doi 10.1515/janeh-2013-0006
JANEH 2014; 1(1): 21–36
Niek Veldhuis*
Intellectual History and Assyriology
Abstract: The present article proposes to understand knowledge and knowledge
traditions of ancient Mesopotamia as assets, deployed by actors in the social
contexts in which they found themselves. This approach is illustrated with three
examples from different periods of Mesopotamian history.
Keywords: intellectual history, ancient Mesopotamia, sociology of knowledge
*Corresponding author: Niek Veldhuis, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA,
E-mail: [email protected]
The idea of an intellectual history, a history of knowledge, or a history of
scholarship bears the mark of the Enlightenment. The optimism of scholars
and scientists of the time that the world could be known, that it obeyed
impersonal laws, which could be discovered, one by one, created many aspects
of the concept of knowledge that we take for granted today: knowledge grows
perpetually by the discoveries of scholars and scientists who are acknowledged
in awards, citations, and footnotes. The object of their research is typically,
nature – that is, anything not made by men and that behaves in a regular,
almost mechanistic way and that is objectively available to perception. Since
this knowledge is like a rolling train that inevitably runs its course to uncover
more and more truths, the question of the history of this knowledge becomes
inevitable. Where did it come from, whom should we acknowledge for all those
things that have been known for a long time, how did the train get here, and
where are we now? Such questions may easily be extended to ancient
Mesopotamia, tracing the development of astronomy out of divination,
linguistics out of lexicography, or (rational) medicine out of magic. In this
contribution, I will argue that it may be more fruitful to think about knowledge
as a commodity that is used by actors in navigating their particular social
context. Knowledge is not a more or less independent thing that moves through
history and evolves from one stage to the next. Knowledge is a tool for defining
one’s place in society; its validity and usefulness are inextricably linked to
social structure and to the place within that structure where knowledge is
produced.
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It is important to contextualize ourselves and to situate the questions that
we ask, because, as one may notice, none of the characteristics by which I
described modern scientific knowledge are applicable to ancient Mesopotamia.
The knowledge of the ancient Mesopotamian scholar was, once and for all,
revealed to humans by the gods. Knowledge was not expected to grow, and
new discoveries were not attributed to named scholars.1 The task of the scholar
was to guard, transmit, and explicate the knowledge that he received and to
preserve it for a next generation.2 There was no concept of “nature” in the sense
of a predictable universe that follows an impersonal regularity. If there was any
history to knowledge, it was a history of decay, indexed by the dreaded he-pí
(broken), indicating damage in the original manuscript that the scholar had in
front of him. Such an approach to knowledge is by no means extraordinary. In
the European Middle Ages and well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was quite common to see the decay of human knowledge as a result of
the original sin of Adam and Eve. The task of the scholar of the time was to
recover or restore original knowledge and to explain it properly.
Both understandings of knowledge, the modern one and the ancient one,
are mythologies that serve to support a certain way of producing and maintaining valid knowledge. As mythologies go, they simultaneously reveal and hide
the actual historical forces behind the transmission, production, dissemination,
and display of knowledge. Thinking about knowledge and progress has not
stopped with the Enlightenment, and more recent discussions, in particular by
such French sociologists and philosophers as Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu,
and Bruno Latour, have been much less optimistic and triumphalist, emphasizing the embeddedness of knowledge production in the structure of society and
in the needs and interests of the individuals and institutions that take part in the
process.3 The knowledge that is developed at our universities, multinational
companies, and military establishments follows rules and adheres to plausibility
structures that answer to the concerns of our times.
When our society changes history changes, too. Our task, today, when it
comes to the intellectual history of Babylonia and Assyria, is to understand the
social, economic, and ideological contexts in which it was possible for ancient
1 The volume of recent discussions around the figure of the Middle Babylonian scholar Esagilkin-apli and the question of the historical reality of the achievements ascribed to him in much
later texts may be analyzed as one example of the projection of a modern scholarly concern
(namely credit) onto ancient history. See Heeßel (2010, 2011); Frahm (2011: 324–32); and Rutz
(2011); all with previous literature.
