogy, especially regarding Sumerian, was already well established in the 2nd millennium BCE and this historical identity is still a feature of the city in the 1st millennium, despite Nippur’s relatively marginal status within the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods (for a brief survey, see Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 2–12 with further references). Indeed, Old Babylonian texts appear to be overrepresented in the Nippurean curricula of the 1st millennium when compared to that of northern Babylonia (Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 29), further suggesting the self-conscious cultivation of the city’s identity as built on the foundations of an ancient tradition. This manifests in the form of a number of compositions that are set in Nippur or are Nippur-oriented but were found primarily in other cities in Assyria and Babylonia during the 1st millennium; specifically the Nippur Compendium, The Poor Man of Nippur, the Series of the Fox, and The Hymn to the Queen of Nippur, of which only the first two are thus far evidenced in exemplars from Nippur, see Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 8.

35 Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 21.

36 Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 6–7 on the “Marduk Syllabus” and its absence from Nippur.

37 See Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 6, 8–9, and 11 on the use of Nippur materials, including the suggestion that scholars from Nippur were teaching in Uruk and that Nippur’s “library tablets” were written to be exported from the city. On The Doctor from Isin as a pedagogical exercise, see Zaia Reference Zaia2025 with further references. On the close ties and intellectual exchange between Late Babylonian Urukean and Nippurean scholars, including the presence of texts that were originally composed in Nippur found in Iqīša’s library and Uruk in general, see Krul Reference Krul2018: 88–89. However, it should be noted that this was apparently a non-institutional intellectual exchange; see Jursa Reference Jursa2010: 116 on the absence of Nippur in the archives of the Eanna temple in Uruk, suggesting that there were no significant institutional relationships between the temples of the two cities.

38 The school texts from Ur are not well published and it remains to be seen if the city also fell within this axis.

39 For the lexical lists, see Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 407–417. On literary texts, George (Reference George2003: 35–36) writes they were “a minor element in the first phase of instruction, for they are present on only a tiny number of the extant tablets. They include Gilgameš, the birth-legend of Sargon, the Cuthean Legend of Narām-Sîn, the literary letter once known as the Weidner Chronicle, a literary letter of Samsuiluna, and the Poor Man of Nippur…. The second phase of elementary instruction exposed the student to much more literature, for the tablets typical of this phase often include several passages from different literary texts.” The second phase literature included Enūma eliš, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the “Counsels of Wisdom,” discussed below. The format of 1st millennium school texts between northern and southern Babylonia were similar, see Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 27–30.

40 Kleinerman Reference Kleinerman and Vita2021: 58–59. This is well illustrated by the Emesal prayers that were relevant for the profession of kalûtu, which are essentially absent from school exercise tablets but are found as copies with colophons identifying them as the work of novice and apprentice _kalû_s, which is consistent with the specialization phase (Gabbay Reference Gabbay2014: 236–238).

41 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 150, 172–174. The āšipu_s mastered techniques and texts for diagnosing and curing illnesses and consequences of negative omens including rituals, incantations, and series such as _Alamdimmû and Sakikkû, see Rochberg Reference Rochberg2021: 5–6.

42 Some texts provide insights into the use of oral instruction. Commentaries in particular contain terminology that indicate oral lessons and dialogue, see Gabbay Reference Gabbay2016. In addition, the “giškim-text” indicates that a teacher (ummânu) pointed out (kullumu) the ominous signs to the students as they observed the heavens, see Hätinen Reference Hätinen and Maul2020: 115–116 and 138 (rev. lines 16-17).

43 At first glance, religion seems to dominate the curriculum, but there are numerous curricular texts that are not explicitly or primarily interested in religion. Many of the lexical lists do not fall within the god-lists category, and the first stage in particular focuses on literature about kings and kingship ideals (Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 149). The 1st millennium humor texts in the curricula have almost no religious content at all (Zaia Reference Zaia2025).

44 Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023. George (Reference George2003: 35) sees the first stage as conveying the “essential pantheon.” On lexical lists in Neo- and Late Babylonian curricula, including god-lists, see Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 406–417.

45 For the most recent editions and lists of manuscripts of An = Anum, see Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023. These god-lists already existed in the Old Babylonian period (Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 200–201 and 2003: 628) and An may even date earlier, to the Ur III period (Shibata Reference Shibata2009: 35). For An’s presence in early Babylonian curricula, see Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 16 and Shibata Reference Shibata2009: 35.

46 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 397. Lambert and Winters (Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 16) note that there are more school copies of An than An = Anum; this correlates well with the idea that fewer students continued on to the second stage of education.

47 The Neo-Assyrian exemplars of An, unlike their Babylonian counterparts, were often multi-column with supplementary information. As described by Shibata (Reference Shibata2009: 35), these columns comprised “the pronunciation of each \[divine\] name, the names of the signs used in each name and explanatory equivalents (names of equated deities or explanatory phrases),” though some exemplars maintained the single-column format.

48 Lambert and Winters (Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 16) argue that “texts like An = Anum continued to be passed down through the centuries. Witnesses from the Hellenistic period (such as W1) demonstrate that the text was then, about a millennium after its original composition and in a far different religious and cultural milieu, still remarkably intact, constituting for those scribes a source of ancient, received knowledge.” For an example of dormant cults, Sîn’s daughter Amarazu, who had an active cult in Nippur in the Ur III and Old Babylonian periods, is retained as a member of Sîn’s household in the 1st millennium only in the god-lists and a few bilingual incantations, consistent with scholastic materials (Hätinen Reference Hätinen2021: 324–325, 446; Simons Reference Simons2017). A Late Babylonian list mentions a šangû for her sister Amaraḫe’a, but the purpose of this text and its potential portrayal of active cult is unclear (Jursa Reference Jursa2001/2002: 76–79).

49 Neo-Babylonian manuscripts of the An list were found in Babylon, Nippur, Kiš, and Uruk (Shibata Reference Shibata2009: 35), while Neo- and Late Babylonian An = Anum exemplars are from Babylon, Borsippa, and possibly Sippar (Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 15–16).

50 Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 4, Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 201, Lambert Reference Lambert1957: 474. Shibata (Reference Shibata2009: 35) observes that the 1st millennium versions of the list were longer than their Old Babylonian predecessors and differed in divine sequence. For an example of a Neo-Assyrian commentary on the An list, see Zaia Reference Zaia2017b.

51 Lambert Reference Lambert1957: 476.

52 Per Lambert and Winters (Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 3): “In addition to providing us with a ‘divine lexicon’ or inventory of names (their spelling in cuneiform, and sometimes also their pronunciation) – many of which are known also from other types of sources – god lists attest the reflective process by which their composers sought to commit the polytheistic world around them into written form, in a (more or less) organized manner.” Robson (Reference Robson2019: 34) argues that the persistence of the An list in education despite the shift to Akkadian education means it “bears some religious or ideological weight; it cannot simply be a practical tool.”

53 On the structure of An = Anum: “Some sections of theologically-based ordering can be found, but in general it, though standardized, seems ‘random,’ and not even any sections arranged by clear lexical or graphemic principles can be readily observed.” (Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 4 and 17). A. Hätinen points out (personal communication) that the order of deities equated with Marduk in the Eriš šummi hymn in part follows the structure of An = Anum, see Fadhil and Jiménez Reference Fadhil and Jiménez2022: 230 and fn. 1. The hymn is not attested in the curriculum, but this may instead be an example of the creative application of the theological lessons that scribes learned in their formal education. For An, Lambert (Reference Lambert1957: 474) writes “at least at the beginning the arrangement of the list is apparently theological. In many places, however, it is difficult to discern the principles of arrangement, if there are any, and it is uncertain if there is even one case of lexical arrangement. Either our knowledge of the deities is inadequate to grasp the basis of the arrangement or, more probably, various short lists have been compiled without any attempt at integrating them.”

