The volume under review is an impressive culmination of the author's extensive research in cuneiform lexical texts. Beginning with the archaic period, and progressing systematically to the Late Babylonian period, Veldhuis describes the available lexical sources, and evaluates their “context, institutional embedding and social location” (p. 23). His research was enabled by the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts (http://oracc.org/dcclt), an essential companion to the volume (pp. 24–5).
Veldhuis emphasizes the importance of context in understanding lexical material. Context can be archaeological or based abstractly in “writing, knowledge, and power” (p. 426). For example, “one particular role of lexical texts in the field of knowledge is scribal education” (p. 428). For the first time during the Old Babylonian period (OB), lexical texts were used as part of “a structured curriculum that takes a student through all the ins and outs of cuneiform and Sumerian – from the most elementary to the most arcane” (p. 223). This is in contrast to third millennium lists, which represented a more fossilized tradition preserved by “well-educated men of letters” (pp. 142, 223).
Veldhuis describes the OB curriculum from Nippur and then compares it to that from other OB sites. However, the majority of other find-spots produced “a few dozen texts at most” (p. 213). To Veldhuis's list on p. 213 should be added Susa, from where over 700 OB school tablets present a curriculum with many similarities to its Mesopotamian counterpart, though modified to fit the needs of Elamite students (Malayeri, “Scribal training in Old Babylonian Susa”, in Susa and Elam (Leiden, 2013)).
While many sites preserve school tablets, few provide enough material to test “the margins of variability of the [Nippur] curricular framework” (p. 203). Veldhuis focuses on the evidence from the Scherbenloch at Uruk and the house of the “diviner” at Sippar-Amnānum. Veldhuis suggests that there were at least two programmes of study: one from southern Babylonia represented by Nippur, and modified only slightly at Uruk, and one from northern Babylonia represented by Sippar (p. 215).
New OB lexical data come from over 750 school texts housed in the Jonathan and Jeannette Rosen Ancient Near Eastern Studies Seminar at Cornell University (CUNES; to be published by A. Kleinerman and A. Gadotti in a forthcoming CUSAS volume). Although this group was almost certainly not a discrete corpus in antiquity, the texts present all phases of the scribal curriculum known from Nippur, and are found on the five tablet types known to contain student exercises (see pp. 204–12 for description). The volume under review has been invaluable to the authors in preparing these texts for publication. With the limited space remaining, two examples will demonstrate how the CUNES lexical material is enhanced by Veldhuis's work, and, conversely, how it can provide further evidence to nuance Veldhuis's discussion of the OB lexical texts.
First, the CUNES texts illustrate the “flexibility” inherent in the OB lists. “Flexibility is a by-product of the curricular setting” (p. 202), meaning that lexical texts are identified easily as belonging to known compositions, but often are not exact duplicates. For example, fifty CUSAS tablets contain words for trees or wooden items, as in chapter 1 of the six-part thematic list Ura. Four of the 50 have sequences that fully parallel those from Nippur Ura 1. However, the majority (40 texts) only partially parallel the sequences found in Nippur Ura 1, deviating either by adding or omitting an entry in a sequence, or switching the order of a sequence. Only six have no entries that are also attested in Nippur Ura 1, four of which are mostly broken.
Second, the CUNES texts support the conclusion that the order of the Ura chapters themselves was relatively fluid. Although Veldhuis suggests that the order “was more or less recognized all over Babylonia” (p. 155), he points to examples of multi-column tablets and prisms that “tend to have rather idiosyncratic combinations and selections of themes that do not correspond to a single chapter in Nippur Ura” (p. 155). Likewise, the CUNES prisms that contain entries from more than one Ura chapter do not preserve the Nippur order: one contains Ura 3 followed by Ura 5 (52–10–161), while another has Ura 3 followed by Ura 5 and then Ura 4 (52–10–145). Given the evidence, it is tempting to suggest that, at least in some instances, the order of the chapters may have been left to the discretion of the teacher, an approach to the curriculum that we find in the advanced literary phase, and in the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods (p. 415).
Overall, the CUNES sources provide a larger data set than has been available previously to strengthen Veldhuis's assertions that “underlying all the variation there is a good deal of similarity between educational practices throughout the Old Babylonian period” (p. 225). It is significant that this is the case even though education was a private matter, not under state or temple control. As such, Veldhuis proposes that “the scribal elite that performed the education may be described as a ‘community of practice’”, in which there was a well accepted notion of what defined a “proper education”, and this education was required for acceptance into the community (p. 225).
As a final note, a few additions can be made based on the CUNES material: to the list of sources of the Early Dynastic Fish List (p. 89) add CUNES 48–09–190 and 48–10–016 to the OB unknown sources; and to the list of sources of the Early Dynastic Food List (p. 93) add CUNES 49–13–153 to the OB unprovenanced sources. All three CUNES texts are exercise tablets (lentils), providing further evidence that the OB curricular lexical texts and those ED lexical texts, which were still in circulation during the OB period, did not (always) exist independently of each other (see p. 218).
