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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.

The thirteen essays in this volume are largely revised papers which were originally presented as part of the Ancient Historiography Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and they investigate particular texts of Chronicles, examine central themes, and consider future prospects for Chronicles study. The volume includes chapters by Shannon E. Baines, Ehud Ben Zvi, Mark J. Boda, Keith Bodner, Paul S. Evans, Louis Jonker, Gary N. Knoppers, Christine Mitchell, Peter J. Sabo, Steven J. Schweitzer, and John W. Wright. The essays represent many different perspectives, methodologies, and conclusions regarding the Chronicler's work and this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Chronicles, ancient Israelite historiography and biblical literature in general.

This book proposes a new approach to the study of ancient Greek and Mesopotamian literature. Ranging from Homer and Gilgamesh to Herodotus and the Babylonian-Greek author Berossos, it paints a picture of two literary cultures that, over the course of time, became profoundly entwined. Along the way, the book addresses many questions of crucial importance to the student of the ancient world: how did the literature of Greece relate to that of its eastern neighbours? What did ancient readers from different cultures think it meant to be human? Who invented the writing of universal history as we know it? How did the Greeks come to divide the world into Greeks and 'barbarians', and what happened when they came to live alongside those 'barbarians' after the conquests of Alexander the Great? In addressing these questions, the book draws on cutting-edge research in comparative literature, postcolonial studies and archive theory.

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.

No detailed description available for \"Elementary Education in Early Second Millennium BCE Babylonia\".

The thirteen essays in this volume are largely revised papers which were originally presented as part of the Ancient Historiography Seminar of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies and they investigate particular texts of Chronicles, examine central themes, and consider future prospects for Chronicles study. The volume includes chapters by Shannon E. Baines, Ehud Ben Zvi, Mark J. Boda, Keith Bodner, Paul S. Evans, Louis Jonker, Gary N. Knoppers, Christine Mitchell, Peter J. Sabo, Steven J. Schweitzer, and John W. Wright. The essays represent many different perspectives, methodologies, and conclusions regarding the Chronicler's work and this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of Chronicles, ancient Israelite historiography and biblical literature in general.

This work is the first comprehensive description of Sumerian constructions involving a copula. Using around 400 fully glossed examples, it gives a thorough analysis of all uses of the copula, which is one of the least understood and most frequently misinterpreted and consequently mistranslated morphemes in Sumerian. It starts with a concise introduction into the grammatical structure of Sumerian, followed by a study that is accessible to both linguists and sumerologists, as it applies the terminology of modern descriptive linguistics. It provides the oldest known and documented example of the path of grammaticalization that leads from a copula to a focus marker. It gives the description of Sumerian copular paratactic relative clauses, which make use of an otherwise only scarcely attested relativization strategy. At the end of the book, the reader will have a clear picture about the morphological and syntactic devices used to mark identificational, polarity and sentence focus in Sumerian, one of the oldest documented languages in the world.

Das vorliegende Buch stellt einen Versuch dar, die Lücke in der Geschichte des Sumerischen zu schließen, die bislang zwischen den umfangreichen, gut untersuchten Textcorpora des späten dritten und frühen zweiten Jahrtausends v. Chr. und den relativ wenigen Vorkommen von Sumerisch im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr. bestand. Untersucht werden zum einen – unter Heranziehung neuen Textmaterials aus dem Vorderasiatischen Museum Berlin – die Schreiberausbildung im kassitenzeitlichen Babylonien allgemein, zum anderen sprachliche Besonderheiten, Verwendungskontexte und ideologische Bedeutung des Sumerischen in jener Epoche. Obwohl es sich auf den ersten Blick um unterschiedliche Themen zu handeln scheint, besteht eine Verbindung zwischen ihnen, stellt doch die Schreiberausbildung die wichtigste Quelle dar, die den Verfassern sumerischer Texte in einer Zeit, in der es keine sumerischen Muttersprachler mehr gab, für ihre Kenntnis jener Sprache zur Verfügung stand. Die Analyse und der Vergleich mit den vorhergehenden und nachfolgenden Epochen erlauben es, Entwicklungslinien und regionale Tendenzen nachzuvollziehen; sie zeigen aber auch, dass es nicht einfach ist, kassitenzeitliches Sumerisch als Sprache zu beschreiben oder gar seine „Qualität\" zu bewerten. The present work attempts to close a gap in our knowledge of the history of Sumerian between the extensive and well-understood corpus of texts from the late 3rd to early 2nd millennia B.C.E. and the sparsely-attested Sumerian of the 1st millennium BCE. Consulting new textual materials from the Vorderasiatisches Museum of Berlin, this investigation devotes special attention to key linguistic features of Sumerian in this epoch, the contexts and ideological significance of its use, and scribal education in Kassite Babylonia generally. Although it may seem to handle disparate themes at first glance, these topics are in fact linked since scribal education provided the key source for knowledge of Sumerian in a time when there were no longer native Sumerian speakers. The analysis and the comparison with previous and subsequent epochs provided here allow lines of development and regional trends to come into clearer view, but they also show the inherent difficulty in describing Kassite Sumerian as a language and in assessing its quality.

The book Presargonic Period (2700-2350 BC) provides editions of all known royal inscriptions of kings who ruled in ancient Mesopotamia down to the advent of King Sargon of Akkad. Most of the inscriptions come from the city states of Lagsh and Umma; inscriptions from other sites are rather poorly attested. The volume includes a handful of new inscriptions recently uncovered in Iraq. Information on museum numbers, excavation numbers, provenances, dimensions, and lines preserved in the various exemplars are displayed for multi-exemplar texts in an easy-to-read tabular form. Also included in several commentary sections are notes on the find-spots of the inscriptions from Lagas and references about various toponymns to be discussed in a forthcoming study of the author on the geography of Lagas and Umma provinces. Indexes of museum numbers, excavation numbers, and concordances of selected publications complete the volume.