54 The relevant school tablet exemplars in Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023 include: 549 no. 80 (Tablet I and Ludlul III), 550 no. 81 (Tablets I and II, “Marduk’s Address,” Ludlul I), 574 no. 89 (Tablets III and IV), 575 no. 90 (Tablets IV and V), 576 no. 91 (possibly Tablets III-V), 581 no. 96 (Tablet VI), 582 no. 97 (Tablet VI and “Counsels of Wisdom), 584 no. 99 (Tablet VI). The school text BM 46282 contains an excerpt of Ludlul and another lexical god-list, see Hätinen and Földi Reference Hätinen and Földi2025: 18–19 and George and Taniguchi Reference George and Taniguchi2021: 9 no. 466, the latter noting a similarity of this god-list with CT 29 45: 7–15, which is part of a Neo-Babylonian explanatory god-list. For the edition of “Marduk’s Address to the Demons,” see Peterson Reference Peterson2020.

55 An is found on elementary tablets along with repetitions of certain signs (like DIŠ and A), Syllabaries A and B, and Ura 1, 2, and 3 (Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2014: 407).

56 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 82–83.

57 See Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 82–96 for a full description of names in these lists. She mentions that the lack of provenance for most relevant tablets means that we can hypothesize but not conclude that lists were organized by the most important god(s) in the city of origin.

58 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 97–102.

59 Regarding lexical lists, Lambert and Winters (Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 3) argue that “there was surely a substantial oral or cultural-contextual component that went along with their transmission that will remain mostly lost to us (at least some of which was committed to writing in the form of explanatory columns and, later, commentaries).”

60 Many of the well-known mythological texts (such as Etana, Atra-ḫasīs, and Adapa) were absent from the school curriculum, however, which George (Reference George2003: 36) suggests is “not because they were unpopular but because they did not suit the pedagogical needs of primary training in the first millennium BC.”

61 See Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 174–178, 195, 251, 282, 699. Oshima Reference Oshima2011 contains other Marduk-centric prayers and hymns that were found on school tablets.

62 On this corpus, see Rozzi Reference Rozzi2024a and Reference Rozzi2024b, which refer to this composition as Marduk2; in Oshima Reference Oshima2011 it is The Marduk Prayer no. 2 (see Footnote ibid.: 89 and 221 for school tablets containing this text).

63 See edition and discussion in Oshima Reference Oshima2011: 216–270.

64 There are many editions, translations, and studies of Enūma eliš, see most recently Haubold et al. Reference Haubold, Helle, Jiménez and Wisnom2024.

65 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 177–178 and Heinrich Reference Heinrich2021. A list of manuscripts is maintained on the eBL page: <https://www.ebl.lmu.de/corpus/L/1/2> (accessed May 2026).

66 Frahm Reference Frahm2010a: 8–13, including other texts that were modified or commissioned in service of these theological changes.

67 See Heinrich and Jiménez (Reference Heinrich and Jiménez2021: 163–164) on school texts from Neo-Babylonian or Achaemenid period Nippur that excerpted Ninurta myths i.e., Angim, Anzû, and Lugale, which were not included in the northern Babylonian curricula, though they note ( Footnote ibid. fn. 10) that Lugale appears in northern Babylonian commentaries. One could suggest that this indicates it was not part of the standard northern curriculum, which was focused on inculcating Marduk-centered ideology, but reserved for specialized and advanced scholarship only.

68 George Reference George2003: 36, citing Enūma eliš, Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, Marduk prayers, and Tintir.

69 George Reference George2003: 36.

70 The edition and study of this text is found in Fadhil and Jiménez Reference Fadhil and Jiménez2024.

71 See Fadhil and Jiménez Reference Fadhil and Jiménez2024: 21 and 26, including the excerpts on school tablets.

72 See Fadhil and Jiménez Reference Fadhil and Jiménez2024: 24–25 for the exemplars and their dates, the earliest of which is a possibly 7th century Assur school text, with several from the “long 6th century” from Sippar and Babylon and others that are also potentially Late Babylonian manuscripts. The Assur school tablet includes excerpts from hymns to Šamaš and Marduk and Erra and Išum ( Footnote ibid. 26), another likely expression of modifications for a local curriculum.

73 Initially, Aššur was largely the god of his eponymous city-state, but that he was already the head of a broader Assyrian pantheon is suggested by the existence of at least one shrine for him in the Assyrian trading colonies in Anatolia during the Old Assyrian period, see Larsen Reference Larsen2015: 265–266.

74 Barjamovic Reference Barjamovic and Dercksen2004.

75 Zaia Reference Zaia and Furey2024a.

76 For example, SAA 18 124, a letter to Esarhaddon attributed to the astronomer Bēl-ušēzib, describes how the Assyrian king must renovate Nippur and restore the ancient privileges owed to a major cult center, as it is a “dynastic house,” and “the eternal city of Enlil.” He advises the king that, because of the Ekur temple’s historical importance, Nippur should be exempt from taxes, tribute, corvée labor, or state service and that it should be treated like Babylon. As part of this argument, he quotes the “Advice to a Prince,” a literary text that instructs the king not to mistreat his subjects on pain of divine punishment. For the most recent edition of the “Advice to a Prince,” see Mitto Reference Mitto2022.

77 George Reference George1992: 143–145.

78 See George Reference George1992: 145 for the extant manuscripts. In Babylonia, the text is preserved on three Late Babylonian tablets, one of which is from the library of the Urukean scholar Iqīša (4th century BCE), which was perhaps used for pedagogical training as well, and one is the school excerpt, which was found in Babylon. There are also two exemplars of the Nippur Compendium from Nineveh, which show a local character and omit several Nippur- or city-specific sections, and an exemplar from Sultantepe includes similar information, see Abraham and Zilberg Reference Abraham and Zilberg2023 and Van Buylaere Reference Van Buylaere, Lanfranchi, Morandi Bonacossi, Pappi and Ponchia2012. The Neo-Assyrian exemplars seem to demonstrate how these Babylonian curricular materials were adapted for a different geo-cultural context, see also below on the Assyrian reception of Tintir versus The Topography of Assur.

79 Frahm Reference Frahm, Melville and Slotsky2010b: 179.

80 See Sallaberger Reference Sallaberger and Wilhelm1997 for Nippur’s history as a religious center, including the theological shift from focusing on Enlil to Ninurta.

81 See Finkel Reference Finkel, George and Finkel2000: 141. An interesting example is a Late Babylonian tablet explaining the astronomical “Goal-Years” method (BM 42294+42282) that begins with “1) Tablet of the secret of heaven, the hidden thing of the great gods. He must not give it out of hand; let him teach (it) to his son whom he loves. 2) To teach (it) to a non-citizen of Babylon or a non-citizen of Borsippa or anyone who is not learned, is a taboo of Nabû and Nisaba. 3) …. a non-citizen of Babylon or a non-citizen of Borsippa or anyone who is not learned who does not …. and speaks anything, 4) may Nabû and Nisaba not confirm him in the knowledge he learned, in poverty and loss 5) may they bring his \[life(?)\] to an end, and kill him with dropsy” (Brack-Bernsen and Hunger Reference Brack-Bernsen and Hunger2008: 6). Given the reference to teaching the tablet to a student (māru “son”) and the content’s explanatory nature regarding making astronomical calculations, it is possible that this tablet was a teaching aid for an instructor. Lenzi (Reference Lenzi2008: 164) also notes a colophon that reads “Let the one who fears Marduk and Zarpanitu guard (and) treasure (this tablet). He will not show it to a non-citizen of Babylon or Borsippa,” protecting a ritual tablet possibly relating to the cult in Babylon. A Late Babylonian letter similarly protects cuneiform scholarship as a privilege of Babylon and Borsippa, with one further letter mentioning Nippur as well, see Frazer Reference Frazer2024: 470–480.

