GODS IN THE CLASSROOM: RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN 1ST MILLENNIUM BCE BABYLONIA | IRAQ

Identifying “Religious Education” in Mesopotamia

Although religions were “embedded” within Mesopotamian societies,Footnote ¹ it was nonetheless necessary to teach members of the rising generations, particularly elites, about religious conventions and theological traditions actively and systematically, especially as many of these comprised specialized knowledge that went beyond normal or daily praxis. Many high-status professions explicitly required different forms of this expertise, ranging from career paths a modern reader would recognize as more clearly religious—priests and other cultic personnel—to practitioners (medical, astronomical, and so forth) for whom rituals and communication with the gods were central to their work. Because religious ideology was intrinsically bound up with the state, however, certain theological ideas such as the king’s relationships with and responsibilities to the gods were also instilled in rising elites who did not have explicitly religious mandates, such as scribes and officials. It is no surprise, then, that religious content was incorporated into the formal “school” curriculum followed by scribes, scholars, and other specialists. However, there was no discrete scholastic unit about religion or theology, nor was there a core text or set of texts that functioned as “holy scripture” like the Bible around which religious education could be centered.Footnote ² Instead, texts with content related to religion or theology represent a variety of genres and were integrated into different parts of the curricula on the basis of the complexity of the skills students were meant to learn, taught amongst other socio-cultural norms and expectations. Thus, there was no distinction between “secular” and “religious” education, and even those “schools” that were found in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions. Some local “schools” produced priests because of demographics—e.g., the teacher was himself a priest—but were not seminary equivalents.Footnote ³

Regardless, it is still possible to speak of religious education in Mesopotamia, and other studies have already established the merits of this subject for the ancient world, including in Greece and Rome.Footnote ⁴ Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler, in an introduction to a volume about religious education in pre-modern Europe, define the concept of religious education as “models and processes of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and competences inside religious traditions,” with religion defined as “a socio-cultural praxis, a web of discourses and practices based on the assumption that there is another level of reality behind the sphere of empirically graspable everyday life.”Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Salvo and Scheer, introducing a volume about religious education in ancient Greece, argue that “when elements of education are specifically geared towards religion, the concept of religious education becomes a useful analytical tool,” specifically identifying four components of religious knowledge: mythology, local traditions, ritual competencies, and the “right behaviour to be directed towards the gods and to be shown to the other members of the community as a display of piety.”Footnote ⁶ Following these frameworks, this study will refer to “religious studies” and “religious education” with respect to education about religious systems, concepts, and practices, including ideas about the nature of gods and relationships between humans and deities.Footnote ⁷

In general, children and adolescents in Mesopotamia would have encountered religion and ritual practices primarily at home, and this is true even for those children who would later undergo formal education. For instance, the ancestor cult was based within the household, as family members were typically interred there, and children would grow up witnessing or taking part in the ritual, as well as rites and beliefs related to other life cycle events.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, there were personal and family deities, and children would have had their parents as models for and access points into religious practices in the home.Footnote ⁹ Visits from specialists such as healers and exorcists was another means by which children would experience the practical application of religious ideas. Children may have accompanied their parents to make votive offerings and donations to the local temples and to visit local shrines, institutions they would also have encountered simply living in the city or town.Footnote ¹⁰ The boys whose fathers were cultic personnel, in particular, likely learned about temple service long before they took over their father’s positions, either through active instruction or observing their fathers’ duties, and there is evidence that apprentices conducted some rituals.Footnote ¹¹ Children would have also witnessed public rituals, such as festivals, and it is possible that parents would teach their children the stories and mythology behind these events on such occasions.Footnote ¹² Publicly displayed monuments and religious imagery would have shaped children’s impressions as well. It is plausible that children might have grown up hearing stories about the gods and kings from their family and had more spontaneous learning experiences and opportunities, such as observing the stars in the night sky or asking their parents questions about life and the world around them.Footnote ¹³ Informal education about religion was likely the norm for most young men and women, and unfortunately it is not preserved in the written record.

