On the curriculum of the Neo-Babylonian school.

• Author: Veldhuis, Niek
• Position: Book Review

Petra D. Gesche's book, Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr., a slightly reworked version of her dissertation, is a stunning achievement. The author evaluates about 2,500 often badly written exercise texts (most of them kept in the British Museum) for the information they yield about Neo- and Late Babylonian scribal education. The novelty of this study becomes apparent in comparison with the publication of similar texts in Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon (MSL), a series that aims at reconstructing lexical compositions and utilizes for this purpose the evidence from various kinds of cuneiform tablets, including school texts and library copies from both Assyria and Babylonia. Since Neo-Babylonian exercise tablets often contain extracts from various (sub)literary and lexical compositions, the edition of a single school tablet may be dispersed over two, three, or even four volumes of MSL. Gesche's focus is on the individual tablet, or rather on the corpus of Neo-and Late Babylonian school tablets and how they bear witness to education in first-millennium Babylonia.

The structure of the book is straightforward and lucid. After chapters A and B (abbreviations and bibliography, respectively), the book opens with the introduction (chapter C), which contains research history, definitions, and a history of education in ancient Mesopotamia (C. III). The author provides the reader with an overview of the school tablets of all periods of cuneiform from the earliest archaic lexical lists onwards and for each group gives a succinct analysis of the evidence these tablets provide for our understanding of contemporary education.

Chapters D and E contain a reconstruction of the curriculum of the Neo-and Late Babylonian scribal schools, based on the analysis of tablet typology, contents of the exercises, and colophons. The author is able to make a clear distinction into two phases of schooling, based on the physical characteristics of the exercise tablets. The drills in type 1 (big, multicolumn tablets) are consistently more elementary and less varied than those in type 2 (smaller one-or two-column tablets). Type 1 tablets contain excerpts from Syllabary [S.sup.a], Vocabulary [S.sup.b], the Weidner god list and u[r.sub.5]-ra = hubullum tablets 1-3, sometimes complemented by exercises in proper use of the stylus (numerous repetitions of DIS.BAD) and a variety of non-standardized exercises such as proper names or letter formulas. This type may include a colophon. Type 2 exercises often include excerpts from one or two literary or sub-literary texts (Akkadian or bilingual) plus several excerpts from lexical series, in many cases from u[r.sub.5]-ra = hubullum. Type 2 tablets are usually dated to month and day. The author distinguishes a number of sub-types of both type 1 and type 2 based on a careful coordination of contents and physical features.

Chapter E.III-IV contains descriptions of all compositions encountered in the corpus, preceded by a discussion of the concepts "canonical" and "non-canonical." The author concedes that "canonical" simply means "standardized," or "standardized and serialized" (p. 62). Given the rather muddied history of the concept in Assyriological research. I would have preferred the term "standardized," since it lacks the laden overtones and is more to the point. Since, however, the author explains in such detail what the concept is supposed to mean in her text this does not affect in any way the substance of the argument. The brief description of all the compositions and exercises attested in the school corpus gives a crystal-clear overview of what the Neo-Babylonian curriculum contained.

Chapter F, the main portion of the book, contains copies and editions of a generous selection of the tablets discussed in the previous chapters with translation of the (sub)literary excerpts and...