82 According to Jiménez (Reference Jiménez2022: 8), “The wide acceptance of Nippur literature in all centers of cuneiform scholarship in the first-millennium BCE is remarkable, and starkly contrasts with the more limited circulation enjoyed by works from Babylon and Northern Babylonia, most of which were never copied in the South…In general terms, the Assyrians imported works from Northern and Southern Babylonia; the Northern Babylonians imported texts from the South; but scholarly imports to the South remained something of a rarity. Both in Assyria and Babylonia, Nippur-born literature circulated widely.” On how Babylon repurposed or reinterpreted religious texts from Nippur, see Jiménez Reference Jiménez2022: 6–7. While there is no unambiguous evidence for state or top-down control over education in the 1st millennium, this attempt to universalize a particular theological message across Babylonia may have been a consciously designed program, and one that potentially further calcified Nippur’s resistance to curricular change.

83 See Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 174 for the standardized order on multi-excerpt tablets, in which Tintir follows Enūma eliš and precedes lexical lists, and Footnote ibid. 179 for the use of this text as forming worldviews as well as the known school text extracts.

84 George Reference George1992: 29–72.

85 George Reference George1992: 4.

86 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis1998: 82. Tablet I in particular gives Babylon names and epithets that George (Reference George1992: 8) claims “portray the city as a place of prosperity and happiness, of justice, freedom and beauty, whose foundation is primeval, created by the gods and chosen by them as their home; on this account it is a sacred city, a fount of life and a source of wisdom, the religious and cosmological centre of the universe, given over to the celebration of festivals and exercising control over kingship and the divine decrees which rule mankind.” The five-tablet series has been summarized by Veldhuis (Reference Veldhuis1998: 82) as giving names of Babylon in Sumerian with Akkadian explanations (tablet I), listing cultic spaces including shrines and temples with their Sumerian ceremonial names (tablets II and IV), and a largely Akkadian section listing Marduk daises and features of the city like quarters, walls, gates, streets, and rivers (tablet V). His summary highlights the various pedagogical aspects (beyond the content itself) that are woven into this work, including Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual equations and explanations, parallels with other curricular materials such as lexical texts, Tintir, and Enūma eliš, and hermeneutic or speculative explorations.

87 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 179 fn. 692. George (Reference George1992: 32) lists exercise tablets that excerpt from Tablets I, II, IV, V. Tablet III is virtually unknown (George Reference George1992: 11).

88 George Reference George1992: 30.

89 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis1998: 80–81. On the Assyrian texts and how they compare to Tintir, see George Reference George1992: 167–172.

90 SAA 18 158: obv. 6–9, translation slightly modified. The Akkadian is as follows: šarrānī bēlēni liginnu kî iqbû ilānī uznu rapaštu u libbu rapšu iltaknūkunūši Dimkurkurra bābilu rikis mātāti mamma mala ana libbi irrubu kidinnūssu kaṣrat.

91 Tablet I line 51: dim kur.kur.raki kimin ri-kis ma-ta-a-ta (George Reference George1992: 40).

92 For the education of Ashurbanipal and other Neo-Assyrian royal family members, see Zamazalová Reference Zamazalová, Radner and Robson2011.

93 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis1998: 80.

94 Manuscript a, George Reference George1992: 30, 71.

95 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 184, George Reference George1992: 31 and 38; the exemplar with Greek is edited as manuscript c. This text is part of the Graeco-Babyloniaca, see Lang Reference Lang and Vita2021 and 2022 with further bibliography. Lang dates these texts to the Parthian period.

96 For example, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, which was likely founded in the late 4th century, appears to have been designed as a “new Babylon” as well as a large-scale urban center of Greek presence and political power (Messina Reference Messina, Blömer, Riedel, Versluys and Winter2021: 383–384). On Babylon gradually losing prominence at the imperial level but maintaining its scholarly importance, see Pirngruber Reference Pirngruber2017: 37–38.

97 On the term “priest” and the prebendary system in Neo-Babylonian temples, see Waerzeggers Reference Waerzeggers2010: 34–38.

98 Prebends could also be purchased, though it was not the typical means of acquisition; see Waerzeggers Reference Waerzeggers2014: 61–62 for the case of Marduk-rēmanni, who amassed an unusually large collection of prebends.

99 Many of the prebendary professions are attested in the Late Babylonian apprenticeship contracts catalogued in Hackl Reference Hackl2007-2010, see also fn. 140 below.

100 Per Robson’s (Reference Robson2019: 165) description: “on the reverse of many of the exercise tablets are long, tripartite colophons which were often pre-prepared for the novice scribes by their teacher or a more advanced trainee. They typically begin with a short prayer to Nabu ša harê or Nabu ša nikkassī ‘of accounts’, then give a list of wishes for the welfare of the scribe and his family, followed by an appeal to the tablet itself to intercede with Nabu on the dedicator’s behalf.” For examples of the decorative wedges, see George Reference George and Civil2010: 278–279 and Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2013: 170.

101 George Reference George and Civil2010 mentions the temples of Šamaš in Sippar, Nabû in Babylon, Nabû in Borsippa, and Mār-bīti near or in Borsippa. See Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 151–166 and Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2013 for colophons on school texts, including those with dedications to gods.

102 Robson Reference Robson2019: 164–165.

103 Robson Reference Robson2019: 165–167. Pigeonholes were also used for storing scholarly libraries within the temples, such as those found in the Šamaš temple in Sippar and the Nabû temple in Dūr-Šarrukīn, see Robson Reference Robson2019: 73, 210–11 and Neumann Reference Neumann2014: 400–401 (photos). Robson ( Footnote ibid .) has argued that these were “no ordinary school tablets but sacred objects.”

104 E.g., the akītu or kislīmu festivals, see Robson Reference Robson2019: 165 with further literature.

105 George (Reference George and Civil2010: 276) tentatively identifies the student’s father as a member of the Dannēa family and a baker’s prebend holder under Cambyses and Darius.

106 Translation from George Reference George and Civil2010: 275.

107 George Reference George and Civil2010: 277.

108 Footnote ibid .

109 Van Buylaere et al. Reference Van Buylaere, Watanabe and Altaweel2019: 182–183.

110 George Reference George and Civil2010: 277.

111 Footnote ibid .

112 Footnote ibid .

113 Veldhuis Reference Veldhuis2013, where he also discusses a dedicated tablet that contains an inventory of lexical lists that were taught across the various stages of the Neo- and Late Babylonian scribal curriculum.

114 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 148–149. For the most recent edition, see Frazer Reference Frazer2024: 115–124. This composition is also called the “Weidner Chronicle” and ABC 19 (after Grayson Reference Grayson1975: 43). For other editions and discussion, see Al-Rawi Reference Al-Rawi1990 and Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 113–173 and 338–399, with further literature.

115 Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 20–21, Al-Rawi Reference Al-Rawi1990: 1. The other provenanced exemplars are from private libraries in Assur (Neo-Assyrian) and Uruk (Hellenistic) but are not as well preserved (Grayson Reference Grayson1975: 145). The most recent edition is in Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 338–399.

116 Translations in Al-Rawi Reference Al-Rawi1990: 8–10 and Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 342–353.

117 The named rulers include kings from Sumerian legends like Akka of Kiš and Enmerkar of Uruk and continue chronologically through the end of the Ur III dynasty with Ibbi-Sîn. These kings are presented in detail in Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 138–173. As an example, one entry reads: “Amar-Suena his (Šulgi’s) son, altered the great bulls and the (sheep) sacrifices of the New Year Festival of Esagila. Goring by an ox was foretold for him, and he died(?) from the ‘bite’ of his shoe,” (Al-Rawi Reference Al-Rawi1990 rev. 30–31). Schaudig (Reference Schaudig2019: 161–164) resolves this apparent disconnect between crime, prophecy, and consequence as one concept hinging on the shoe being made of leather from a bull, the very type of animal that was central to the sacrifices Amar-Suena changed, noting that this king’s death by sandal is also known from Old Babylonian historical omens.