In considering the specific competences transmitted to students through formal education, there are several observable learning outcomes related to religion. This study focuses on religious education in Babylonia during the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods of the 1^st millennium BCE. Babylonia during this period was heir to longstanding local religious and educational traditions and the region was united under native Mesopotamian empires (first the Neo-Assyrian and then the Neo-Babylonian empires) that largely upheld these customs before being conquered by foreign kings (the Achaemenids and then the Seleucids) with whom Mesopotamians did not share religious or educational systems. These case studies are not meant to be comprehensive but illustrate a range of types of religious knowledge that students in the 1^st millennium acquired in the course of their formal education. Specifically, these comprise discrete outcomes including education about the pantheon, the characteristics of gods, religiously significant spaces including temples, the theological landscapes and cultic importance of Babylon (and, to a lesser extent, Nippur), and the relationships between gods and mortals.

Formal Education in Babylonia

Most professions and vocations were passed down from father to son, who would begin working alongside his father to learn through imitation and hands-on methods until he had mastered the necessary proficiencies. While literacy and scribal knowledge were transferred between generations as well, it was more clearly formalized and structured: this process of education followed a relatively standardized curriculum and was more pedagogically comprehensive than focused, career-based training and apprenticeships.Footnote ¹⁴ Formal education was largely intended for professions that required literacy, e.g., scribes who would write texts ranging from administrative records to royal inscriptions, cultic personnel, and specialists in āšipūtu (“exorcism”), bārûtu (“divination”), kalûtu (“cultic singing”), and asûtu (“healing”). Regardless of their future professions, students followed essentially the same learning plan, with their intended profession dictating how far into the curriculum they continued.Footnote ¹⁵ Elementary education was followed by an advanced specialization stage, essentially an apprenticeship phase.Footnote ¹⁶ Exact ages are difficult to determine, but scribal students began their education young and entered their specializations or apprenticeships as adolescents, while their peers in other trades would have started working as children.Footnote ¹⁷

Formal education was essentially the privilege of boys and young men from elite or aspirational families.Footnote ¹⁸ Scribal education took place in private, household-based contexts, not dedicated educational institutions or academies.Footnote ¹⁹ The instructors were adult professionals, often the father of one or more of the boys in the “class,” to whom other prominent or upwardly mobile urban families would send their sons.Footnote ²⁰ Because students belonged to the highest socio-cultural classes, education’s purpose was two-fold: to train students in the skills needed for their future career, as well as to impart cultural values, norms, and ideals as part of their enculturation into adult society.Footnote ²¹ The exercises and texts they were taught were selected to achieve both of these aims, and the “schools” were a setting in which boys socialized with peers from comparable socio-economic backgrounds and developed their identities as the future elites of their communities. Education also played an important role in transmitting information, ideas, and skills across generations.Footnote ²² This is true of the texts themselves as well: while most written exercises were disposable, many library copies of texts were composed by scribal apprentices or professional scribes at the beginning of their career, shortly after completing their education, building archival collections and preserving them for future generations to use.Footnote ²³

The extant written material produced during formal education, referred to in modern scholarship as “school texts,” demonstrates how education transmitted ideas and values beyond literacy skills. School texts were either written by students and contain their class exercises and assignments or were composed by instructors for pedagogical purposes. In some cases, these texts are identified as the product of scribal education by a colophon, but they can also be distinguished by their content, which is usually excerpts of texts known to be part of the curricula, often presenting as excerpts from multiple texts on the same school tablet. Other texts have been identified as scribal exercises by their mistakes, poor handwriting, tablet shape, or archival context.^{Footnote 24} The surviving school texts have enabled modern scholars to reconstruct the curricula taught in different areas and time periods.Footnote ²⁵ Most studies of education are centered on the Old Babylonian period (particularly in the city of Nippur), for which there are not only plentiful texts but also literary compositions purporting to reflect on the scribal school (Edubba’a) and educational experience itself.Footnote ²⁶

