Revealing the scholarly worlds behind the world’s first writing system, this volume explores how cuneiform cultures classified, transmitted, and interpreted knowledge.

Cuneiform is the world’s first preserved writing system, yet cuneiform texts and the associated cultures and practices remain undervalued across several disciplines. Scribal Worlds: Scholarship and Classification in Cuneiform Cultures explores the history of the earliest writing cultures of the ancient Middle East. Case studies reconstruct the intellectual frameworks and the transmission of knowledge of scribal cultures to show how specific texts and objects can be interpreted within their cultural contexts.

 Eduardo A. Escobar is assistant professor of the history of science in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bologna. Kiersten Neumann is a curator of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures Museum, Chicago, research associate at the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, and lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. She is coeditor of The Routledge Handbook of the Senses in the Ancient Near East.C. Jay Crisostomo is the George G. Cameron Professor of Ancient Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and associate professor of Assyriology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Translation as Scholarship: Language, Writing, and Bilingual Education in Ancient Babylonia.

List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Abbreviations
Editorial conventions

Introduction: Learning from a Once Broken List
C. Jay Crisostomo, Kiersten Neumann, Eduardo A. Escobar

Part I: Frameworks
1 The order-of-the-world: Things, lumps, and texts
Francesca Rochberg

2 Is there a Mesopotamian ontology?
Marian H. Feldman

Part II: Categories and Classification
3 What’s in a name? Material self-referentiality, aesthetic values, and stone classification
Kiersten Neumann

4 Imperial Hermeneutics: Classifying the Assyrian Group Vocabularies
Eduardo A. Escobar and C. Jay Crisostomo

5 Gods in stone and clay: Classifying figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia
Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper

6 Raven, falcon, dove: Birds and the Mesopotamian exorcist
Gina Konstantopoulos

Part III: Scribal Education and Knowledge Transmission
7 Back to House F: On community, temporality, and locality in Old Babylonian scribal schooling
Eleanor Robson

8 The role of Sumerian model contracts in Old Babylonian scribal education: Standardisation and variants
Gabriella Spada

9 On the formal and social aspects of the acquisition of literacy in Old Assyrian times
Cécile Michel and Piotr Michalowski

10 Ezekiel in the Edubba
Laurie E. Pearce

11 Young Anu-belšunu: Two rare tablets from Hellenistic Uruk
Enrique Jiménez

Part IV: Texts and Signs
12 The Old Babylonian transmission of the Early Dynastic Proverb Collection 1
Jana Matuszak

13 Writing Akkadian in Sumer: Scenes from the Mesag archive
Emmanuelle Salgues

14 Mesopotamian personal name lists: Classification, education, or scholarship?
Paul Delnero

15 A Sumerian Šu'ila-prayer to Ištar of Nineveh and her akitu festival in Nineveh
Daisuke Shibata

16 Wedge order and the character-forming rules of Neo-Assyrian cuneiform
Jonathan Taylor