SUMERIAN PROVERBS IN THEIR CURRICULAR CONTEXT.

• Author: VELDHUIS, NIEK
• Position: Bibliography included

Bendt Alster has published a two-volume edition of all known Old Babylonian Sumerian proverbs. This publication provides an opportunity to look at the proverbs as a corpus and to investigate their actual use. Proverbs are mostly found on school tablets. The curriculum of the school and the position of the proverbs therein is relatively welt known. Part I of this article explores some of the implications of looking at the proverbs as didactic instruments for a particular phase of scribal education. Part II includes additional fragments, joins, corrections, and suggestions.

THE IDENTIFICATION AND PUBLICATION OF Sumerian proverb collections began in the 1950s and 1960s through the efforts of S. N. Kramer, E. I. Gordon, and J. J. A. van Dijk. Subsequent studies by R. S. Falkowitz and B. Alster made an ever-increasing number of proverbs available, furthering the scholarly discussion over the nature of these texts. Alster's new book is a corpus publication. It includes editions of all Old Babylonian proverb collections. Previously published collections are re-edited. More than half of the twenty-seven collections are presented here for the first time. Bendt Alster's Proverbs of Ancient Sumer is thus a landmark publication.

The numbering of the proverb collections used by Alster essentially goes back to Gordon's famous article, "A New Look at the Wisdom of Sumer and Akkad," published in 1960. [1] This article, technically a review-article of van Dijk's La Sagesse sumero-accadienne, [2] lists the sources of all "wisdom" texts--published and unpublished--known to Gordon at that time, including the proverb collections. The concept "wisdom" was derived from biblical scholarship. The inclusion by van Dijk and Gordon of the proverbs under this label implicitly or explicitly compared the Sumerian collections with the Old Testament Meshalim. The wisdom concept naturally generated questions about the contents and background of this wisdom. Gordon's edition of Collections 1 and 2 has the subtitle Glimpses of Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. [3] This romantic interpretation of the proverbs and their wisdom is elaborated on by Alster in the introduction to the present book. He identifies the moral outlook of the proverbs with that of the ordinary people, the "folk." According to Alster the proverb collections represent actual proverbial expressions used by ordinary Sumerian speakers, collected by scholars as sayings by sages of old.

In this paper I will propose an alternative approach to the proverbs, a curricular one. Whatever the original context and use of the proverbs, the tablets as we have them originate in great majority in the school. We should try to establish how and why proverbs were employed in scribal education. This idea is not altogether new. Falkowitz in his 1980 dissertation [4] strongly argued in favor of understanding the proverbs as part of the traditional curriculum of the Old Babylonian scribal school. Unfortunately, Falkowitz' dissertation was never published, so that his arguments did not get the attention they deserved. Today we are in a much better position to evaluate the curricular place and function of the proverbs than Falkowitz was twenty years ago. Alster's book has made all extant proverb collections easily accessible. Moreover, our understanding of the Old Babylonian school, its curriculum, and its teaching methods has considerably improved.

This article consists of two parts. In the first part I will outline a few interpretative possibilities stemming from a curricular approach to the corpus. The second part includes the results of my work on the primary sources: additional fragments, joins, corrections, and suggestions.

PART 1: PROVERBS IN THE CURRICULAM

The scribal curriculum of the Old Babylonian period can be reconstructed in some detail. Since educational practice was not entirely uniform, I will restrict myself to that of Nippur, where most of our sources originate.

The Nippur curriculum consisted of two phases. In the first, pupils mainly copied a variety of lexical texts. These texts aimed at imparting the writing system but also introduced Sumerian vocabulary. In the second phase of their curriculum pupils studied literary texts. Tablets with proverbs are found at the end of the first phase. Their contents prepared students for studying literary Sumerian in the second phase.

There are thousands of exercise texts from Nippur which allow us to get a rather precise idea of what was taught in what order and how. Exercise tablets come in five types: prisms, large multi-column tablets, square tablets, single-column tablets, and lentil-shaped tablets or buns. [5] Prisms, multi-column tablets, and single-column tablets were used by pupils of all levels. Square tablets (usually called type II tablets) and lentils are characteristic of the first phase. Both lentils and type II tablets provide a model text by the teacher, to be copied by a pupil. In general, literary exercises are written on tablet types that do not include a teacher's model. Type II tablets combine extracts from two different texts: introduction of a new exercise and a repetition of an old one. The obverse contains a model text written by the teacher. This is the new exercise. To the right of the model there is room for the pupil to copy the example several times, until he became truly familiar with the exercise. The reve rse was used by the pupil to repeat a longer extract from a school text that he already knew by heart. Type II tablets thus allow us to establish the order in which texts were studied.

