Old Babylonian texts in the Schøyen Collection. Part Two. School letters, model contracts, and related texts

This book is the first publication of ninety-two Old Babylonian tablets and fragments, now in the Schøyen Collection, which have in common a context in pedagogy, being products of Old Babylonian schools. Almost all are new to knowledge. They fall into two groups: school letters in Akkadian, edited by George, and Sumerian model contracts and other legal texts, edited by Spada. Each text is presented in transliterated form and translation, with appropriate commentary and annotations. The cuneiform is presented as photographic images at the end of the book. A catalogue, bibliography and indexes make the material easy to control. School letters in Akkadian are mainly copies of model letters on routine topics. These letters were used in Old Babylonian schools for writing practice and familiarization with epistolary form and expression. In theory they prepared the would-be scribe for the task of composing real-life letters, a skill necessary to the administration of the Old Babylonian state and its bureaucratic institutions, but also useful in the management of business enterprises and the conduct of private affairs. Akkadian school letters have been the subject of only one previous scholarly treatment, an article by F. R. Kraus on “altbabylonische Briefschreibübungen” (1964). He based his study on twenty-two Old Babylonian tablets. Subsequent identifications added to the corpus somewhat, but the discovery of 60+ school letters in the Schøyen Collection has much enlarged knowledge of the corpus. The first part of this book places these newly discovered letters in the context of the whole corpus, and considers afresh the typical features of school letters and their place in the curriculum. Model contracts were a common element in scribal schooling, belonging to the first stage of the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum. They were used to train scribes in the written forms of the administration and the law. While they were not functional documents, but simply didactic tools, model contracts follow the common patterns of Sumerian contract types and represent a comprehensive assortment of all possible transactions that the ancient Mesopotamian administration might have been required to draw up in the everyday economic life: barley and silver loans, sales of real estates and slaves, marriage contracts, adoptions, and so on. The second part of the book presents the edition of twenty-six cuneiform objects (twenty-four tablets and two prisms), most of them recording model contracts. The remaining tablets, although not belonging to the category of model contracts, can be related to legal training in the school milieu.