118 Schaudig (Reference Schaudig2019: 341) suggests a late 2nd millennium date (during the Second Dynasty of Isin) for composition. The only extant manuscripts are from the Neo-Assyrian and Neo-/Late Babylonian periods; on anachronisms and the use of possibly authentic historical sources, see Frazer Reference Frazer2024: 36, Villard Reference Villard2020: 278–279, Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 339–341, Grayson Reference Grayson1975: 44.

119 Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 148. For the most recent edition, see Frazer Reference Frazer2024: 125–138. Frazer ( Footnote ibid.: 36–37) notes that the characterization of Marduk in the text is anachronistic for Samsuiluna’s reign, much like with the Esagil Chronicle.

120 Al-Rawi Reference Al-Rawi1990: 2, Schaudig Reference Schaudig2019: 113, Villard Reference Villard2020: 279, Waerzeggers Reference Waerzeggers2012: 292.

121 In this same vein, the emphasis on the importance of Esagil and its cultic practices as a response against threats of marginalization and disruption under foreign kings is also a feature of the “Late Babylonian Priestly Literature,” new compositions that pretend to codify ancient rituals such as the Babylonian New Year’s Festival while actually reconceptualizing them to benefit the elite, especially priestly, classes (see studies in Jursa and Debourse Reference Jursa, Debourse, Dubovský and Giuntoli2020a and Reference Jursa, Debourse, Trampedach and Meeus2020b).

122 The Epic of Gilgameš is another example in the category of education about relationships between gods and humans, particularly the lessons about mortality. However, given that the protagonists were not “ordinary” humans, it is not discussed here. The Epic of Gilgameš was studied both at the elementary and advanced levels of the curriculum, see George Reference George2003: 37–38 for discussion.

123 On the genre of “wisdom literature,” which includes both of these compositions, see Cohen and Wasserman Reference Cohen, Wasserman and Kynes2021.

124 For Ludlul exemplars and its use in scribal curricula, see Hätinen Reference Hätinen2022b, Hätinen Reference Hätinen2024a, and Hätinen and Földi Reference Hätinen and Földi2025, with earlier lists in Lenzi Reference Lenzi2023: 52–61 and 187–208. Ludlul’s potential role in religious and ethical education was already suggested in early scholarship about the text, particularly in studies by Jastrow and Landersdorfer, see discussion in Hätinen forthcoming. I thank Aino for this information and for kindly providing an advance copy of her article. A list of exemplars for “Counsels” can be found in Földi Reference Földi2021 and Reference Földi2023, in which almost half of the known manuscripts are from school contexts. Like many of the compositions discussed in this study, the “Counsels of Wisdom” is known from 1st millennium manuscripts only, with the latest datable exemplar coming from Borsippa in the Achaemenid period. Ludlul was found as school exercises in Assur with further manuscripts found in Nineveh, Calah, Sultantepe, and “Counsels” in Assur and Nineveh, suggesting they were also used in the Neo-Assyrian curricula.

125 Lenzi Reference Lenzi2021: 2–3. Cohen and Wasserman (Reference Cohen, Wasserman and Kynes2021: 124) argue that wisdom literature’s use in Mesopotamian curricula “can be understood as a social discourse, which presumes common values and relays cultural coordinates to its receivers—students of the scribal school, who later become administrators and judges, businessmen and merchants, and even generals and the royalty. Consequently, Wisdom Literature can be viewed as a central tool for preserving and propagating the hegemonic ideology of ancient Mesopotamian civilization.”

126 For recent translations and discussion, see Oshima Reference Oshima2014, Hätinen Reference Hätinen2022a, and Lenzi Reference Lenzi2023. For the extant school texts excerpting this work, see Hätinen Reference Hätinen2022b and Hätinen and Földi Reference Hätinen and Földi2025. See Hätinen Reference Hätinen, Mattila, Rollinger and Fink2023a for the depiction of the relationships between the sufferer, his personal gods, and Marduk.

127 Tablet I 39, translation following Haubold Reference Haubold, Canevaro and O’Rourke2019: 214–216 but see Hätinen Reference Hätinen2019 for rendering the final noun as gamālšin rather than gumālšin. As opposed to the “Weidner Chronicle” and the “Counsels of Wisdom,” however, Ludlul identifies no explicit addressee at the beginning of the didactic monologue, implying that the student/reader is himself the direct recipient of this advice as representing the “the people,” generally speaking.

128 Translation Foster in Hätinen Reference Hätinen2022a (Tablet II 29-38; numbering follows eBL edition as of August 2025). A similar lament appears in SAA 10 294: obv. 26-31, a letter from the āšipu Urad-Gula to the Assyrian king: “Improper conduct, whispering about and revealing a secret are detestable things; I guarded the privileges of the king my lord, but I did not find benefactors. I endured \[…\] words, \[I made\] (my) office (my) night’s resting place, I taught the servants, the non-eunuchs and eunuchs alike, submission, toil and fear of the palace, and what did I get for it?” The line puluḫtu ša ēkalli urdāni ša ziqni u ša rēšāni ussammid is particularly close to Ludlul II 32 puluḫtu ēkalli ummān ušalmid but expanded to specify the members of the royal court with whom Urad-Gula, as a former member of the court himself, would have interacted. Given his profession, Urad-Gula presumably studied Ludlul during his education and a reference to the lament acts to both increase the pathos and show off his erudition.

129 Tablet II 34-43 describes the capriciousness of the gods.

130 Lambert (Reference Lambert1996: 22–23) already noted similarities between the descriptions of the sufferer’s diseases and incantations, see also Haubold Reference Haubold, Canevaro and O’Rourke2019: 213–214 and fns. 15 and 29 with further literature and Hätinen Reference Hätinen, Mattila, Rollinger and Fink2023a for discussion of parallels with incantation-prayers. On incantation excerpts with Ludlul, see Lenzi Reference Lenzi2023: 208–209. Lenzi ( Footnote ibid.: 5) notes that the author of the poem may have himself been an āšipu.

131 Tablet II 51-107 (illness), Tablet III 68-107 (recovery).

132 Tablet III 40-46.

133 Tablet II 6-9 and 108-111, for example.

134 As Lenzi (Reference Lenzi, Oshima and Kohlhaas2018: 62) argues, using “Counsels” in the scribal curriculum “perpetuated the literate professional’s place in society as a social group caught between the ruling elite, on whom the professional depended, and the common person, whose subsistence-level fate threatened the unheeding. The text advises the literate professional in the art of maintaining their precarious position between power and poverty through the exercise of discernment and discretion. This is the text’s wisdom, though never designated as such; it is a kind of white-collar, managerial wisdom.” George (Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 26) claims it was used “for the moral edification of apprentice scribes.” Haubold (Reference Haubold, Canevaro and O’Rourke2019: 208–209) argues that these texts are self-referential as didactic reference works for students: “The details can be looked up ‘in the tablet’, that is to say, in didactic literature on the topic, including (presumably) the Counsels of Wisdom itself. The advice to rely on one’s learning and ‘look it up in the tablet’ (ina iḫzikāma amur ina ṭuppi) is repeated twice more in the extant portion of the text.”

135 Lenzi Reference Lenzi2021: 4, Földi Reference Földi2022: lines 4–5 and A+85–91.

136 Lenzi Reference Lenzi2021: 5. While George (Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 26) qualifies that “the text is itself neither an aid to worship nor a religious tract,” he identifies it as conveying “basic facts about the form of Babylonian worship.”