The twenty-seven collections published by Alster are not all equally well represented. Most frequent is SP Coll. (Sumerian Proverb Collection) 2 + 6. [6] For this collection we now have over one hundred twenty-five Nippur sources. More than half of these tablets are either buns or type II tablets. [7] Other proverb collections that were frequently used in primary education are 1 and 3. Collections 1, 2, and 3 are relatively well standardized. There are, to be sure, many variants in orthography and in verbal forms. Occasionally the order of two proverbs is inverted, an extra proverb is added, or one is omitted (though it should be remarked that adding and omitting are terms that presume a fixed composition). The proverb collections are flexible compositions. They share this feature with other texts used in the first phase of education: the lexical corpus. Other collections besides SP Colls. 1, 2, and 3 are relatively rare. Collection 16, for instance, is represented in Alster's edition by three sources. Two m ore tablets may now be added (see below) to bring the total to five. Two out of five are type II texts. How can such numbers be interpreted? Evidently, Collection 16 was available for Nippur teachers to assign as an exercise, but they rarely did so.

This pattern compares well with the distribution of the lexical corpus. There are some lexical texts that are available in tens or even hundreds of copies. Examples are Syllable Alphabet B (a very elementary exercise), the tree list (the first section of Old Babylonian [ur.sub.5] - ra), Proto-Ea, Proto-Lu, and Proto-Izi. In contrast, there are lists that rarely appear among the school tablets. There are six examples of Early Dynastic Lu A from Old Babylonian Nippur. One of these is written on the reverse of a type II tablet with Nigga on the other side (N 5566 + N 5583). [8] There are five copies of an abbreviated form of Proto-Ea, two of them written on a type II tablet. [9] Somewhat more frequent are Proto-Diri, ugumu, and the later portions of [ur.sub.5]-ra. If one were to plot the ideal order of the exercises against the number of tablets found one would see peaks with passes and valleys.

One of these peaks is Proverb Collection 2. In one of the valleys we find Proverb Collection 16. Presumably, primary education consisted of a number of required exercises which every pupil would study. Faster students, or those who could afford to spend more time, might do extra work before continuing to the next required exercise. Proverb Collection 16 and Early Dynastic Lu A belong to the texts that only a few pupils would study. Collection 2 belongs to the required program.

WHAT DID THE PROVERBS TEACH?

Proverbs may have taught moral lessons. Collection 2, number 6 says: "My fate is her voice. My mother can change it," reflecting the obedience of a good son to the command of his mother. [10] Various proverbs praise scribes who know Sumerian and have good handwriting, or singers who have a good voice. SP Coll. 2.38 states: "A scribe who knows just one single entry, if only his hand is nice, he is a scribe indeed." Since the pupils who copied this line had learned hundreds and hundreds of (lexical) entries it is hard to take this statement literally. The importance of a nice hand is no doubt exaggerated. The saying may be used to encourage good handwriting, but it may as well be invoked to ridicule a pupil who is more successful in refining his hand than in recalling entries. Even though the grammatical and lexical interpretation of this proverb does not seem to pose insurmountable problems--many proverbs, however, do--its interpretation as a moral lesson is very uncertain. Many proverbs do not seem to have a ny moral implication at all. They simply describe a situation or a mental state in a particularly vivid way. This is the case, for instance, for SP Coll. 16.F1, also attested as SP Coll. 9.G3 (see part II, below):

kur [ku.sub.3] ba-al-[gin.sub.7] [lu.sub.2] [dim.sub.2]-ma nu-[sa.sub.6]

Like a mountain mined for metals, this man is not in a right state of mind.

If we look at the place that the proverbs occupy in the curriculum, it becomes clear that they must have had other functions as well. We may look forward in the curriculum to the literary texts, and backward to the lexical corpus.

The comparison with a mountain mined for metal ore is also found in the Curse of...