The school texts found in 1^st millennium Babylonian contexts contain many of the same texts and genres as in the Old Babylonian period, but the socio-cultural environment was markedly different.Footnote ²⁷ Most importantly, the 1^st millennium BCE was an age of empires rather than of regional kingdoms or territorial states, starting with the Neo-Assyrian Empire (c. 1000–610 BCE), which meant a scaling up of royal infrastructure. The imperial apparatus relied on a massive administrative and bureaucratic infrastructure of scribes, officials, and professionals who were in regular correspondence with each other and the king.Footnote ²⁸ As such, it was critical that future elites were raised within the norms, mission, and expectations of the empire.Footnote ²⁹ Assyria’s successor, the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626–539 BCE)—which had a great deal in common with Assyria, including a largely shared pantheon and similar educational traditions that were supported even under Assyrian hegemony—adopted much of the same imperial infrastructure.Footnote ³⁰ As the native empires gave way to the non-Mesopotamian empires of the Achaemenids and Seleucids, respectively, tensions arose between traditional ways and new socio-cultural expectations. The linguistic landscape had also changed by the 1^st millennium; while Old Babylonian schools were concerned with preserving Sumerian, a language that was no longer spoken in favor of Akkadian, it was increasingly Akkadian that needed to be maintained by this point, since Aramaic developed as a lingua franca and became the official language of the Achaemenids and eventually Greek was introduced as the imperial language under the Seleucids.Footnote ³¹ The Neo- and Late Babylonian school texts thus largely focus on Akkadian writing, though Sumerian was still taught, particularly in bilingual Akkadian-Sumerian texts.Footnote ³²

In the 1^st millennium there existed (at least) two visible pedagogical spheres of influence, with implications for the content of religious education on local levels. There seems to have been a fairly standard curriculum in northern Babylonia, dominated by Babylon-oriented ideology that stemmed from that city and that was likely also perpetuated (and perhaps amplified) by Borsippa, which was closely linked to Babylon politically, religiously, and intellectually.Footnote ³³ In southern Babylonian education, there were distinct traditions around Nippur, likely facilitated by the memory of its status as a center of scribal education.Footnote ³⁴ Nippur’s extant school texts comprise the largest known 1^st millennium yield, and they are remarkable for not only focusing on Nippur and its gods but also omitting the typical Marduk- and Babylon-oriented exercises that were standard in northern Babylonia.Footnote ³⁵ In particular, Nippureans apparently eschewed the so-called “Marduk syllabus” of Babylon—containing works exalting Marduk such as the great Marduk hymns and prayers, Enūma eliš, and Ludlul bēl nēmeqi—in favor of Ninurta mythology.Footnote ³⁶ Perhaps the best demonstration of this contrast is how the respective cities were conceptualized as religious centers in the Nippur Compendium and Tintir = Babylon, discussed below. Nippur’s educational sphere also encompassed the southern city Uruk, together forming an ideologically cooperative pair similar to Babylon and Borsippa. Urukeans studied materials from and about Nippur in their curricula, such as The Doctor from Isin, a unique pedagogical composition set in Nippur but found in Uruk.Footnote ³⁷ This suggests at least two somewhat competing nodes of education operating in the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods: a dominant Babylon-Borsippa axis (which included other northern cities such Sippar and Kiš) and a more limited Nippur-Uruk axis.Footnote ³⁸ Notable for this study is that the greatest divergences between these northern and southern curricula are seemingly within the sphere of religious education, particularly in terms of the literary compositions.