137 George Reference George, Hezser and Edelman2021: 24–27, Lenzi Reference Lenzi2021: 5–6. In particular, the text advises “Bless your god every day, offerings, prayer, suitable incense you should have as freewill offerings to your god, for this is appropriate for a deity, prayer supplication and obeisance: for every grain you tender, you will return a talent, and you will proceed at a premium with (your) god” (Földi Reference Földi2022: lines A+78-A+84).

138 As a concrete example: “Take pity on the w\[eak\] (and) \[he\]lpless, Do not \[…\] the miserable, do not ho\[ld\] them in contempt. Do not condescend haughtily to them. One’s god will be angry with him for that, it is displeasing to Shamash, he will requite him with evil. Give food to eat, beverage to drink, Aspire to what is right, provide for and honor. One’s god will be happy with him for that, it is pleasing to Shamash, he will requite him with favor” (Földi Reference Földi2022: lines A+7–A+15).

139 Lenzi Reference Lenzi2021: 7, Gesche Reference Gesche2001: 150–151.

140 Colophons contain references to \[profession\] ṣeḫru (“junior \[profession\]”), such as āšipu ṣeḫru, which may indicate young professionals in their specialization/apprenticeship phase or those who were in a transitional phase after finishing their formal education but before becoming professionally independent. See fn. 16 above on the Fachausbildung stage of scribal education. For apprenticeship contracts in the Neo- and Late Babylonian period, see Hackl Reference Hackl2007-2010, particularly Appendix 2, which lists the professions the apprentices were learning. These were crafts and specialized labor such as textile work, wood and metalwork, and entertaining/singing, not scribal or literate professions.

141 George (Reference George2003: 36) writes that one of the reasons behind the curriculum was “to prepare him \[the student\] for an apprenticeship as a junior āšipu, a position that we know from colophons was held by many novice scribes” and to support “the acquisition of practical expertise.”

142 George Reference George1992: 7–8.

143 See Zaia Reference Zaia, Polinskaya, James and Papadogiannakis2024b for examples from Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions related to state religion and military conflicts.

144 See, i.a., Beaulieu Reference Beaulieu and Schnappet2013, Bartelmus and Taylor Reference Bartelmus and Taylor2014, Michalowski Reference Michalowski, Kozuh, Henkelman, Jones and Woods2014, Galter Reference Galter, Portuese and Pallavidini2022.

145 See Lang Reference Lang and Vita2021 and Reference Lang, Cancik-Kirschbaum and Schrakamp2022 on the Graeco-Babyloniaca, for example, which comprise traditional school exercises in both cuneiform and Greek script transliterations.

146 On Persian relations with the Babylonian elite, see Robson Reference Robson2019: 173–176.

147 Krul Reference Krul2018.

148 An An temple or shrine may already have existed in the 4th millennium, when an Inana temple was already active, but the evidence is ambiguous; see Beaulieu 2013: 103–115 on the early history of the Inana and An cults in Uruk, including Inana’s usurpation of Eanna from An in literary imaginings.

149 Krul Reference Krul2018: 79–84, including compositions inspired by or derived from the god-lists.

150 Beaulieu Reference Beaulieu1992: 55–60, including how these lists shaped the entire Urukean local pantheon, and Krul Reference Krul2018: 79–80.

151 Lambert and Winters Reference Lambert, Winters, George and Krebernik2023: 70.

152 See Zaia Reference Zaia2017a for edition and discussion.

153 Krul Reference Krul2018: 36–38, 43–45, Beaulieu Reference Beaulieu1992: 53–54.

154 Krul Reference Krul2018: 92–93.

155 Zaia forthcoming a for discussion with further literature.

156 Frahm Reference Frahm2010a: 9.

157 Beaulieu 1997.

---

References

Abraham, K. and Zilberg, P.. 2023. “Who is the Lord-of-Šāṭir?” N.A.B.U. 2023.1: 65–66 (no. 27).Google Scholar

Al-Rawi, F. N. H. 1990. “Tablets from the Sippar Library. I. The ‘Weidner Chronicle’: A Supposititious Royal Letter concerning a Vision”. Iraq 52: 1–13.10.2307/4200313CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Auffarth, C. 2012. “Religious Education in Classical Greece” in Tanaseanu-Döbler, I. and Döbler, M., eds. Religious Education in Pre-Modern Europe (Numen Book Series 140). Leiden: Brill, pp. 39–61.10.1163/9789004232143\_003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Barjamovic, G. 2004. “Civic Institutions and Self-Government in Southern Mesopotamia in the Mid-First Millennium BC” in Dercksen, J.G., ed. Assyria and Beyond: Studies presented to Mogens Trolle Larsen (PIHANS 100). Leiden: NINO, pp. 47–98.Google Scholar

Bartelmus, A. and Taylor, J.. 2014. “Collecting and Connecting History: Nabonidus and the Kassite Rebuilding of E(ul)maš of (Ištar)-Annunītu in Sippar-Annunītu”. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 66: 113–128.10.5615/jcunestud.66.2014.0113CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Beaulieu, P.-A. 1992. “Antiquarian Theology in Seleucid Uruk”. Acta Sumerologica 14: 47–75.Google Scholar

Beaulieu, P.-A. 2003. The Pantheon of Uruk during the Neo-Babylonian Period. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004496804CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Beaulieu, P.-A. 2013. “Mesopotamian Antiquarianism from Sumer to Babylon” in Schnappet, A. et al., eds. World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, pp. 121–139.Google Scholar

Brack-Bernsen, L. and Hunger, H.. 2008. “BM 42282+42294 and the Goal-Year Method,” SCIAMVS 9: 3–23.Google Scholar

Cohen, Y. and Wasserman, N.. 2021. “Mesopotamian Wisdom Literature” in Kynes, W., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Wisdom and the Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 121–140.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190661267.013.8CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Crisostomo, C. J. 2019. Translation as Scholarship: Language, Writing, and Bilingual Education in Ancient Babylonia. Boston: De Gruyter.10.1515/9781501509810CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Delnero, P. 2010. “Sumerian Extract Tablets and Scribal Education”. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 62: 53–69.10.1086/JCS41103871CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Elman, Y. 1975. “Authoritative Oral Tradition in Neo-Assyrian Scribal Circles”. Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society of Columbia University 7: 19–32.Google Scholar

Fadhil, A. A. and Jiménez, E.. 2022. “Literary Texts from the Sippar Library III: ‘Eriš šummi’, a Syncretistic Hymn to Marduk”. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 112 (2): 229–274.10.1515/za-2022-0004CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Fadhil, A. A. and Jiménez, E. 2024. “Literary Texts from the Sippar Library V: Hymn in Praise of Babylon and the Babylonians”. Iraq 86: 21–78.10.1017/irq.2024.23CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Finkel, I. 2000. “On Late Babylonian Medical Training” in George, A. R. and Finkel, I. L., eds. Wisdom, Gods and Literature: Studies in Assyriology in Honour of W.G. Lambert. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, pp. 137–223.Google Scholar

Földi, Z. 2021. “New Fragments of the Counsels of Wisdom ”. Kaskal 18: 189–213.Google Scholar

Földi, Z. 2022. “Counsels of Wisdom”. With contributions by A. C. Heinrich, E. Jiménez and T. D. N. Mitto. Translated by Benjamin R. Foster. electronic Babylonian Library. https://doi.org/10.5282/ebl/l/2/3 Last accessed August 2025.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Földi, Z. 2023. “More Fragments of the Counsels of Wisdom ”. Kaskal 20: 129–140.Google Scholar

Frahm, E. 2010a. “Counter-texts, Commentaries, and Adaptations: Politically Motivated Responses to the Babylonian Epic of Creation in Mesopotamia, the Biblical World, and Elsewhere”. Orient 45: 3–33.10.5356/orient.45.3CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Frahm, E. 2010b. “The Latest Sumerian Proverbs” in Melville, S. C. and Slotsky, A. L., eds. Opening the Tablet Box: Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Benjamin R. Foster. Leiden: Brill, pp. 155–184.10.1163/9789004186569\_011CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Frahm, E. 2023. Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar

Frazer, M. 2024. Akkadian Royal Letters in Later Mesopotamian Tradition. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004685949CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gabbay, U. 2014. Pacifying the Hearts of the Gods: Sumerian Emesal Prayers of the First Millennium BC. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.Google Scholar

Gabbay, U. 2016. The Exegetical Terminology of Akkadian Commentaries. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004323476CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Gadotti, A. and Kleinerman, A.. 2021. Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Babylonia. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar

Galter, H. D. 2022. “Assyrian Royal Inscriptions between Royal Propaganda and Historical Positioning” in Portuese, L. and Pallavidini, M., eds. Ancient Near Eastern Weltanschauungen in Contact and in Contrast. Rethinking Ideology and Propaganda in the Ancient Near East. Münster: Zaphon, pp. 87–114.10.5771/9783963271878-87CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Garroway, K. 2017. “Children and Religion in the Archaeological Record of Ancient Israel”. Journal of Ancient near Eastern Religions 17: 116–139.10.1163/15692124-12341289CrossRefGoogle Scholar

George, A. R. 1992. Babylonian Topographical Texts. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar

George, A. R. 2003. The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic. Vols. I–II. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

George, A. R. 2003/2004. “Review of Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr. (= Alter Orient und Altes Testament 275) by Petra D. Gesche”. Archiv für Orientforschung 50: 403–406.Google Scholar

George, A. R. 2005. “In Search of the é.dub.ba.a: The Ancient Mesopotamian School in Literature and Reality” in Sefati, Y., et al., eds. An Experienced Scribe Who Neglects Nothing: Ancient Near Eastern Studies in Honor of Jacob Klein. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, pp. 127–137.Google Scholar

George, A. R. 2010. “The colophon of MS 5007” in Civil, M., ed. The Lexical Texts in the Schøyen Collection. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press, pp. 274–279.Google Scholar

George, A. R. 2021. “Access to Religious Knowledge in Ancient Babylonia” in Hezser, C. and Edelman, D., eds. The Use and Dissemination of Religious Knowledge in Antiquity. Sheffield/Bristol: Equinox, pp. 20–35.Google Scholar

George, A. R. and Taniguchi, J.. 2021. Cuneiform Texts from the Folios of W.G. Lambert, Part Two. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns.Google Scholar

Gesche, P. D. 2001. Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr. Münster: Ugarit Verlag.Google Scholar

Grayson, A. K. 1975. Assyrian and Babylonian Chronicles. Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin.Google Scholar

Hackl, J. 2007–2010. “Neue spätbabylonische Lehrverträge aus dem British Museum und der Yale Babylonian Collection”. Archiv für Orientforschung 52: 77–97.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2019. “The Salvation of the People (Ludlul I 39)”. Kaskal 16: 77–79.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2020. “Fragmente des Kompendiums mul.apin und ein astrologisch-astronomischer Kommentar aus Assur” in Maul, S. M., ed. Assur-Forschungen 2. Arbeiten aus der Forschungsstelle «Edition literarischer Keilschrifttexte aus Assur» der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, pp. 109–169.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2021. The Moon God Sîn in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian Times. Münster: Zaphon.10.2307/jj.18654660CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2022a. “Righteous Sufferer (Ludlul bēl nēmeqi)”. With Contributions by Z.J. Földi, A.C. Heinrich, E. Jiménez and T.D.N. Mitto. Translated by Benjamin R. Foster. electronic Babylonian Library. https://doi.org/10.5282/ebl/l/2/2. Last accessed August 2025.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2022b. “Fragments of Ludlul bēl nēmeqi Chiefly from the Babylon Collection”. Kaskal 19: 139–151.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2023a. “Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan and his Gods” in Mattila, R., Rollinger, R., Fink, S., eds. Deciphering Assyria: A Tribute to Simo Parpola on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday. Münster: Zaphon, pp. 155–165.10.5771/9783963272370-155CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2023b. “The ‘Lying Down Menology’: Instructions for a Year of Auspicious Dreams”. Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 113 (1): 223–249.10.1515/za-2023-0005CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2024a. “ Ludlul bēl nēmeqi in Ashurbanipal’s Library”. Kaskal Nuova serie 1: 311–321.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. 2024b. “Purification, Defilement, and Privilege? An Example from the Hemerological and Menological Corpus”. Kaskal Nuova serie 1: 159–168.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. Forthcoming. “From Messiah to Job: The Recovery and Reception of Ludlul, 1880–1960” in Haubold, J. et al., eds. Library of Babylonian Literature 2. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar

Hätinen, A. and Földi, Z.. 2025. “From the Electronic Babylonian Literature Lab 52-3”. Kaskal Nuova serie 2: 1–28.Google Scholar

Haubold, J. 2019. “Embodied Teaching: Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi and the Babylonian Didactic Tradition” in Canevaro, L.-G. and O’Rourke, D., eds. Didactic Poetry of Greece, Rome and Beyond: Knowledge, Power, Tradition. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales, pp. 205–224.10.2307/j.ctvd58tb5.11CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Haubold, J., Helle, S., Jiménez, E., Wisnom, S., eds. 2024. Enuma Elish. The Babylonian Epic of Creation. London: Bloomsbury Academic.10.5040/9781350297425CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Heinrich, A. C. 2021. “Poem of Creation (Enūma eliš)”. With contributions by Z. J. Földi, A. Hätinen, E. Jiménez, and T. D. N. Mitto. Translated by Benjamin R. Foster. electronic Babylonian Library.Google Scholar

Heinrich, A. C. and Jiménez, E.. 2021. “Ninurta Lore in Neo-Babylonian Nippur: Two Exercise Tablets with Excerpts from Lugale, Angim, and Anzû ”. Kaskal 18: 163–169.Google Scholar

Jiménez, E. 2022. Middle and Neo-Babylonian Literary Texts in the Frau Hiprecht Collection, Jena. TMH 13. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.10.13173/9783447118811CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jursa, M. 1999. Das Archiv des Bel-Remanni. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar

Jursa, M. 2001/2002. “Göttliche Gärtner? Eine bemerkenswerte Liste”. Archiv für Orientforschung 48/49: 76–89.Google Scholar

Jursa, M. 2010. Aspects of the Economic History of Babylonia in the First Millennium BC. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.Google Scholar

Jursa, M. and Debourse, C.. 2020a. “Late Babylonian Priestly Literature from Babylon” in Dubovský, P. and Giuntoli, F., eds. Stones, Tablets, and Scrolls: Periods of the Formation of the Bible. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 253–282.Google Scholar

Jursa, M. and Debourse, C. 2020b. “Wooing the Victor with Words: Babylonian Priestly Literature as a Response to the Macedonian Conquest” in Trampedach, K. and Meeus, A., eds. The Legitimation of Conquest: Monarchical Representation and the Art of Government in the Empire of Alexander the Great. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 165–178.Google Scholar

Kikuchi, S. 2024. Mesopotamische Hemerologien und ihre gesellschaftliche Bedeutung (dubsar 32). Münster: Zaphon.Google Scholar

Kleinerman, A. 2011. Education in Early 2nd Millennium BC Babylonia. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004214231CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Kleinerman, A. 2021. “Teaching Akkadian in the Ancient Near East” in Vita, J.-P., ed. History of the Akkadian Language. Leiden: Brill, pp. 37–65.10.1163/9789004445215\_003CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Krul, J. 2018. The Revival of the Anu Cult and the Nocturnal Fire Ceremony at Late Babylonian Uruk. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004364943CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lambert, W. G. 1957. “Götterlisten” in Reallexikon der Assyriologie vol. 3, pp. 473–479.Google Scholar

