A. R. George - Böcker

In ancient Mesopotamia, men training to be scribes copied model letters in order to practice writing and familiarize themselves with epistolary forms and expressions. Similarly, model contracts were used to teach them how to draw up agreements for the transactions typical of everyday economic life. This volume makes available a trove of previously unknown tablets and fragments, now housed in the Shøyen Collection, that were produced in the training of scribes in Old Babylonian schools.Following on Old Babylonian Texts in the Schøyen Collection, Part One: Selected Letters, this volume publishes the contents of sixty-five tablets bearing Akkadian letters used to train scribes and twenty-six prisms and tablets carrying Sumerian legal texts copied in the same context. Each text is presented in transliterated form and in translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations and, at the end of the book, photographs of the cuneiform. The material is made easily navigable by a catalogue, bibliography, and indexes.This collection of previously unknown documents expands the extant corpus of educational texts, making an essential contribution to the study of the ancient world.

W. G. Lambert’s line drawings of cuneiform tablets from the British Museum, together with his meticulous editions of their contents, form a contribution to Assyriology unrivaled in his generation. Upon his death in 2011, Lambert bequeathed his academic legacy to A. R. George, who discovered among its contents approximately 1,400 unpublished pencil drawings. He and Junko Taniguchi took over the task of converting the drawings into images suitable for publication. The first of two planned volumes, this book features drawings of 329 cuneiform tablets found in Lambert’s academic papers. Written by Babylonian and Assyrian scribes between 2500 and 35 BC, the texts in this volume are organized by genre and provided with a descriptive catalogue and indexes. The contents include commemorative and votive inscriptions, late copies of royal inscriptions and royal correspondence, historical and historical-literary texts, Sumerian literature, Akkadian-language compositions of mythological and “epic” content, Babylonian and Assyrian hymns, prayers and praise poetry, incantations, wisdom literature, and fragments of unidentified literary works. The mass of unpublished cuneiform tablets in museums remains a largely unexplored resource with enormous capacity to illuminate all aspects of life in ancient Mesopotamia. This collection constitutes an important milestone on the road to a fuller comprehension of the written legacy of the ancient Babylonians.