This dialogue is one of several related compositions which purport to describe the lives of scribes and their trainees. Here, an older man patronizingly lectures a recent scribal school graduate on his own exemplary educational career. He tells his apprentice what an obedient, hard-working student he was, under his excellent teacher, and exhorts the young man to follow his own example, perhaps quoting proverbs to make his point (3—28). The young man is not impressed, however: he berates his supervisor for talking down to him and vigorously outlines his own accomplishments as a scribe (29—53). The older man backs down, acknowledging at last that the younger man is ready in his turn to become a teacher (54—72), and invokes the blessing of Nisaba, patron goddess of scribes.
Such compositions have often been used as primary evidence for the working conditions and professional attitudes of Old Babylonian scribes. But the archaeological evidence from scribal schools such as House F shows that this work and others like it were copied by the trainee scribes in the process of their education. In fact, one tablet from House F in Nibru contains both the first 20 lines of this work and a mathematical exercise. This means we need to think quite carefully about how the students themselves interpreted them. Did they recognize in these dialogues a true picture of school life, or some humorous heightened reality which bore only tangential similarity to their own experiences and feelings? The nuances of humour are very hard to recover from Sumerian literature, yet it appears to be present here, for instance in pointedly contrasting pairs of words, such as ‘The learned scribe humbly answered’ and ‘Your charming ditty delivered in a bellow (29—35). The dialogue structure of the composition also links it to the Debate genre (see The debate between Sheep and Grain and The debate between Bird and Fish, both Group G) in which the vigorous nature of the exchanges often descends into gutter humour and slapstick. The school poems, in this light, may not be the serious documentary sources we have taken them to be after all.
World History
