Neo and Late Babylonian Lexical Texts

The extent of the Neo (and Late) Babylonian lexical tradition is illustrated by two catalog texts. With help of these catalogs we may reconstruct the following sequence of lexical compositions as used in the scribal education of the time (see the table; the Elementary phase is not represented in the catalogs, but reconstructed from other sources).

As it turns out, quite a few well-known first millennium lexical series were not part of the Neo Babylonian scribal curriculum; for instance the Emesal ("women's language") vocabulary and the word list Antagal. These compositions are essentially Assyrian; Babylonian copies of the Emesal Vocabulary and Antagal are very rare.

Of the two catalogs discussed above, the most interesting is the one from Babylon (published as CTMMA 2, 65), because it is written on the obverse of a school tablet. On the reverse the pupil wrote an elaborate prayer, in which he dedicated his work to Nabû, the god of writing. Dedications like this one are well known and are always found on the reverse of very elementary school exercises. The pupil who wrote this catalog of intermediate and advanced lexical texts, therefore, was a beginner himself, and indeed he made quite a few mistakes in his listing of lexical incipits.

The dedication prayer to Nabû explains that the pupil went out to get pure clay from a place outside of the city in order to make this tablet, and that he then left the finished tablet in a special container with the gatekeeper of the Nabû temple. This corresponds very nicely with the rules of purity and access for priests in this period. The purity of the priests who prepared and served the divine meal not only depended on the purity of the ingredients and the finished food, but also on the correct lineage and moral and physical attributes of the priests themselves. Access to the temple was restricted to priests and the level of access was a direct expression of the rank of the priest. The pupil who went out to get pure clay and left his exercise at the gate of the Nabû temple thus conformed to rules of purity and access.

Pupils in Neo Babylonian scribal schools belonged to the priestly circles that maintained the cuneiform tradition - even long after other writing systems (Aramaic and Greek) had become available.

Neo Babylonian Exercises

CBS 8801; Neo Babylonian school text from Nippur. Photograph © University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

Advanced Neo Babylonian exercise texts are divided into short sections of four to fifteen lines. The first few section include extracts from literary texts (for instance the Epic of Creation Enuma Eliš), and bilingual incantations. The other sections have extracts from lexical texts. The lexical extracts are always in sequence; if the first extract is from Ura 10, then the next one is from Ura 11, etcetera.

CBS 8801 is an example of such a school text from Nippur with extracts from incantation series on the obverse, and passages from Ura 3 and 4 on the reverse.

Other examples of such tablets may be found here

Neo Babylonian Scholarly Texts

An example of an interesting library text from this period comes from Uruk. It is a very learned commentary to the sign list Aa and was published as SpTU 2, 54

Further reading

• Gesche, Petra D. 2001 Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr. Alter Orient und Altes Testament 275. Ugarit-Verlag: Münster.
• Gesche, Petra D. 2005 Late Babylonian School Exercise Tablets. Pp. 257-65 in Literary and Scholastic Texts of the First Millennium B.C., eds. Ira Spar and W.G. Lambert. Cuneiform Texts in the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• George, Andrew R. 2010 The Colophon of MS 5007. Pp. 274-79 in The Lexical Texts in the Schøyen Collection. Cornell University Studies in Assyriology and Sumerology 12. Bethesda, Maryland: CDL.
• Veldhuis, Niek C. 2013 Purity and Access: A Catalog of Lexical Texts Dedicted to Nabû. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 65: 169-180. Download from JSTOR (subscription needed).
• Waerzeggers, Caroline 2011 The Babylonian Priesthood in the Long Sixth Century BC. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 54: 59-70.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'Neo and Late Babylonian Lexical Texts', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/neobabylonian/]