Intellectual History and Assyriology

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. 22 N. Veldhuis

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 maintain- ing 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, emphasiz- ing 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 Esagil- kin-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). Intellectual History and Assyriology 23 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 pseudo- science, 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 Hattušainthe 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). 24 N. Veldhuis 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. Intellectual History and Assyriology 25 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 impres- sions 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 balan- cing 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. 26 N. Veldhuis

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 colla- boration 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 Hattušain 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). Intellectual History and Assyriology 27

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. 28 N. Veldhuis

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 Akkadian Sumerian Syll. Sumerian Akkadian Sumerian Syll. Sumerian 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). Intellectual History and Assyriology 29

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 con- ceal 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. 30 N. Veldhuis

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 non- example. 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 composi- tion which is followed through its entire history). See Van Koppen (2011). Intellectual History and Assyriology 31 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 – literacywasacraftthatcouldbe learnedonthejobinanapprenticeship,thesamewaythatonewould 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 theol- ogy and scholasticism (Wintroub 2006). Several of the newly introduced Sumerian literary texts discuss the proper behavior and demeanor of the awīlum,orlu2-ulu3 in Sumerian. Konrad Volk (2000) and more recently Ulrike Steinert (2012: 110–13) have shown how the so- called 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 32 N. Veldhuis 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). 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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