2 Various aspects of this guardianship are discussed by Lenzi (2008); and Cavigneaux and
Jaques (2010), both with further literature.
3 Foucault (1982); Bourdieu (1977); Latour (1987).
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scholars to do their work. This perspective on intellectual history is freeing us
from many of the unfruitful questions and anachronistic assumptions that are
required by more genealogical or evolutionist approaches to the subject and it
opens up much more interesting questions than a “history of ideas” approach
could ever do. We no longer need to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, between medicine and magic (or medicine and religion, for that matter).
We can describe diviners as scholars, without feeling the urge to ascribe to them
an empiricism that requires some concept of nature. We can understand Old
Babylonian mathematics as being based on cut-and-paste geometry, without the
need to reconstruct a number theory – and thus we can do away with the very
anachronistic and uncomfortable idea of a Pythagorean Theorem.4 And we can
broaden our inquiry into realms of writing, alchemy, and linguistic speculation
that would hardly fit any modern category of valid knowledge.
I will discuss here three examples of what such an approach to intellectual
culture might look like. The three examples refer to the Old Babylonian period (early
second millennium) in southern Mesopotamia, the scribes of Hattuša in the
Anatolian Late Bronze Age (late second millennium), and the prebendary priests
of the Late Babylonian period in southern Mesopotamia again (late first millennium).
I will discuss these in reverse order, and thus I will start with the prebendary priests.
1 The prebendary priests of late Babylonian Uruk
The surge in Neo-Babylonian studies that started somewhere in the early 1990s
has yielded a remarkably detailed picture of the place and function of prebendary priests in southern Mesopotamian cities like Babylon, Borsippa, and Uruk in
the final centuries of ancient Mesopotamian history, that is, from the sixth
century BC to the first century AD. These priests took part in the daily care of
the city god by preparing his or her food, drink, and clothing and by performing
the rituals and the entertainment that the god needed. In return they received
remuneration from the temple coffers. The task of the prebendary priest was
located between religion5 and politics and we may see the families of prebendary priests at a pivotal place between the city, the god (and the cosmic order that
the deity represented), and the king. The king, after all, was the ultimate
provider for the gods and no prebendary priest was appointed without the
4 See Robson (2001) with previous literature.
5 The concept religion is not less problematic and anachronistic than that of Pythagoras’
Theorem. That discussion is beyond the scope of this article; the reader is referred to the
succinct treatment of the matter in Nongbri (2013).
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king’s consent. By running the city temple with its large holdings of land, slaves,
and animals, the prebendary priests played an important role in the economy of
the time. They were bound to rules of purity: purity of descent, physical purity,
purity of marriage, purity of moral behavior, and purity of the products that they
prepared for the god. Those rules of purity allowed them to keep a tight lid on
their ranks. Only certain elite families were allowed to enter the priesthood.6
Michael Jursa (2013) has argued recently that the prebendary priests were
not the top-earners of the period. They belonged to the elite, but their wealth
paled in comparison to that of merchant families such as the Egibis. They
derived their power and influence not so much from wealth, but rather from
their connections to god, city, and king. As Caroline Waerzeggers has shown
(2003), the fate of prebendary families was inextricably connected to larger
political developments and those families that fell out of favor may suddenly
disappear from the archival record.
It is in this tightly knit social environment that the maintenance of the
cuneiform tradition is found. We know of brewers of Enlil at the Ekur temple
in Nippur who wrote very complex commentaries to medical texts and to the
learned sign list Aa.7 Families of so-called temple enterers and lamentation
singers at Uruk assembled large collections of cuneiform scholarly material.8
The traditional cuneiform texts of the period, the divination compendia, the
lexical lists, the Gilgameš epic, and the medical texts thus served to support the
claims of these elite families to their central position in society. Some of these
same families engaged in the new mathematical astronomy.9
All studies of cuneiform intellectual history have to contend with the issue
of preservation. Whatever these scholars wrote on writing boards or parchment
scrolls is now lost to us – except for a cursory notice in library records or in
colophons. This issue becomes much more pertinent in the Hellenistic period
when, for the first time in Babylonian history, a plausible alternative to cuneiform scholarship became available. The scholars who copied traditional cuneiform texts had made a choice to express themselves in that particular cultural
6 This brief summary depends on Waerzeggers (2010, 2011); and Jursa (2011); all with earlier
literature.
