Although, as in the case of Axe, Sumerian literary tablets are often published and studied as textual sources for Sumerian literary works (as might be expected), they are also archaeological artefacts. Ifwe look at them as objects, like a bin or an axe, we can learn something about what they meant to the society and the individual people who made, used, and disposed of them.
We have already mentioned that UM 55-21-327, our source C for Axe, was excavated from the ancient city of Nibru in 1951. That means that there is an archaeological context for it, which can shed light on the circumstances of its production, use, and disposal. You may also have noticed that two of the others, sources B and E, have excavation numbers like that of source C, beginning with the sequence 3N-T. So they too were excavated in the same place and year, though one of them, source B (IM 58417), remained in the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. The other has not been assigned a museum number: although it has been in the University Museum in Philadelphia since the end of the dig, it is only on long-term loan and will be returned to Baghdad in due course.
Notes, plans, and catalogues made in the field during excavation show that all three tablets B, C, and E were found in a small mud-brick house in a densely populated area just a hundred metres or so south of the god Enlil’s great temple complex E-kur, at the heart of Nibru. As sun-dried mud brick weathers easily, houses made of it need to be repaired or rebuilt about once a generation. This particular house, which the excavators named House F, had been built some time after 1843 BCE (the date on a tablet recording a loan of silver, which was found in the foundations) and was remodelled three or four times, each time making a new floor above the old one and thus leaving traces of how the house had been before. It was finally abandoned after 1721 BCE (the latest date amongst the tablets left behind in the last occupation level). The house had four tiny rooms, including a kitchen, and two small courtyards. The entire living area was less than 50 square metres. It looked much like the neighbouring houses and contained much the same sorts of objects: the remains of domestic crockery, the ceramic plaques and figurines which decorated people’s homes at this period, some family legal contracts (loans, sales, adoptions) and letters. The only peculiar thing about it was that in the penultimate occupation level, abandoned in or after 1739 BCE, the excavators found seven hundred pieces of Sumerian literary tablets and a similar number of tablets with elementary scribal exercises on them. There were also three waterproofed baked-brick recycling bins, where fresh clay and old used tablets were soaked and shaped into new tablets. At that point in its life House F must have been home to a small scribal school.
The study of this vast cache of sources for Sumerian literature was hampered by the fact that the season’s finds were, following established practice, shared out (while the tablets were still in pieces) between the Universities of Chicago and Philadelphia, who had run the expedition, and the Iraq Museum for the host country. Joins between fragments have since reduced the total number of literary tablets to just under 600, but there are doubtless many more joins to be made. Over eighty different literary compositions are attested in House F—more than the works presented in this book. Fully three-quarters of them are narratives: myths, epics, city laments, epistolary works, debates, fables. Just twenty are hymns addressed to deities or kings— the most recent of whom, Enlil-bani, ruled about a century before House F was operating as a school.
Some twenty-four compositions were copied frequently—18 or 20 times—at House F. They can be divided into two different curricular sequences, as discussed in the introduction to Group J. The others survive in just single copies, or perhaps three or four, as does Axe. But Axe too belonged to a larger, somewhat fluid group, called by modern scholarship rather prosaically, and slightly misleadingly, Letter Collection B. These twenty or so short compositions, mostly fictive letters, cohere through their length (11—34 lines), the themes they address, their fictional senders and recipients, and other elements of intertextuality. (The group also includes Nintinuga’s dog, the fictive dedication that shares the last three lines with Axe.) Collection B is recognizable through the existence of tablets from elsewhere in Nibru (such as Sources D, F, and H of Axe) which contain all or part of the collection—so-called collective sources. Nineteen members of Collection B were found in House F, all on single tablets of the same shape and size as UM 55-21-327, and all in one to three copies.
Tiny scribal schools like House F were undoubtedly training the next generation in Sumerian literacy. But to learn literature is to learn more than literacy. The students were being inculcated with the values of their society and the values of the profession in which they were to serve. As the compositions in Groups I and J show, Sumerian school literature demarcated the boundaries of appropriate professional behaviour and demeanour, and the values of the institutions (whether temples or palaces) that employed scribes. The works emphasized the differences between scribes and non-scribes, instilled a sense of pride and duty to their profession—and hinted at the shame and humiliation of those who did not come up to the mark.
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