Lambert, W. G. 1996. Babylonian Wisdom Literature. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns (originally printed 1960 by Oxford University Press).Google Scholar

Lambert, W. G. and Winters, R. D.. 2023. An = Anum and Related Lists, vol. 1 of God Lists of Ancient Mesopotamia , ed. George, A. R. and Krebernik, M.. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.Google Scholar

Lang, M. 2021. “Akkadian and the Greek Alphabet (Graeco-Babyloniaca)” in Vita, J.-P., ed. History of the Akkadian Language. Volumes 1-2. Leiden: Brill, pp. 102–125.10.1163/9789004445215\_006CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lang, M. 2022. “Lost in Transliteration. The Possible Role and the Sitz im Leben of the Graeco Babyloniaca” in Cancik-Kirschbaum, E. and Schrakamp, I., eds. Transfer, Adaption und Neukonfiguration von Schrift- und Sprachwissen im Alten Orient. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 479–493.10.13173/9783447117210.479CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Larsen, M. T. 2015. Ancient Kanesh: A Merchant Colony in Bronze Age Anatolia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781316344781CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lenzi, A. 2008. Secrecy and the Gods: Secret Knowledge in Ancient Mesopotamia and Biblical Israel. State Archives of Assyria Studies 19. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project.Google Scholar

Lenzi, A. 2018. “‘Counsels of Wisdom’ as ‘White-Collar’ Wisdom in First Millennium Ancient Mesopotamia” in Oshima, T. and Kohlhaas, S., eds. Teaching Morality in Antiquity: Wisdom Texts, Oral Traditions, and Images. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 60–69.Google Scholar

Lenzi, A. 2021. “Counsels of Wisdom: An ancient Babylonian instruction for scribal students”. Religion Compass 15 (3): 1–12.10.1111/rec3.12390CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lenzi, A. 2023. Suffering in Babylon: Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the Scholars, Ancient and Modern. Leuven: Peeters.10.2307/jj.3919381CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Lion, B. 2008. “Les femmes et l’écrit en Mésopotamie: auteurs, commanditaires d’inscriptions et scribes” in Justel Vincente, J.J., Vita, J.-P. and Zamora López, J.-A., eds. Las culturas del Próximo Oriente Antiguo y su expansión mediterránea. Zaragoza: Instituto de Estudios Islámicos y del Oriente Próximo, pp. 53–68.Google Scholar

Lion, B. 2011. “Literacy and Gender” in Radner, K. and Robson, E., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 90–116.Google Scholar

Löhnert, A. 2007. “The Installation of Priests According to Neo-Assyrian Documents”. State Archives of Assyria Bulletin XVI: 273–286.Google Scholar

May, N. N. 2018. “Female Scholars in Mesopotamia?” in Budin, S. L., Cifarelli, M., Garcia-Ventura, A., Millet Albà, A., eds. Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East: Approaches from Assyriology and Beyond. Barcelona: University of Barcelona Press, pp. 149–162.Google Scholar

May, N. N. 2022. “Women in Cult in First Millennium BCE Mesopotamia” in De Graef, K., Garcia-Ventura, A., Goddeeris, A., Nakhai, B. A., eds. The Mummy Under the Bed: Essays on Gender and Methodology in the Ancient Near East. Münster: Zaphon, pp. 125–156.Google Scholar

Messina, V. 2021. “Beyond Greece and Babylonia: Global and Local at Seleucia on the Tigris” in Blömer, M., Riedel, S., Versluys, M. J., Winter, E., eds. Common Dwelling Place of all the Gods: Commagene in its Local, Regional and Global Hellenistic Context. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, pp. 381–408.Google Scholar

Michalowski, P. 2014. “Biography of a Sentence: Assurbanipal, Nabonidus, Cyrus” in Kozuh, M., Henkelman, W. F. M., Jones, C. E., Woods, C., eds. Extraction & Control: Studies in Honor of Matthew W. Stolper. Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, pp. 203–210.Google Scholar

Michel, C. 2009. “Les femmes et l’écrit dans les archives paleo-assyriennes (XIXe s. av. J.-C.)” in Fares, S., Briquel-Chatonnet, F., Lion, B., Michel, C., eds. Femmes, cultures et sociétés dans les civilisations méditerranéennes et proches-orientales de l’Antiquité. Lyon: Topoi, pp. 253–272.Google Scholar

Mirelman, S. 2021. “Public Lamentation in Ancient Mesopotamia” in Hezser, C. and Edelman, D.,eds. The Use and Dissemination of Religious Knowledge in Antiquity. Sheffield/Bristol: Equinox, pp. 36–57.Google Scholar

Mitto, T. D. N. 2022. “Advice to a Prince”. With contributions by Z. J. Földi, A. C. Heinrich, A. Hätinen and E. Jiménez. Translated by Benjamin R. Foster. electronic Babylonian Library. https://doi.org/10.5282/ebl/l/2/5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Neumann, K. 2014. “Resurrected and Reevaluated: The Neo-Assyrian Temple as a Ritualized and Ritualizing Built Environment”. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar

Nongbri, B. 2008. “Dislodging ‘Embedded’ Religion: A Brief Note on a Scholarly Trope”. Numen 55 (4): 440–460.10.1163/156852708X310527CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Oshima, T. 2011. Babylonian Prayers to Marduk. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.Google Scholar

Oshima, T. 2014. Babylonian Poems of Pious Sufferers: Ludlul Bēl Nēmeqi and the Babylonian Theodicy. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.Google Scholar

Peterson, J. L. 2020. “Marduk’s Address to the Demons”. With contributions by Z. F. Földi, A. C. Heinrich, E. Jiménez, and T. D. N. Mitto. Translated by W.G. Lambert. electronic Babylonian Library. https://doi.org/10.5282/ebl/l/3/3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Pirngruber, R. 2017. The Economy of Late Achaemenid and Seleucid Babylonia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316226766CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Radner, K. 2014. “An Imperial Communication Network: The State Correspondence of the Neo-Assyrian Empire” in Radner, K., ed. State Correspondence in the Ancient World. From New Kingdom Egypt to the Roman Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 64–93.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199354771.003.0004CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Robson, E. 2001. “The Tablet House: A Scribal School in Old Babylonian Nippur”. Revue d’assyriologie et d’archéologie orientale 93 (1): 39–66.10.3917/assy.093.0039CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Robson, E. 2008. “Mathematics Education in an Old Babylonian Scribal School” in Robson, E. and Stedall, J., eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Mathematics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 199–228.10.1093/oso/9780199213122.003.0010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Robson, E. 2019. Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia. London: UCL Press.10.14324/111.9781787355941CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Robson, E. and Stevens, K.. 2019. “Scholarly Tablet Collections in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, c. 700-200 BCE” in Barjamovic, G. and Ryholt, K., eds. Libraries before Alexandria: Ancient Near Eastern Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 319–366.10.1093/oso/9780199655359.003.0008CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Rochberg, F. 2021. “ ṭupšarrūtu and the Historiography of Science”. Claroscuro 20 (2): 1–27.10.35305/cl.vi20.53CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Rozzi, G. 2024a. The Akkadian Great Hymns and Prayers: A Critical Edition of the Nabû and Ištar Prayers and a Study of the Corpus. Venice: Edizioni Ca’Foscari.Google Scholar

Rozzi, G. 2024b. “How to Write a Hymn: Material Features in Manuscripts of Akkadian Poetry”. KASKAL. Rivista di storia, ambienti e culture del Vicino Oriente Antico, n.s. 1: 323–340.Google Scholar