7 See Frahm (2011: 302).
8 The various Uruk libraries have been published in LKU and SpTU 1–5; additional tablets, now
spread over museums all over the world, have been published at various places. The material is
edited online in the Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia project under direction
of Eleanor Robson (http://oracc.org/cams/gkab). For recent discussions of these libraries see
Clancier (2009); Ossendrijver (2011); see also Farber (1987); Frahm (2002); Oelsner (2000); and
Robson (2007).
9 For Babylonian mathematical astronomy, see Ossendrijver (2012) with further literature.
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register. Other options were available, even to a prebendary priest of Marduk at
the Esagil in Babylon like Berossos, as fragments of his work in Greek show.
Geert de Breucker (2011 and 2012) has shown that Berossos positioned himself
between traditional Babylonian historiography and Greek ethnography.10
Whenever scholars decided to write Greek, or Aramaic for that matter, we are
out of luck because such documents do not survive. The Berossos fragments
only serve to remind us of the range of possibilities that may have been available at the time, but that are largely invisible to us. Against this background we
may interpret other details of their identity construction, such as seal impressions with Greek motifs, occasional Greek names, and the use of Greek coinage
as revealing a cultural hybridity which may have been much more pervasive
than what may be gleaned from the extant textual material.
Elite actors may have fostered multiple social identities. Their choices were not
restricted to being either Greek or Babylonian – we should rather imagine a
situation where individuals negotiated their position between these cultural
options depending on their social and institutional needs. Prebendary priests of
the Late Babylonian period utilized numerous techniques to provide themselves
with deep chronological roots, compatible with their customary role in traditional
rituals caring for gods in traditional Babylonian temples. Such roots were
expressed by their efforts to transmit ancient Babylonian knowledge in the form
of literary, divinatory, and lexical texts, but also by their use of traditional cuneiform for writing contracts (such as house sales), following traditional documentary
patterns. Their naming practices included family names that projected their
lineages back into the distant past. At the same time these same priests were
interested in the latest developments in mathematical astronomy, revealing a
decidedly nontraditional side of their knowledge production. It would be a mistake
to understand the prebendaries as living in a bygone world; indeed, their central
position in the political constellation between god, king, and city would make it
impossible for them to be isolated from the wider world. Similarly, it would be a
mistake to understand the traditional cuneiform knowledge texts as simply reproducing what was received from earlier periods. These ancient texts entered a world
that had changed, in which new topics and new methods had been embraced and
were being developed. They signified a conscious choice for the ancient, but in a
landscape where they competed for relevance and validity with very different
knowledge traditions. Late Babylonian cuneiform scholarship was part of a balancing act between traditional temple culture and novelties such as mathematical
astronomy or Greek ethnography in a hybrid definition of knowledge.
10 See also Langin-Hooper (2007) for a similar argument based on the very different data set of
terracotta figurines.
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The Neo-Babylonian and Late Babylonian period is a privileged example
because the scholarly texts are provided with very explicit colophons that allow
us to see who wrote and owned such tablets and because we have such a broad
variety of evidence from administrative texts, letters, initiation rituals, and
scholarly texts of all kinds to place these individuals in a broader context.
This period is also privileged, though, because a number of scholars have
gone through the trouble of making this evidence accessible to those of us
who have not had the privilege of reading through thousands of administrative
documents. The surge in Neo-Babylonian studies since the early 1990s has
clarified many issues in the political and social history of the area. The charge
has been led primarily by Michael Jursa and his team at Vienna,11 but many
others have contributed to this success, more than can be acknowledged here.
Intellectual history in the sense that I am proposing will need intensive collaboration between the various sub-fields of Assyriology. We will need to end the
overspecialized nature of our research and make sure that those at the other side
of the fence can actually read the results of our investigations.
