"The Rules of the School".

• Author: Gadotti, Alhena
• Position: Essay

"The Rules of the School," or Eduba R, is a previously unedited Sumerian literary composition that describes a day in the life of an Old Babylonian student. In this paper, we examine the nature of Eduba R, its place within the corpus of scribal life texts (and particularly its relationship to the more popular composition Eduba A), and its pedagogical role within the Old Babylonian scribal school curriculum as a whole. In addition, we publish a transliteration, translation, commentary, and photos of the two primary manuscripts of the composition. "The Rules of the School," or Eduba R, is a previously unpublished Sumerian composition that describes the daily routine of an Old Babylonian student. The composition was first identified by M. Civil from several incomplete manuscripts. Since then, two larger and more complete exemplars have come to light, one in the Schoyen collection in Oslo, Norway (hereafter X2), the other in a private collection (hereafter X1), which we had the opportunity to study in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Near Eastern Studies Seminar at Cornell University. Both are multi-column tablets and, while neither is complete, they provide enough detail to merit publication of the composition. (1) However, roughly fifty-five lines are still missing or unplaced. (2) The purpose of this article is not only to publish Eduba R, but also to investigate its position within the Old Babylonian scribal school, which is the context from which the majority of Sumerian compositions known to us derive. In particular, we examine the relationship between Eduba R, which is not well attested, and Eduba A, commonly known as "Schooldays," which was extremely popular in the Nippur schools (Kramer 1949).

Eduba R begins with a dialogue between a teacher and a student, although in what is preserved there is no evidence that the dialogue continued beyond the introduction. After the teacher asks the student to recite the school's regulations (Section 1: 1-3), the student replies that if he starts enumerating the rules he will be too busy to do his school work (Section 1: 4-7). Despite his misgivings, however, the student accepts the teacher's challenge (Section 1: 8ff.). The rest of Eduba R is devoted to an outline of the school day, with the student gathering the supplies needed for his day (Section 1: 12-13). However, although he feels prepared and obeys orders, some school officials still punish him (Section 1: 14-19). One of the school's officials then gathers all of the pupils together for the first lesson of the day, which consists of recitation of arithmetic and vocabulary (Section 1: 27-30).

Section 1 of both X1 and the Schoyen manuscript breaks off soon thereafter, and when the text resumes a third-person narrator is describing various activities that involve all the students. For instance, they receive instructions to prepare a tablet board (Section 2: 13-14). The composition names a large number of school staff members who are in charge of the different facets of the school's daily activities: the man in charge of the tablet boards (lu dub-dim) instructs them to prepare their tablet boards (Section 2: 6-9). The man in charge of flattening the clay (lu im-dub) is the staff member for ordering the students to shape their clay tablets (Section 2: 24). (3)

The largest gap is between Sections 2 and 3 (approximately twenty-seven lines according to X1, five of which are preserved on the Schoyen manuscript). When the narrative continues, the students have their lunch break (Section 3: 7-8). After lunch, they are instructed to write their assignment on a tablet, perhaps the same assignment that they had recited aloud in the morning (Section 3: 17). The teacher then checks the students' work and, if it is not up to the school's standards, they are punished (Section 3: 19-27). After the work has been checked, the assistant in charge of the water instructs the students as follows: "take the jars, you idiots, your jars." (4) Presumably, the students are here expected to erase their tablets and make new ones. They go to fetch water from a nearby canal (Section 3: 28-31).

Approximately thirteen lines are missing between Sections 3 and 4 of X1, four of which are preserved at the beginning of Section 4 of the Schoyen manuscript. In the final section of the composition additional instructions are given to the students, who begin to practice the next day's lesson by reading from lentils (Section 4: 19). Finally, the students' families come to school to see their progress (Section 4: 23-25). According to Eduba R, the Old Babylonian students had a very structured day, with a morning recitation, a lunch break, afternoon written exercises, review of the assignment, and clean-up and preparation for the next day.

Aside from X1 and the Schoyen tablet, Eduba R is attested on at least five other manuscripts, three from Nippur and two from Ur. Thus, while Eduba R was fairly widespread, it is not well attested, at least not in comparison to the other so-called Eduba compositions, all of which originated from the Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal schools. (5) For example, Eduba A, which like Eduba R illustrates a school-day, is attested on at least sixty-five Nippur manuscripts. Eduba B, a dialogue between a father and his misbehaving son (unpublished, but see Civil 1992), and Eduba C, a dialogue between a teacher and a student, are each attested in over thirty Nippur exemplars (Vanstiphout 1997: 590-92). However, the only Eduba compositions relatively well attested outside of Nippur are Eduba B and Eduba R.