As for the Neo- and Late Babylonian curricular texts in general, there were multiple phases of training comprising increasingly complex compositions. Elementary education began with lists of basic signs, lexical lists, proverbs, and select literature, while the second stage introduced more complex lexical lists, more difficult literary works, incantations (including bilingual ones), prayers and hymns, and Tintir (in northern Babylonia).Footnote ³⁹ The specialization phase focused on texts related to the advanced student’s chosen profession, often resulting in copies of entire compositions.Footnote ⁴⁰ Much of the second stage curriculum was related to āšipūtu “exorcism.”Footnote ⁴¹ In terms of learning objectives, the goals of formal education in 1^st millennium Babylonia comprised basic Akkadian and Sumerian literacy, specific writing and technical skills, professional skills (including through apprenticeships), and socialization (including cultural norms and ideology, social class group cohesion, and networking). It should be stated that what is left of formal schooling is only what was written, and it is not possible to fully reconstruct what students learned in the context of studying these texts since oral explanations are not preserved.Footnote ⁴² Nonetheless, it is clear that students were taught certain values through texts and that instructors made deliberate choices in which texts they had their students study, copy, and compose with specific learning objectives in mind that transmitted not only practical writing skills but also the accepted and shared socio-cultural values. Religious ideology was one of these values, and what children and adolescents learned about religion through formal schooling can be identified in the curriculum as both practical skills and worldviews.Footnote ⁴³

Religious Education: Learning Objectives and Lessons

Divine Names and Characteristics of the Gods

The first observable learning outcome for religious education is a familiarity with both the basic and extended pantheon(s). It is unclear how much knowledge about individual deities the students would have acquired before formal education, but one might assume that they were aware of the major gods in their cities as well as any personal or familial deities. Much broader pantheons were presented in the scribal curriculum: among the lexical lists that students learned and excerpted are the so-called god-lists, which sometimes included hundreds of deities, the simplest of which listed deity names while the more complicated lists presented both the Sumerian and Akkadian names and, occasionally, pronunciations, epithets, or other identifying characteristics.Footnote ⁴⁴ In 1^st millennium Babylonia, students primarily learned two longstanding god-lists: the An list (previously known as the “Weidner god-list”) and the An = Anum list.Footnote ⁴⁵ The former was part of the first stage of the elementary curriculum, while the latter was taught in the second stage.Footnote ⁴⁶ This correlated with increasing conceptual complexity, moving from a simple list of divine names written in logograms in a single column (An) to a two-column list of equations or identifications between Sumerian and Akkadian divine names (An = Anum).

These lists represent several discrete lessons relevant to religion. First, the lists had the practical purposes of teaching students the logograms still used to write many divine names even in Akkadian texts in addition to the Akkadian spellings of the names. An focused on the Sumerian logograms, while, with An = Anum, students learned the relationships between the older Sumerian names and the Akkadian equivalents.Footnote ⁴⁷ The god-lists also communicated knowledge of the broader pantheon(s) and how the gods related to one another, albeit to a lesser extent. It is important to observe that these were not necessarily “living” pantheons, however, but exercises in the historical pantheon as passed down and augmented along multiple generations, including deities whose cults had long been dormant.Footnote ⁴⁸ By the 1^st millennium, these lists were standardized and manuscripts have been found across numerous Babylonian cities.Footnote ⁴⁹ The An list, for instance, had over 200 entries and continued to be augmented into the 1^st millennium, sometimes including further explanations of the listed deities such as pronunciations or relationships to other gods.Footnote ⁵⁰ The much longer An = Anum list contains almost 2000 names in seven tablets.Footnote ⁵¹ The sheer number of deities, including poorly known or rarely attested ones, suggests that the main pedagogical goal was not to teach students about the main pantheon of their city or active practices of their community but to preserve essentially a maximalist encyclopedia of known gods regardless of active status.Footnote ⁵² The lists are structured in such a way that there are some observable organizational principles, including associations of gods within the same divine “household” and a general progression from ancient and distant gods like An(um) to less prominent divinities, but it is not always clear to modern scholars what the logic was; presumably the teachers of the scribal school supplemented the writing assignments with oral explanations.Footnote ⁵³ Some extant Neo- and Late Babylonian school texts excerpting An = Anum (which represent different parts of Tablets I-VI) contain excerpts of other compositions, and these are relevant for the study of religion and the roles of the gods, specifically Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, the “Counsels of Wisdom,” (both discussed below) and “Marduk’s Address to the Demons.”Footnote ⁵⁴ This places the god-list in the context of broader learning objectives about religion. An, in contrast, was excerpted with other sign lists and syllabaries in an early stage of education that was very much focused on the basics of writing signs.Footnote ⁵⁵

