In the Old Babylonian period, the school (Sumerian edubba) continued to be the heart of Mesopotamian culture. Its highly conservative nature allowed it to pass down those instruments of the scribal profession developed in the third millennium bc. Paradoxically, a large part of Sumerian literature has arrived to us from the edubba of Old Babylonian Nippur, when Sumerian was already a dead language. At the same time, however, the school had to take into consideration new problems. These mainly pertained to the definitive transition from Sumerian to Akkadian as the main written language. Syllabaries were adapted to accommodate the characteristics of the Semitic language (the voiced-unvoiced-emphatic triad, the use of long vowels and double consonants and so on). Akkadian morphology therefore began to develop in its classical form.
The problem of bilingualism was not new. However, it had now spread throughout the Mesopotamian scribal tradition, forcing schools to re-formulate bilingual terms and to convert Sumerian conventions into Akkadian. Consequently, we find Sumero-Akkadian bilingual lists arranged in three columns (ideogram, Sumerian reading and Akkadian reading). There even were trilingual lists, such as the ones concerning the Eme-sal dialect (of the type dimmer = dingir = ilu). The difference between an ideogram and its syllabic writing now made monolingual lists a sort of ‘translation’, providing an ideogram with its Akkadian reading.
The disappearance of Sumerian as a spoken language forced scribes to develop other forms of recovery and translation of the Sumerian literary tradition. There were interlinear translations, the collection and writing down of the great compositions of Sumerian literature and the teaching of Sumerian. Although it was now a dead language, Sumerian remained a fundamental aspect of scribal training. Apart from its cultural and religious prestige, which made Sumerian a sort of ‘Medieval Latin’, there was a practical reason for the transmission of Sumerian. In fact, the system used to write Akkadian was originally developed for Sumerian and it kept visible traces of this origin (at least in its ideographic repertoire). In fact, no Akkadian text could have been read or understood without knowing Sumerian.
Alongside the problem of translation, there was the constant need to keep the cultural legacy of the Sumerians updated, expanded and organised. The result of this effort was the development of a large ‘encyclopaedia’ (which would become a classic), called the Harra-hubullu. This collection of twenty-two tablets listed all the terms needed by the Mesopotamian scribes: from trees to wooden objects, reeds and objects made of reed, pottery, leather objects, metals and metal objects, wild and domestic animals, body parts, semiprecious stones and stone objects, plants, fish, birds, wool, clothes, places and foodstuffs. In its effort towards classification, this ‘encyclopaedia’ could be compared to the Chinese one imagined by Jorge Luis Borges (with its incoherent set of categories). However, it should instead be seen as a large ‘dictionary’, recording the scribal knowledge of the time with all its gaps and overlaps, as well as allowing the constant addition of as many new elements as possible. There were other, more practical, compositions, such as the equally classic, but shorter, ana ittisu series. This was a handbook of legal formulas developed for the writing of legal contracts. Then, there were numerical texts (with multiples, multiplications, reciprocals and so on) to facilitate calculations. Another type of text typical of the period was mathematical problems (Text 11.3), such as: ‘knowing that a canal is x amount long and x amount wide, a worker digs x amount of land per day and his ration is x amount, how many days are needed to dig a canal of x length and how much will it cost?’
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