The high number of copies of Eduba A, B, and C indicates that they played a significant role in the Sumerian scribal curriculum at Nippur in the early second millennium. However, this was clearly not the case for Eduba R. A possible explanation for this may lie in the strong similarity between Eduba A, the most popular Eduba composition at Nippur, and Eduba R.

Similarly to Eduba R, Eduba A begins with a dialogue in which the student is asked by an unnamed interlocutor what he has been learning at school:

Eduba A, ll. 1-7

1. dumu e-dub-ba-a [u.sub.4]-ul-la-am me-se i-gen-ne-en

2. e-dub-ba-a-se i-gen-ne-en

3. e-dub-ba-a a-na-am i-ak

4. dub-[gu.sub.10] i-sid nig-ka-gub-[gu.sub.10] i-[gu.sub.7]

5. dub-[gu.sub.10] i-dim i-sar i-til-ma

6. mu-gub-ba-[gu.sub.10] ma-an-gub-bu-us

7. kig-sig im-su-[gu.sub.10] ma-an-gub-bu-us

1. "Graduate from many years ago, where did you go?"

2. "I went to school."

3. "What did you do at school?"

4. "I recited my tablet, and I ate my lunch.

5. I fashioned my tablet, I wrote (it), and I finished (it).

6. I laid out my lexical list.

7. (After) the afternoon snack, I laid out my lentil-shaped tablet."

   In this passage the student briefly answers the question by explaining how he has spent his day. He then reports that he went home and showed his father the exercises he did in class. Like the student in Eduba R, the student in Eduba A is eager to go back to school and to get there early. However, despite his enthusiasm, he is beaten by a number of staff members for improper behavior, exactly like his counterpart in Eduba R:

   Eduba A, ll. 37-38

37. lu gis-hur-ra-[ke.sub.4] a-na-as-am ga-da nu-me-a i-zi-ge-en in-tud-de-en

38. lu ka-na-[ke.sub.4] a-na-as-am ga-da-nu-me-a ib-ta-e-e-se in-tud-de-en

37. The man in charge of drawing (asked me): "Why, without my permission, did you get up?" And then he beat me.

38. The man in charge of the gate (asked): "Why, without my permission, did you go out?" And then he beat me.

    The final section of Eduba A, as in Eduba R, is devoted to a meeting between a parent and a teacher in which the latter praises the student's accomplishments.

    A comparison of Eduba A and Eduba R illustrates that the two compositions are modifications of a basic plot line: each emphasizes different aspects of a normal day in the life of a student as reflected in the Eduba corpus. Whereas Eduba A is focused on the father-son and father-teacher interactions and outlines the school day only in brief, Eduba R reverses the attention paid to these two themes as it focuses on the school day and only marginally on the relationship between the teacher and the student's family.

    As such, Eduba R and Eduba A are elaborations of the same story. The discovery of a number of manuscripts of Eduba A in excavated context at Nippur indicates that Eduba A was a favorite with some of the Nippur teachers, (6) while Eduba R was not. However, Eduba R is attested not only on multi-column tablets but also on single-column exercise texts (imgida). This places it securely within the advanced Old Babylonian Sumerian scribal curriculum. These findings support the argument that in early second millennium Babylonia, teachers had the final say as to what was studied in their classrooms, and they took advantage of an existing corpus of stories that they modified to suit their pedagogical needs.

    SOURCES

    Eduba R is attested so far on seven manuscripts. One, N1, is an imgida, and four (N2, Ur1, X1, X2) are multi-column. N2 and Ur1 are fragments of what in origin must have been four-column tablets. X1 and X2 are four-column tablets, both missing the bottom third of the tablet. Two (N3 and Ur2) contain passages of Eduba R that are currently unplaced, and at this time we are unable to determine their tablet typology.

    N1 = CBS 4573 (PBS 12/1, 30 = PBS 1/2, 98) = P260885 (7) tablet type: imgida lines: obverse = unplaced lines; reverse = col. iii 19-31

    N2 = CBS 11786 = P266923 (8) tablet type: multi-column lines: obverse = col. i 1-7; reverse = unplaced

    N3 = Ni 4103 (ISET 1 72) tablet type: unclear lines: obverse = unplaced; reverse = unplaced

    Ur1 =UET 6/2, 168 (9) tablet type: multi-column lines: obverse = col. i 15-26; reverse = col. iv 17-24

    Ur2 = UET 6/3, 620 = P346657 (10) tablet type: unclear lines: obverse = unplaced; reverse = unplaced

    X1 = private collection manuscript (Figs. 1-2) tablet type: multi-column lines: obverse col. i = col. i 1-37, obverse...