Rubio, G. 2009. “Scribal Secrets and Antiquarian Nostalgia: Tradition and Scholarship in Ancient Mesopotamia” in Barreyra Fracaroli, D. A., del Olmo Lete, G., eds. Reconstructing a Distant Past. Ancient Near Eastern Essays in Tribute to Jorge R. Silva Castillo. Sabadell-Barcelona: Editorial Ausa, pp. 153–180.Google Scholar

Sallaberger, W. 1997. “Nippur als Religiöses Zentrum Mesopotamiens im historischen Wandel” in Wilhelm, G., ed. Die Orientalische Stadt im Wandel: Kontinuität, Wandel, Bruch. Saarbrücken: Saarbrücker Druckerei und Verlag, pp. 147–168.Google Scholar

Salvo, I. and Scheer, T. S.. 2021. Religion and Education in the Ancient Greek World. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.Google Scholar

Schaudig, H. 2019. Explaining Disaster: Tradition and Transformation of the ‘Catastrophe of Ibbi-Sîn’ in Babylonian Literature. Münster: Zaphon.10.2307/jj.18654690CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Schmidhuber, C., 2019. “Ancient Childhood: Perspectives from Iraq and Syria in the Early Second Millennium BC”. PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge.Google Scholar

Shibata, D. 2009. “An Old Babylonian Manuscript of the Weidner God-list from Tell Taban”. Iraq 71: 33–42.10.1017/S0021088900000723CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Simons, F. 2017. “Alammuš Redux,” N.A.B.U. 2017/1: 8–13 (no. 6).Google Scholar

Svärd, S. 2016. “Studying Gender: A Case Study of Female Administrators in Neo-Assyrian Palaces” in Lion, B. and Michel, C., eds. The Role of Women in Work and Society in the Ancient Near East. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 447–458.10.1515/9781614519089-025CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Tanaseanu-Döbler, I. and Döbler, M.. 2012a. “Towards a Theoretical Frame for the Study of Religious Education: An Introduction” in Tanaseanu-Döbler, I. and Döbler, M., eds. Religious Education in Pre-Modern Europe (Numen Book Series 140). Leiden: Brill, pp. 1–37.10.1163/9789004232143CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Tanaseanu-Döbler, I. and Döbler, M. eds. 2012b. Religious Education in Pre-Modern Europe (Numen Book Series 140). Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004232143CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Van Buylaere, G. 2012. “The Secret Lore of Scholars” in Lanfranchi, G. B., Morandi Bonacossi, D., Pappi, C., Ponchia, S., eds. Leggo! Studies Presented to Frederick Mario Fales on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, pp. 853–863.Google Scholar

Van Buylaere, G., Watanabe, C. E., Altaweel, M.. 2019. “‘Clay Pit, You Are the Creator of God and Man!’: Textual Evidence for the Sources of Raw Clay Used in Mesopotamia”. Orient Supplement I: 175–192.Google Scholar

Van der Toorn, K. 1996. Family Religion in Babylonia, Syria and Israel: Continuity and Change in the Forms of Religious Life. Leiden: Brill.10.1163/9789004668867CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Van der Toorn, K. 2008. “Family Religion in Second Millennium West Asia (Mesopotamia, Emar, Nuzi)” in Bodel, J. and Olyan, S. M., eds. Household and Family Religion in Antiquity. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 20–36.10.1002/9781444302974.ch3CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 1997. “Elementary Education at Nippur: The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects”. PhD Dissertation, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.Google Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 1998. “Tintir = Babylon, the Question of Canonization and the Production of Meaning”. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 50: 77–85.10.2307/1360035CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 1999. “Continuity and Change in the Mesopotamian Lexical Tradition” in Roest, B. and de Varennes, F., eds. Aspects of Genre of and Type in Pre-Modern Literary Cultures. Leiden: Brill, pp. 101–118.10.1163/9789004434820\_010CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 2003. “On the Curriculum of the Neo-Babylonian School”. JAOS 123 (3): 627–633.10.2307/3217754CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 2012. “Domesticizing Babylonian Scribal Culture in Assyria: Transformation by Preservation” in van Egmond, W. S. and van Soldt, W. H., eds. Theory and Practice of Knowledge Transfer. Studies in School Education in the Ancient Near East and Beyond. PIHANS 121. Leiden: NINO, pp. 11–24.Google Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 2013. “Purity and Access: A Catalog of Lexical Texts Dedicated to Nabû”. JCS 65: 169–180.Google Scholar

Veldhuis, N. 2014. History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition. Münster: Ugarit Verlag.Google Scholar

Villard, P. 2020. “The Babylonian Chronicles of Ancient Times in the Context of the Neo-Assyrian Empire”. Ash-sharq Bulletin of the Ancient Near East Archaeological, Historical and Societal Studies 4 (2020): 277–292.Google Scholar

Volk, K. 1996. “Methoden altmesopotamischer Erziehung nach Quellen der altbabylonischen Zeit”. Saeculum 47 (2): 178–216.10.7788/saeculum.1996.47.2.178CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Volk, K. 2011. “Über Bildung und Ausbildung in Babylonien am Anfang des 2. Jahrtausends v. Chr.” Orientalia NS 80 (3): 269–299.Google Scholar

Waerzeggers, C. 2010. The Ezida Temple of Borsippa. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het nabije Oosten.Google Scholar

Waerzeggers, C. 2012. “The Babylonian Chronicles: Classification and Provenance”. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 71 (2): 285–298.10.1086/666831CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Waerzeggers, C. 2014. Marduk-rēmanni: Local Networks and Imperial Politics in Achaemenid Babylonia. Leuven: Peeters.Google Scholar

Zaia, S. 2017a. “Commentary on Uncertain (CCP 6.7.u1)”. Cuneiform Commentaries Project (E. Frahm, E. Jiménez, M. Frazer, and K. Wagensonner), 2013–2025; accessed July 19, 2025, at <https://ccp.yale.edu/P348739>. DOI: 10.1079/xksn0fv 10.1079/xksn0fvCrossRefGoogle Scholar

Zaia, S. 2017b. “Commentary on Weidner’s God List (CCP 6.7.B)”. Cuneiform Commentaries Project (E. Frahm, E. Jiménez, M. Frazer, and K. Wagensonner), 2013–2025; accessed August 27, 2025, at <https://ccp.yale.edu/P285539>. DOI: 10.1079/s1rn92h 10.1079/s1rn92hCrossRefGoogle Scholar

Zaia, S. 2024a. “Pantheon. C. Mesopotamia” in Furey, C. M. et al., eds. Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception volume 22. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 1292–1296.Google Scholar

Zaia, S. 2024b. “The Cosmic Front: War and its Impact on Official Religion in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 1000-610 BCE)” in Polinskaya, I., James, A., Papadogiannakis, I., eds. Religion and War from Antiquity to Early Modernity. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 102–119.Google Scholar

Zaia, S. 2025. “Humor as Pedagogy: Cases from Mesopotamia in the 1st Millennium BCE”. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 84 (1): 131–157.10.1086/735029CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Zaia, S. Forthcoming a. “Monolingualism in a Multilingual Empire: Official Language Choice and Scribal Education in the Neo-Assyrian Period” in de Bakker, M. and van den Eijnde, F., eds. Multilingual Inscriptions and Cultural Interactions. Leiden: Brill.Google Scholar

Zaia, S. Forthcoming b. “Growing Up Imperial: Raising the Next Generation of Empire in 1st Millennium BCE Mesopotamia” in Mynářová, J. and Alivernini, S., eds. Proceedings of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale held in Prague (July 7-11 2025). University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns/Penn State University Press.Google Scholar

Zamazalová, S. 2011. “The Education of Neo-Assyrian Princes” in Radner, K. and Robson, E., eds. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 313–334.Google Scholar

You have Access Open access

Loading...

www.cambridge.org · 14 images · 231 links

Comments (0)

No comments yet