Leiden University Student Repository

Eertink, Mark (2025)

"The Scribe Interrogates the Student..." A Literary and Historical Contextualisation of the First-Millennium BCE Sumero-Akkadian 'Exam Texts'

Research master thesis | Classics and Ancient Civilizations (research) (MA)

The so-called Exam Texts are four literary texts concerning scribal education in Mesopotamia. Their style and contents seem to resemble scribal literature from the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2000–1600 BCE), but they only survive on tablets much later in date. This paradox has remained unstudied, despite scholarly attention into their details about grammatical and musical terminology, lexicography, and into their bilingual format. This thesis studies the contents and contexts of the Exam Texts and their manuscripts to determine their relation to OB scribal literature and how this intellectual heritage is integrated in their first-millennium historical, social, and cultural contexts. It argues that they are school texts that also function as epistemological treatises about the nature of the scribal art and the values of scholarship.

Exam Texts

Literature

Bilingual

First Millennium

Scribal Art

Eduba

Author

Eertink, Mark

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Specialisation

Assyriology

Supervisors

Waerzeggers, C.

ECTS Credits

30

Language

en