As a related (but not explicitly religious) learning outcome, lists of personal names taught in Babylonian schools built on the foundational knowledge from god-lists. Personal names were generally structured as a prayer to or evocation of a deity, with most common names containing a theophoric element. In learning to write personal names, students put to use their training in how to write divine names. These texts list men’s names organized by theophoric element, and the gods Bēl (Marduk), Nabû, and Šamaš appear especially often, as these are the most common deities mentioned in Neo- and Late Babylonian names.Footnote ⁵⁶ Other deities that appear include Sîn, Nuska, Zababa, and (more rarely) gods like Uraš and Mandānu.Footnote ⁵⁷ Lists of women’s names are also known, albeit less well attested, and these names feature different deities, primarily goddesses: Nanāya, Ninlil, Tašmētu, Bēltu, Ningal, Ba’u, and Banītu, for instance.Footnote ⁵⁸ By copying these lists, students learned the standard ways to spell and structure common names with theophoric elements. These would be directly applicable for students who became scribes that wrote administrative documents and legal texts, which recorded names of people involved in or witnessing transactions or legal proceedings.

Mastering the names of and relationships between the gods did not inherently convey information about their natures and characteristics, though; as mentioned, it should not be excluded that teachers would have supplemented the written lessons with fuller oral explanations that were not recorded.Footnote ⁵⁹ Written exercises about the personalities of individual gods took the form of prayers, hymns, and god-centered mythological texts.Footnote ⁶⁰ Unsurprisingly, the range of deities that students studied more thoroughly was narrower than that contained within the god-lists; the subset comprises largely Marduk, Nabû, Ninurta, and Šamaš.Footnote ⁶¹ Prayers and hymns tend to contain numerous epithets and descriptors of the deities to whom they are directed, giving students an orientation to the gods’ powers, roles, characteristics, and relationships to other gods. For example, one of the canonical Great Hymns and Prayers is a prayer to Marduk numbering over 200 lines, which was excerpted on numerous Neo- and Late Babylonian school tablets from the second stage of education, usually with other texts.Footnote ⁶² Its contents venerate Marduk’s many powers and attributes, including over the prosperity of the world, justice, and redemption.Footnote ⁶³

In general, it was important for a politically unified Babylonian religious ideology to present Marduk as the head of the pantheon. His role in the mythological composition Enūma eliš is central to instilling this concept and its implications, detailing his ascendency over other gods through heroically defeating Tiāmat and receiving divine kingship, his Esagil temple in Babylon, and extensive powers in return.Footnote ⁶⁴ The Neo- and Late Babylonian school text corpus contains numerous excerpts of Enūma eliš, and all seven tablets are represented in the various student exercise tablets.Footnote ⁶⁵ That this was a politically relevant text is evidenced by the Neo-Assyrian revisions during Sennacherib’s reforms, which gave Aššur pride of place over Marduk.Footnote ⁶⁶ In tandem with the aforementioned Marduk hymns and other Marduk-centric texts discussed below, these exercises instilled in students the religious ideology of Marduk as the patron of the capital Babylon, and, consequently, head of the Babylonian (state) pantheon. As mentioned above, this was widespread but not universal: in Nippur the curriculum instead focused on Ninurta-centric mythology such as Angim, Anzû, and Lugale to promote local religious traditions.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nonetheless, these exercises embrace the same learning objectives, instructing students in the characteristics, roles, and stories of important individual deities.

