Old Babylonian School Texts in the Jena Collection
HS 1612+: four-sided prism with a sign list (OB Nippur Ea) with glosses. Photograph by Jay Crisostomo. Copyright © Frau Professor Hilprecht Collection, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena.
The Hilprecht collection contains a large number of well-preserved Old Babylonian school texts that were used in the scribal schools of Nippur. Similar exercises, also form Nippur, have been identified in collections in Philadelphia and Istanbul, all in all several thousands of practice tablets. These tablets provide the evidence for a detailed reconstruction of the Nippur scribal curriculum and the text books that were used in this curriculum. All types of exercises known from Nippur are attested in the jena collection.
In the scribal school lexical texts were copied on five distinct tablet types, all of which are attested in the Jena collection.
| Type | Description |
| Prism | Four- or six-sided prism with inscription on all sides |
| I | Large multi-column tablet |
| II | Teacher-student exercise |
| III | One column exercise |
| IV | Lenticular (round) exercise |
Prisms and Type I tablets usually contain an entire lexical composition. The other tablet types have extracts. Type II and Type IV include a model text (by a teacher) and a copy of that text by a pupil.
The Hilprecht collection includes eleven lexical prisms, including two important exemplars of the sign list Old Babylonian Ea (HS 1612+ and HS 1670) and a beautiful exemplar of the word list Izi (HS 1802).
HS 1795 listing words for locusts and various insects.
Less spectacular, but not less important, are the contributions of the extract tablets. Among the numerous exemplars (mostly extracts) of the list of domestic animals, wild animals, and meat cuts (OB Ura 3), only HS 1795 preserves entry 360: birâ‚… ensi "praying mantis." The word is damaged or destroyed in all other exemplars.
27 Dec 2019Further reading
- Veldhuis, Niek C. 1997 Elementary Education at Nippur. The Lists of Trees and Wooden Objects. PhD Dissertation, University of Groningen. Download [http://irs.ub.rug.nl/ppn/30177613X].
- Veldhuis, Niek C. 2014 History of the Cuneiform Lexical Tradition. Guides to the Mesopotamian Textual Record 6. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.
Niek Veldhuis
Niek Veldhuis, 'Old Babylonian School Texts in the Jena Collection', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts: Jena, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/jena/highlights/obschooltexts/]
