The role of Sumerian model contracts in Old Babylonian scribal education: standardisation and variants

This paper examines the role of Sumerian model contracts in Old Babylonian scribal education. Used to train future scribes in legal and administrative language and procedures, these texts played a central role in the transmission of technical knowledge. Although Akkadian had become the dominant spoken language, Sumerian remained an essential component of scribal training and continued to be employed in administrative contexts in southern Babylonia during the early second millennium BCE. Drawing on a corpus of more than 370 tablets, the paper identifies standardised collections of model contracts and examines their textual transmission. It further analyses formal differences and textual variants among multiple exemplars, demonstrating how these correlate with different tablet formats and stages of scribal instruction.