Babylon vs. Nippur as Religious Centers

The religious landscape of Babylonia as a whole was characterized by an official pantheon led by Marduk, the patron of Babylon as the political and religious capital. It comes as no surprise, then, that much of the Neo- and Late Babylonian curriculum focused on indoctrinating the next generations with the philosophies of both Marduk’s supremacy in the pantheon and Babylon’s primacy as an ancient center of the universe. This is especially visible in the selection of literature that was taught within the “schools,” which does not include many traditional mythological compositions but instead focused on those that were Marduk- and/or Babylon-centric.Footnote ⁶⁸ As George has observed, this was meant “to fill the student’s mind with the theological and political ideology current in the capital” and represented “the inculcation of a world view.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Emblematic of this learning goal is the Hymn in Praise of Babylon and the Babylonians.Footnote ⁷⁰ This composition is a long and complex literary text (approximately 250 lines) attested in 20 manuscripts from the 1^st millennium, when it was studied as part of the school curriculum.Footnote ⁷¹ It exalts, in turn, Marduk, his Esagil temple, Babylon, and then the inhabitants of Babylon themselves, elegantly tying together the various essential components of city-based religion and instilling in its students the supremacy of Babylon from a religious perspective. It was copied well into the later periods, with three exemplars possibly written in the 2^nd/1^st centuries BCE.Footnote ⁷²

This emphasis on Babylon in the greater Babylonian curriculum was likely strategic: unlike the Assyrians, who venerated Aššur as the head of the Assyrian pantheon since the earliest attested periods,Footnote ⁷³ Babylonian city-centered religion was much more visible, with people strongly identifying with their cities or regions and maintaining ancient local cults. This is due in part to the historical development of southern Mesopotamia, in which the originally Sumerian city-states and their associated patron deities were long independent and maintained their local characteristics even during periods of consolidation under territorial kingdoms.Footnote ⁷⁴ Mesopotamian religions had always had local distinctions: cities had different patron and resident deities, pantheons varied between kingdoms and empires, and individual gods could become more or less popular over time.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was only with the rise of Hammurabi’s Old Babylonian kingdom that Babylon became an important urban center and Marduk was promoted to the head of a regional pantheon, but individual cities’ religious traditions persisted, especially in traditional strongholds like Nippur.Footnote ⁷⁶

As mentioned above, Nippur is perhaps the most visibly distinct in terms of maintaining its own pedagogical ideals about religion, and it presents a counter-image to Babylon as the uncontested religious capital of the region. Nippur’s portrayal as a religious center is exemplified in the Nippur Compendium, comparable to Tintir for Babylon (see below) but explaining Nippur, its gods, cult spaces, and other theological commentary and explanations, such as about festivals and months.Footnote ⁷⁷ It is not well attested as part of the curriculum, but one Late Babylonian tablet seems to be a school exercise.Footnote ⁷⁸ The excerpt tablet begins and ends with a colophon that it was dictated by a teacher (pî ummânu) as a lesson for a student.Footnote ⁷⁹ As teaching material, the Nippur Compendium’s objectives seem to be to preserve the knowledge related to Nippur’s traditional religious status. As with Babylon and Marduk, the learning goals around teaching Nippur as a religious center included the promotion of its city gods, especially Ninurta.Footnote ⁸⁰ The curricula instead centering Babylon in education across as much of Babylonia as possible, particularly in northern Babylonia, may have been meant to override some of these more strongly articulated city-based identities, which occasionally caused friction between different cultic personnel and established families.Footnote ⁸¹ Indeed, that northern Babylonians incorporated southern Babylonian texts (but not vice versa) suggests an intentional effort to absorb and domesticize the competing theological education, which locally resisted assimilation.Footnote ⁸² The continued invocation of Nippur and its religious identity, while geographically limited, may have thus become the symbol of (or shorthand for) religious pedagogy independent of Babylon, perhaps in increasing defiance of a push to harmonize diverging traditions.

