Lexical Exercises

AUAM 73.3285 (AUCT 5, 186). Photograph © Siegfried H. Horn Museum, Andrews University. Lentil-shaped exercise tablet with two lines by the teacher (model text) copied below by the pupil.

Exercise texts are the products of students at the scribal school. They may include extracts from multiple lexical or literary compositions and they occasionally feature a model text by a teacher, to be copied by a student. Exercise texts are particularly interesting because they demonstrate how lexical compositions were used in the practice of education.

Exercise tablets are particularly well attested in three periods of cuneiform history: the Old Babylonian period (around 1800 BCE); the Middle Babylonian [/ckst/introduction/schooltexts/index.html] period (around 1300 BCE) and the Neo Babylonian period (around 500 BCE). In addition, there are some examples of Neo-Assyrian exercises.

Niek Veldhuis

Niek Veldhuis, 'Lexical Exercises', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicalliststypology/exercises/]