Susanne Paulus - Böcker

Babylonia in the second half of the 2nd millennium BCE is one of the most understudied periods of Mesopotamian history. In the last few years, discoveries of new texts and archaeological materials from the Sealand Dynasty have emerged, which expand the possibilities to fill this gap in our knowledge of Mesopotamian history. At the same time, scholars have started to revive Kassite studies using new materials, methods, and questions.While those works are groundbreaking contributions to the field, many questions about the history and chronology, archaeology, economy, language of Babylonia during this period are still unsolved. This volume brings together eleven contributions by leading scholars in the Sealand and Kassite period, approaching those questions from an archaeological, ethnological, historical, linguistic, and economical point of view. The book opens with an introduction into the history and research on Babylonia under the Sealand Dynasty and the Kassites.

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—explores 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.