On the Curriculum of the Neo-Babylonian School (Book Review‪)‬

Petra D. Gesche's book, Schulunterricht in Babylonien im ersten Jahrtausend v. Chr., a slightly reworked version of her dissertation, is a stunning achievement. The author evaluates about 2,500 often badly written exercise texts (most of them kept in the British Museum) for the information they yield about Neo- and Late Babylonian scribal education. The novelty of this study becomes apparent in comparison with the publication of similar texts in Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon (MSL), a series that aims at reconstructing lexical compositions and utilizes for this purpose the evidence from various kinds of cuneiform tablets, including school texts and library copies from both Assyria and Babylonia. Since Neo-Babylonian exercise tablets often contain extracts from various (sub)literary and lexical compositions, the edition of a single school tablet may be dispersed over two, three, or even four volumes of MSL. Gesche's focus is on the individual tablet, or rather on the corpus of Neo-and Late Babylonian school tablets and how they bear witness to education in first-millennium Babylonia. The structure of the book is straightforward and lucid. After chapters A and B (abbreviations and bibliography, respectively), the book opens with the introduction (chapter C), which contains research history, definitions, and a history of education in ancient Mesopotamia (C. III). The author provides the reader with an overview of the school tablets of all periods of cuneiform from the earliest archaic lexical lists onwards and for each group gives a succinct analysis of the evidence these tablets provide for our understanding of contemporary education.