2 The scribes of Hattuša
My second example comes from the royal palace at the Hittite capital Hattuša in
the second half of the second millennium. Cuneiform texts excavated there were
written in Hittite, Hurrian, Akkadian, Sumerian and other languages, although
the great majority is in Hittite. This was a period of intense international contact
in which cuneiform writing had spread all over the ancient Near East.
Babylonian knowledge traditions, in the form of lexical texts, show up at almost
every place where cuneiform was known.
Much of the research in the intellectual history of the so-called western
periphery (Syrian Ugarit and Emar, Anatolian Hattuša, Egyptian Amarna, and a
host of smaller find spots) has addressed questions of transmission. What route
did the knowledge tradition take, what intermediaries may there have been? It
has become evident that there was not one line of transmission, but that there
were several routes at the same time, with feedback loops and direct contacts
with Babylonian or Assyrian teachers (Beckman 1983). This period has been
called the International Period and one of the reasons why cuneiform was
known in all these places was the importance of international correspondence
in Akkadian. So we should expect a dense web of possible transmission routes,
crisscrossing the area rather than a steady stream emanating from Babylonia.
11 See, for instance, Jursa (2005).
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There is no indication that the scribes of Hattuša worried much about the
pedigree of their texts or that they valued an original from Babylonia more
highly than one that had come through Mittannian or other intermediaries.
This is in marked contrast with Middle Assyrian Assur, approximately contemporary, where the only good traditions were Babylonian traditions and scribes
went out of their way to be able to claim that their work was a reliable copy of
an original from Nippur or Babylon (Veldhuis 2012).
The appearance of lexical texts in the western periphery is routinely
explained as a necessity in the training of scribes. These are school texts in
the tradition of Babylonian scribal education and the lexical texts travelled
along with the cuneiform system itself – or so the narrative goes.
For the lexical texts from Hattuša, this scenario is somewhat implausible.12
The Hattuša lexical corpus specializes in the most complex and most erudite
compilations. The thematic list of objects Ura, which is found in large numbers
at contemporary sites such as Emar and Ugarit, is relatively rare in Hattuša (6
exemplars only). We do not find the elementary sign list Syllabary A, but instead
we find two exemplars of a very learned sign list.13 In addition there is a prism,
by itself a very rare format in the Late Bronze Age,14 with a list of signs crossing
each other – including very rare and otherwise unattested signs.15 The school
text now known as the Weidner God List has not been found so far in the Hittite
capital, but instead we have a copy of the much more complex god list An ¼
Anum.16 One of the most learned lists of the period, the series Erimhuš
(Cavigneaux et al. 1985), belongs to the most frequently attested lexical compositions in Hattuša (13 exemplars). Erimhuš specializes in obscure and rare
Sumerian words; some passages likely originated in a commentary to the difficult Sumerian text Ininšagura, or Inana C (Michalowski 1998). It had very little to
offer for the acquisition of basic literacy; it belonged to the scholarly handbooks
of the period.
Compared to the lexical finds at Ugarit (van Soldt 1995) and Emar (Cohen
2009), which are more modest in their intellectual aspirations, the scribes at the
12 For the lexical texts from Hattuša see Weeden (2011); and Scheucher (2012b) with earlier
literature.
13 KUB 3, 94 and KBo 26, 50. For these texts, see Weeden (2011: 107–108); and Scheucher
(2012b: 664–71).
14 The prism is a common format for lexical texts and other school texts in the Old Babylonian
period, but becomes rare afterward (see Waal 2012).
15 KBo 26, 56; this type of sign list is extremely rare; see Cavigneaux (2012: 72–78) for two
Middle Assyrian examples.
16 KBo 26, 1; this is the only copy of An ¼ Anum in the western periphery to be identified
so far.
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Hittite capital aimed at the highest level of complexity and difficulty. The
Hattuša text corpus is a royal corpus, in service of royal management and
royal ritual (van den Hout 2008). And thus the presence of highly sophisticated
complex learned handbooks may be understood as supporting the power and
prestige of the royal court. The Hattuša lexical texts are not the products of
school boys, trying to master cuneiform for diplomatic correspondence – this is
a set of learned handbooks for the display of cultural ambitions.