Illustrative of this unifying effort is the aforementioned Tintir, which was studied in the second level of the Neo-Babylonian curriculum along with more complex lexical lists, incantations (bi- and monolingual), Enūma eliš, and prayers.Footnote ⁸³ Neo- and Late Babylonian school text exemplars have been found in numerous cities in Babylonia, including Babylon, Kiš, Sippar, Dilbat, and possibly Borsippa.Footnote ⁸⁴ Despite its early classification as a topographical text, it is now generally accepted that its primary purpose was not to describe the layout of Babylon or even its political importance as the seat of kingship but “to glorify Babylon as a great religious centre”Footnote ⁸⁵ as the city was “described as well as created. It is created as a mental image, as a cosmic centre defined by a network of religiously significant points.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The excerpts of Tintir that were copied in school contexts include portions that give the names and epithets of the city, the city’s shrines and names of the major temples, Marduk shrines in particular, and the names of gates and streets.Footnote ⁸⁷ Students would gain systematic knowledge about Babylon’s temples and the city as an ancient center of sacred spaces, applying lessons from the elementary stage lexical lists to deepen their knowledge as well as explore the religious significance of the city. This further underscored the city’s place in the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s religio-political ideology, which these students needed to internalize as future servants of the divinely appointed king who ruled from Babylon.

While many manuscripts of Tintir are Neo- and Late Babylonian, the text was not restricted to Babylonia; copies were also found in Assyria from the 7^th century, almost exclusively from Ashurbanipal’s library with one exemplar from Assur.Footnote ⁸⁸ It, or at least the lexical tradition that produced it, seemingly influenced the composition of similar texts, particularly about Assur, Assyria’s own religious capital.Footnote ⁸⁹ The Neo-Assyrian Empire recognized Babylon’s importance, especially for those Assyrian kings who ruled over Babylonia as well, and Tintir was so closely aligned with this worldview that “the people of Babylon” (Babilaya) even quoted it in an appeal to the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, with explicit reference to the formal education he and his brother Šamaš-šuma-ukīn (who was the king of Babylonia) had undergone: “When the kings, our lords, practiced their school tablet(s) (liginnu), the gods bestowed great wisdom and magnanimity on you. ‘Dimkurkurra, Babylon, (is) the Bond of the Lands.’ Whoever enters inside it, his privileged status is secured.”Footnote ⁹⁰ The line from Tintir gives the ceremonial name of Babylon as Dimkurkurra and then explains it.Footnote ⁹¹ It is surely not coincidental that these Babylonians have linked the Tintir quotation directly with formal education, appealing to a common set of religious and cultural values that were shared between them and the Assyrian royal family members by virtue of scribal education.Footnote ⁹² Since Tintir was integrated into Ashurbanipal’s library collection, he may indeed have studied it as a student himself. In contrast, the Babylonian curriculum never adopted the Assyrians’ Topography of Assur into its canon.Footnote ⁹³ The shift to non-Mesopotamian empires did not affect this learning outcome, as the latest datable exemplar of Tintir (based on its colophon) comes from Babylon in 61 BCE,Footnote ⁹⁴ and another manuscript includes a Greek transliteration of the Akkadian explanations on the reverse, meaning it must be Seleucid period or later.Footnote ⁹⁵ Both of these exemplars excerpt Tablet I, suggesting the historical and ceremonial names of Babylon and its ancient role as the religious center par excellence were considered particularly important to preserve and teach in the late periods as the non-Mesopotamian empires shifted the base of power to other capital cities.Footnote ⁹⁶

