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Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Babylonia
In this volume, Alhena Gadotti and Alexandra Kleinerman investigate how Akkadian speakers learned Sumerian during the Old Babylonian period in areas outside major cities. Despite the fact that it was a dead language at the time, Sumerian was considered a crucial part of scribal training due to its cultural importance. This book provides transliterations and translations of 715 cuneiform scribal school exercise texts from the Jonathan and Jeanette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Collection at Cornell University. These tablets, consisting mainly of lexical texts, illustrate the process of elementary foreign-language training at scribal schools during the Old Babylonian period. Although the tablets are all without provenance, discrepancies between these texts and those from other sites, such as Nippur and Ur, strongly suggest that the texts published here do not come from a previously studied location. Comparing these tablets with previously published documents, Gadotti and Kleinerman argue that elementary education in Mesopotamia was relatively standardized and that knowledge of cuneiform writing was more widespread than previously assumed.By refining our understanding of education in southern Mesopotamia, this volume elucidates more fully the pedagogical underpinnings of the world’s first curriculum devised to teach a dead language. As a text edition, it will make these important documents accessible to Assyriologists and Sumerologists for future study.
eBook
An Annotated Sumerian Dictionary
Sumerian was the first language to be put into writing (ca.
3200-3100 BCE), and it is the language for which the cuneiform
script was originally developed. Even after it was supplanted by
Akkadian as the primary spoken language in ancient Mesopotamia,
Sumerian continued to be used as a scholarly written language until
the end of the first millennium BCE. This volume presents the first
comprehensive English-language scholarly lexicon of Sumerian.
This dictionary covers all the nuances of meaning for Sumerian
terms found in historical inscriptions and literary,
administrative, and lexical texts dating from about 2500 BCE to the
first century BCE. The entries are organized by transcription and
are accompanied by the transliteration and translation of passages
in which the term occurs and, where relevant, a discussion of the
word's treatment in other publications. Main entries bring together
all the parts of speech and compound forms for the Sumerian term
and present each part of speech individually. All possible Akkadian
equivalents and variant syllabic renderings are listed for lexical
attestations of a word, and a meaningful sample of occurrences is
given for literary and economic passages. Entries of homonyms with
different orthographies and unrelated words with the same
orthography are grouped together, each being assigned a unique
identifier, and the dictionary treats the phoneme /dr/ as a
separate consonant.
Written by one of the foremost scholars in the field, An
Annotated Sumerian Dictionary is an essential reference for
Sumerologists and Assyriologists and a practical help to students
of ancient cultures.
eBook
The Nesbit Tablets
In 1914, William M. Nesbit published his dissertation at Columbia University on 30 archival texts from the Third Dynasty of Ur. Now, more than a century later, the remaining tablets in his collection have been recovered and, thanks to the generosity of the Nesbit family, were made available for publication by David I. Owen. The majority of texts published here is from Puzriš-Dagan (Drehem) with some from Nippur and Umma. They originate from the earliest clandestine finds at those sites. The 98 texts, including a re-edition of the previously published tablets, are provided with a catalogue, hand-copies, selected photographs, along with transliterations, translations and comments, thus providing an important addition to the extensive corpus of Ur III texts from this important period in Mesopotamian history.
eBook
The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur
The goal of this book is to present a revised edition of the Sumerian Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, a lament bewailing the fall of the glorious Ur III kingdom in 2004 B.C.E.Lamentation is a well-known genre in world literature. Laments of various types are part of the cultural legacy and literary corpus of many societies, from ancient to modern times, and Sumerian literature is no exception. However, Mesopotamian lamentation literature includes a significant body of laments belonging to a unique and almost unparalleled genre—the genre of lamentations over the destruction of cities and temples. This genre has no known ancient parallel outside the ancient Near East; more specifically, it is almost exclusively attested in Sumerian and biblical literature. The Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur is the most famous and important exemplar of the city-laments.In this updated and revised publication of the Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur, Samet provides an introductory discussion of Sumerian city-laments in general; a full presentation of the text of the Ur Lament, including transliteration, translation, and an extensive philological commentary; and an accounting of the extant textual witness in score format. Plates with color photos of many texts are included.
eBook
Cuneiform texts from various collections
This text features 217 cuneiform texts, found in small collections throughout the world, that date from the late third to the late first millennia BCE and includes inscriptions, letters, administrative documents, and literary works in Akkadian and Sumerian.
BOOK
From the 21st Century B.C. to the 21st Century A.D
This volume collects the proceedings of a three-day conference held in Madrid in July 2010, and it highlights the vitality of the study of late-third-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia. Workshops devoted to the Ur III period have been a feature of the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale roughly every other year, beginning in London in 2003. In 2009, Steve Garfinkle and Manuel Molina asked the community of Neo-Sumerian scholars to convene the following year in Madrid before the Rencontre in Barcelona. The meeting had more than 50 participants and included 8 topical sessions and 27 papers. The 21 contributions included in this volume cover a broad range of topics: new texts, new interpretations, and new understandings of the language, culture, and history of the Ur III period (2112–2004 B.C.).The present and future of Neo-Sumerian studies are important not only for the field of Assyriology but also for wider inquiries into the ancient world. The extant archives offer insight into some of the earliest cities and one of the earliest kingdoms in the historical record. The era of the Third Dynasty of Ur is also probably the best-attested century in antiquity. This imposes a responsibility on the small community of scholars who work on the Neo-Sumerian materials to make this it accessible to a broad, interdisciplinary audience in the humanities and related fields. This volume is a solid step in this direction.
eBook