This explanation, however, runs into other problems. The Hattuša lexical
texts, and in particular the Erimhuš copies, are full of errors of interpretation.
The Hittite translations of the Sumerian and Akkadian entries often more or less
ignore the Sumerian and reinterpret the Akkadian based on improper readings
of the signs or incorrect identifications of the lexemes.
Mark Weeden (2011) has drawn attention to an entry in Erimhuš that is
rendered in Akkadian as ṣiddu u birtu, mob or riffraff.17 The Hittite translations
indicate that ṣiddu was read as ṣītu, “exit,” and that birtu was understood as
“fort,” or “castle.” Such errors or reinterpretations are indeed quite frequent in
the Hattuša lexical texts and in particular in Erimhuš (see Scheucher 2012a).
What does that mean – did the household of one of the most powerful people of
the period employ incompetent scribes? Or should we go back to the first
analysis and conclude that these texts were written by ignorant pupils as part
of their scribal training?
I think that there are other ways of dealing with this data set. First, we may
take a closer look at the format of Erimhuš at Hattuša. Hattuša lexical texts often
add a translation column in Hittite and a pronunciation column in syllabic
Sumerian between the Sumerian and the Akkadian. The syllabic Sumerian and
Hittite columns are innovations by the Hittite scribes, they are not found in this
way at other places.18 The Hattuša Erimhuš versions that we have today exhibit
various combinations of Sumerian, Syllabic Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite.
The following formats are known:
Sumerian
Sumerian
Sumerian
Sumerian
Syll. Sumerian
Syll. Sumerian
Akkadian
Akkadian
Akkadian
Hittitte
17 Weeden (2011: 100): KBo 26, 25 ( þ ) KBo 01, 35 rev. ii 6’-7’.
18 School extracts from Ugarit and Emar occasionally insert syllabic Sumerian, squeezed
between the Sumerian and the Akkadian column; see van Soldt (1995).
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The scribes at Hattuša experimented with their data. They did not simply
reproduce the text as they received it, but they started meddling with it – adding
new information, experimenting with the best layout. This is quite unusual. One
can show that scribes from Emar, for instance, were careful to reproduce the text
that they received as accurately as possible – not because they thought there
was anything untouchable about it, but because they barely understood what
was going on and they lacked sufficient mastery of Akkadian and Sumerian to
manipulate the text.19
Scribes at Hattuša were not satisfied with simply reproducing the texts that
they received. They tried to make sense of them and since they were dealing
with Erimhuš, a compilation that was inherently and intentionally obscure, they
ran into difficulties. Describing those problematic passages as errors may conceal the real point. The Hattuša scribes ingeniously made sense of a text that
would put any highly qualified scribe in a difficult spot. Their innovative
formatting of the Hattuša Erimhuš versions and their reinterpretation of numerous entries is a sign of their confidence that they knew what they were doing
and that they really owned this knowledge tradition. The type of reinterpretation
that we find in the Hattuša lexical texts is not all that different from the
argumentation style of first millennium commentary texts (Frahm 2011) that
equate words that are written similarly or sound similarly. What we call learned
in seventh century Nineveh we tend to call mistakes in Hattuša – but that may
not be altogether fair or helpful.
The case of the Hattuša scribes of lexical texts is very different from my first
example, the Late Babylonian prebendary priests. We know a lot more about the
social and political position of prebendary priests and colophons that allow us
to link tablets to one particular scribe or scribal family are absent in Hattuša.
What the two examples have in common is that they represent attempts to
understand knowledge and scholarship in the context in which this knowledge
functioned, putting less emphasis on questions of transmission, and more on
issues of agency and on knowledge and scholarship as a tool in the hands of
actual people who were negotiating their place in the social landscape of the
time.
19 The Emar lexical texts represent two distinct traditions, the (older) Syrian tradition and the
Syro-Hittite tradition (see Cohen 2009). Within each tradition, where we have multiple exemplars that preserve the same lexical passage, those exemplars tend to duplicate each other
almost sign by sign.
