From Sumerophone Scribe to Court Scholar

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From Sumerophone Scribe to Court Scholar - Lexical Texts in the Stream of Tradition

Hey e n e n u r u





I am linking below a paper that I just finished writing for a course in Toronto, the course was on the history of the Neo-Assyrian empire. My intention was to investigate the "stream of tradition" a stock phrase coined by A. Leo Oppenheim in 1960. The phrase was meant to describe what Oppenheim saw as an essential continuity in the intellectual tradition, in the literary texts of second and first millennium Mesopotamia. With reference to an important new work on the history of the Lexical tradition by Niek Veldhuis (Veldhuis 2014), I chart the development of the curriculum from the OB period, through the middle period and into the NA library of Assurbanipal (the material from which Oppenheim formulated his initial statements); I stress the distinct ideology of the late period scribes and the novel uses they had for traditional material, over and above the continuity of the tradition.

Link here