![]() “If you were to ask me about the rules of the school,” the student replies, “I would be speaking from sunrise until sunset!” This bit of banter is a far cry from the beatings of “Schooldays,” and after the dialogue, the text describes the pupils gathering to recite arithmetic and vocabulary. “I forsook the scribal art.” Yet his teacher goes on to praise him, calling him “exalted” and “a hero.” “Schooldays” celebrates the gifts of literacy and wisdom that education imparts, and it ends with praise for Nisaba, the goddess of writing and a patron deity of scribes.Ī similar Sumerian story, labeled “Eduba R” by modern scholars, features a dialogue between a teacher and a student who is challenged to recite the school’s regulations. “I neglected the scribal art,” he laments. This mundane list of activities takes a dark turn about twenty lines in, when the student’s heart is gripped by fear at the prospect of beatings for minor missteps like writing with a messy hand or speaking Sumerian badly. His mother packs a lunch of “two breads” for him, and his schoolteacher recites words for him to copy onto a tablet. I prepared, wrote, and finished my tablets. Dozens of fragmentary copies of this text made by students were uncovered in Nippur, and they preserve a story about a fictional boy who goes to the eduba, which translates loosely to “tablet house” or “school.” The work tells us less about the realities of life in school and more about the types of stories included in the scribal curriculum, but it nevertheless provides some tantalizing hints of student life: “Schoolboy, where have you been going so long?” reads the first line of “Schooldays,” a work of literature written in Sumerian. Their shared intellectual heritage, confined to schools and professional scholarly networks, kept Sumerian alive long after the lifetimes of its last speakers. After the fall of the last Sumerian dynasty, around 2000 bc, the political landscape of ancient Mesopotamia gave way to the Akkadian-speaking Babylonians in the south and their Assyrian neighbors to the north. ![]() Initially developed as a record-keeping tool near the end of the fourth millennium bc, cuneiform was first used to write the Sumerian language before being adapted in the last half of the third millennium bc to write the unrelated Akkadian language. ![]() Cuneiform tablets tell countless stories, including those of children learning the very writing system that has preserved these clay pages of history. Known as cuneiform because of its characteristic wedges ( cuneus means “wedge” in Latin), this writing system preserves hundreds of thousands of snapshots of life in ancient Mesopotamia, from the diplomatic spats of royalty to receipts for beer, law collections to lullabies. The clay these rivers deposited onto the surrounding plains would eventually form the medium for writing shared by the civilizations that called Mesopotamia home in antiquity, including the Babylonians. The impressions of his teeth remain in the corner of that tablet, which was unearthed almost four thousand years later in excavations of the ancient city of Nippur, part of the vast Babylonian Empire built along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. In the eighteenth century bc, a preteen student in what is now southern Iraq grew so frustrated with a vocabulary exercise that he lifted a clay tablet he was writing on, brought it to his lips, and bit down. ![]()
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