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3 Old Babylonian gentlemen
My last example concerns the intellectual history of the Old Babylonian period
in southern Mesopotamia – and it may be more accurately described as a nonexample. The Old Babylonian period witnessed an unprecedented number of
innovations in the scribal sphere. Sumerian literature was not exactly new, but it
became repurposed for educational aims and the corpus was enriched with new
genres and was thus restructured in various ways. The third millennium lexical
corpus was basically thrown out and an entirely new corpus was constructed.
Unlike third millennium lexical texts, this Old Babylonian lexical corpus was
aimed at the educational goals of the scribal school (Veldhuis 2010a), and
significant parts of this corpus continued to be used all the way to the end of
cuneiform civilization. Many other kinds of texts are found for the first time in
the Old Babylonian period, including divinatory compendia and compilations of
mathematical problem texts. Several of the compositions that belong to the
classics of Akkadian literature, such as Gilgameš, Etana, and Anzû, are first
attested in this period. To this one may add the Old Babylonian letter – not a
new genre, but certainly utilized and formatted in innovative ways – and finally
the administrative table.20
This broader use and, presumably, wider spread of literacy may well be
related to still another development, the introduction of the cursive hand. The
highly standardized style of Ur III (and earlier) writing may be described as
semi-monumental (even for quite mundane receipts), signaling the power of the
royal administration in whose service such texts were produced. In the Old
Babylonian period, abbreviated, informal writing styles became more current,
with crowded lines and undefined boundaries between individual signs.
Not all of these innovations may be directly related to each other – in most
cases it is rather hard to establish when exactly a particular innovation took
place in this period of roughly 400 years. It seems safe to say, however, that
writing moved to a different social location. It was no longer dominated by king
and governor, but it was used for a variety of purposes by a variety of actors.
Perhaps the most telling innovation was the introduction of the divinatory
handbook with long lists of omens. Such handbooks are rather impractical and
they do not seem to relate directly to the process of asking a god a yes/no
question (Veldhuis 2010b). Divination itself was hardly new and diviners had
20 For Old Babylonian divination, see Richardson (2010); for mathematical problem texts
Robson (2008); for letters Sallaberger (1999); for tables Robson (2003). Old Babylonian literature
in Akkadian has been sparsely studied as such (most studies concentrate on a single composition which is followed through its entire history). See Van Koppen (2011).
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done fine without the use of writing for a long time (Richardson 2010). This
suggests that diviners sought to strengthen their position in society by claiming
literacy and a written corpus as essential to their craft. This would have
complicated entrance to their ranks; moreover, the tablets listing the omens
would represent very physical signs of the learnedness and elite status of their
owners.
The scribal schools, known as Edubas, provided a kind of formal
training that is not attested in earlier periods. The Eduba was not simply a
place for the acquisition of literacy – literacy was a craft that could be
learned on the job in an apprenticeship, the same way that one would
learn any other craft. The Eduba provided an elite training, introducing
pupils to ancient history, the organization of the cosmos, and all the ins
and outs of Sumerian writing.
What these data suggest is that these innovations were spurred by a new
elite, more or less independent from the royal house – an elite that was in need
of a self-definition. They found that self-definition in a very learned approach to
writing, in the creation of an imagined Sumerian past and, in general, in a
broadened use of cuneiform writing. But who were these people – what was the
social anchor of all these developments?
In a very interesting article Robert McC. Adams (2009) has argued that those
involved were the awīlū, the gentlemen, who appear in the Laws of Hammurapi
as a well-defined social class, distinguished from commoners and slaves. I think
that Adams’ theory has a very high plausibility – there are excellent parallels in
early modern Europe where the rise of cities created new elites of merchants and
scholars who did not fit the medieval classification of noblemen, clerics, and
farmers. These merchants and scholars thus had no clear model of how to define
and delineate themselves as an elite. The process led to important scholarly and
literary innovations, such as the birth of vernacular literature and the introduction of alternative knowledge traditions that were more independent from theology and scholasticism (Wintroub 2006).
