Back to School in Babylonia

Editor(s): Susanne Paulus.

With Marta Díaz Herrera, Jane Gordon, Madeline Ouimet, Colton G. Siegmund, and Ryan D. Winters.

$39.95

Series / Volume

ISAC Museum Publications 1

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This volume—the companion book to the special exhibition Back to School in Babylonia of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures of the University of Chicago—examines education in the Old Babylonian period through the lens of House F in Nippur, excavated jointly by the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania in the early 1950s and widely believed to have been a scribal school. The book’s twenty essays offer a state-of-the-art synthesis of research on the history of House F and the educational curriculum documented on the many tablets discovered there, while the catalog’s five chapters present the 126 objects included in the exhibition, the vast majority of them cuneiform tablets.

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Table of Contents

Foreword. Theo van den Hout
Foreword. Eleanor Robson
Preface. Marc Maillot
Acknowledgments. Susanne Paulus
List of Contributors
Part I: Essays

Back to School in Babylonia: The Aims of Babylonian Education. Susanne Paulus
Old Babylonian Nippur in Its Environmental and Historical Settings. Hervé Reculeau
The Archaeology of Nippur’s House F and Its Neighborhood. Augusta McMahon
Living the Edubbaʾa: School as Sensory Experience and Social Identity. Madeline Ouimet
Economic Life in the Scribal Quarter of Nippur. Anne Goddeeris
Literacy in the Old Babylonian Period. Dominique Charpin
Reconstructing the Elementary Nippur Curriculum. Niek Veldhuis
Learning the Basics: The First Steps at School. Klaus Wagensonner
Complex Lists: Between Didactics and Erudition. Marta Díaz Herrera
Bilingualism and Akkadian. Jay Crisostomo
Sumerian Grammar for Babylonians. Colton G. Siegmund
Sumerian Proverbs. William A. Younger
What Did They Learn about Mathematics? Barbora Wichterlová
Practicing Law. Susanne Paulus
The Decad and Scribal Errors. Paul Delnero
Adventures in a Legendary Past: Tales of Long-Ago Kings as Cultural Education. Jane Gordon
Learning History. Piotr Michalowski
What Did They Learn about Myths and Religion? Christopher Metcalf
Learning Rhetoric through Sumerian Disputations. Catherine Mittermayer
What Did They Learn about Women? Jana Matuszak

Part II: Catalog

Discovering a School in Nippur. Madeline Ouimet and Susanne Paulus, with Laura D'Alessandro and Alison Whyte
School Life in House F. Marta Díaz Herrera, Jane Gordon, Danielle Levy, Madeline Ouimet, Susanne Paulus, and Ryan D. Winters
The Curriculum: From Signs to Literature. Marta Díaz Herrera, Jane Gordon, Madeline Ouimet, Susanne Paulus, and Colton G. Siegmund
Topics of Education. Marta Díaz Herrera, Jane Gordon, Jana Matuszak, Madeline Ouimet, Susanne Paulus, Colton G. Siegmund, Barbora Wichterlová, and Ryan D. Winters
After School. Susanne Paulus, Colton G. Siegmund, and Ryan D. Winters

List of Compositions
Concordance of Museum Registration Numbers
Bibliography