Several of the newly introduced Sumerian literary texts discuss the proper
behavior and demeanor of the awīlum, or lu2-ulu3 in Sumerian. Konrad Volk
(2000) and more recently Ulrike Steinert (2012: 110–13) have shown how the socalled Eduba texts (narratives and debates set at the scribal school) did so
primarily in negative ways, by showing how not to behave if you wanted to be
a true lu2-ulu3. They feature pupils who are lazy, speak Akkadian (they are
supposed to speak Sumerian), and are generally incompetent. The teacher does
not fare much better and is described in the most unflattering ways. The real
awīlum, by contrast, knows Sumerian, is diligent, and has a high sense of honor.
Again, this use of negative examples in literary contexts is fairly typical for a
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new elite that is negotiating its proper definition and its relationship to existing
elites.21
While all this seems rather promising and satisfying, I still refer to it as a
non-example. The reason is that the awīlū as a social class are exceedingly hard
to find and to define. Although the Laws of Hammurapi consistently contrast
“gentleman,” “commoner,” and “slave” as three clearly delineated groups,
attempts in modern scholarship to define and describe the awīlū as a group
with a circumscribed historical and social identity have remained remarkably
vague. Who are these people? Balmunamhe of Larsa may well qualify, and we
know that he is referred to as “the gentleman” in his own administrative
archives (Van De Mieroop 1987). But unlike the Late Babylonian prebendary
priests, discussed above, the individuals or families that made up this stratum of
Old Babylonian society remain mostly unidentified and thus the social-historical
meaning of awīlum, its history and its relationship to royalty or other realms of
power can be studied only through the idealized lens of the Laws of Hammurapi.
Moreover, explicit connections between scribal culture and awīlum/lu2-ulu3 are
mostly restricted to literary texts (the Eduba texts) and do not directly refer to
actual historical people. And thus my attempts to link the extraordinary scribal
and intellectual innovations of the period to historical agents have to remain
vague and speculative.
4 Conclusions
With these three examples – or rather two examples and a non-example – I hope
to have illustrated an approach to knowledge and scholarship that is contextual,
taking knowledge, literature, and scholarship as components of the social
structure of the time and as elements in the struggle for social advantage.
In doing so, the focus is less on historical developments or the history of
transmission and more on the synchronic context in which intellectual culture is
deployed. That means, on the one hand, that it is important to demolish existing
boundaries between sub-disciplines and sub-sub-disciplines in the field of
Assyriology. We cannot study divinatory texts without studying letters and
administrative records. In the conclusion to my forthcoming History of the
Cuneiform Lexical Tradition, which traces lexical texts from the late fourth
21 Late-medieval literature from the Low Countries presents many examples of stereotypical
boorish behavior (involving food, sex, excrements, and other bodily functions), inverted gender
roles, etc. that illustrate in mirror-image the proper social interaction and etiquette of the new
urban elite. See, for instance, Pleij (2007).
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Intellectual History and Assyriology
33
millennium all the way to the Parthian period, I argue that such books should
not be written anymore. A history of the lexical tradition suggests that there is
such a tradition as a more or less independent entity that moves through time
and has its own inherent development. There is no such thing.
Cuneiform evidence tends to come in large quantities for very brief periods
of history – with little or nothing in between. Cuneiform history, therefore, is
fragmentary, it is a form of island hopping and I think we should use that to our
advantage. I am reminded here of Jeremy Black’s discussion of Sumerian literature, where he argued that the very fragmentariness of this literature might make
it relevant again to a (post-)modern taste (Black 1998). As far as I can see that
has not happened yet. But we may add that post-modernism has no problem
with a fragmentary and disconnected type of history as long as it is securely
contextualized. Much of the data used for Ancient Judaic, Greek and Roman
history have been transmitted over many centuries to be preserved in
Carolingian and later manuscripts. Such data sets need to be projected back
into the history that they attest to and, paradoxically, that may lead to rather
coherent narrative histories. Our data set is much dirtier, with little filtering
applied, but it relates much more immediately to the period and the people we
are interested in. Cuneiform studies cannot simply apply whatever is available in
ancient historical methodology – we will have to develop our own version. And
it may just be that the dirty, fragmentary evidence in its bewildering variety will
become its strength.
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