Religious Spaces and Temple Cult

Understanding the temple cult required knowledge of several different subjects, e.g., the major temples and where they were located, the personnel, and the rituals or priestly practices that took place in the temples. Practical training in temple activities was relevant only for individuals with prebends (isqu “share”), which allowed entry into the temple and an income in return for executing the cultic duties associated with the prebend.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the Neo-Babylonian period, priestly prebends were generally hereditary, and sons of priests expected to take on their fathers’ roles.Footnote ⁹⁸ These young men would largely have acquired their practical training for their future tasks from their fathers. While some scribal students were indeed identified as the sons of priests, others were preparing for other careers and roles that would not necessitate proficiency in or even familiarity with the inner workings of the temple cult. In general, the practicalities of conducting rituals and cultic procedures are not represented in the written curriculum.Footnote ⁹⁹ Nonetheless, scribal training included some instruction related to appropriate interactions with the temple cult, both in terms of their individual behavior and with regard to expectations around the kings that they would eventually serve as professionals; in particular, royal responsibilities towards Marduk’s Esagil temple in Babylon.

Concerning their own interactions with temples, students had supervision in preparing and making offerings to the temple as part of their formal studies. This practice is embodied in the school texts dedicated to individual gods and deposited at the temple as votive offerings. The tablets had typical school exercises on one side, with prayers to the god and requests for blessings on the other, and were often decorated with borders or rows of wedges.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The recipient was usually (but not exclusively) Nabû as the patron of scribal arts, and votive school texts were deposited in numerous temples in Babylon, Sippar, Borsippa, Nippur, and Uruk.Footnote ¹⁰¹ For instance, E-niggidru-kalama-suma, the temple of Nabû ša ḫarê in Babylon, has yielded a few thousand such school tablet fragments.Footnote ¹⁰² There is no evidence of a “school” on the temple grounds, and students were therefore visiting the temple with the express purpose of depositing their prepared votive tablets, some of which were placed in pigeonholes called gunnu or given to the temple’s doorkeeper.Footnote ¹⁰³ Completing this task introduced the students to the temple grounds and provided them with experience in making votive offerings, with some visits possibly taking place on festival days.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In one such dedicated scribal tablet, MS 5007, the student describes in the colophon how he collected the clay for the tablet:Footnote ¹⁰⁵

For Nabû, august, majestic and awesome heir, firstborn son of Asarre, foremost of all, who bears the tablet of destinies of the gods, whom the Igigi gods respect most in the entire universe, my lord, I, Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, son of Šamaš-iddina, the baker of Šamaš and Aya, with joy in my heart went out to the open countryside. I picked up some clean clay and brought it from the holy clay-deposit. I loaded(!) it on my shoulder and transported it. For my good health, for a long life, for well-being, for the well-being of my father’s household, my own stability and my successful raising(!) of a family, I(!) wrote (this) tablet. I(!) sent it in to the gunnu-container, to the porter of the door of E-babbarra. O tablet, when you enter, [intercede(?)] for Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, son [of Šamaš-iddina! … ].Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The procedure for acquiring the clay was itself ritualized, and teachers or āšipu specialists would guide young students, probably at dawn, through the steps of consecrating the clay with incantations at a special clay-pit outside of the city, before the student collected the clay for his votive tablet.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Many tablets specify that the clay came from special locations, including a sacred precinct in Babylon near the Ea temple called “the Garden of the Apsû.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The collection of the clay was an important skill for future scribes, and students could observe where and how the clay was acquired, including the rituals and offerings needed to properly prepare it for offering purposes. This was particularly salient knowledge for future āšipus, who used essentially the same procedure for clay they fashioned into ritual figurines.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The student then inscribed the clay with his school exercises and dedication and took the finished tablet to the temple, where he placed it as a votive for the god, taking part in an active ritual offering that linked his religious education and developing professional identity with the cultic space and the veneration of the divine.Footnote ¹¹⁰ This excursion could take place quite early in a student’s education, as some of the tablets feature colophons written by a more senior student or teacher and others are designated as ṭuppi meṣḫerūti “tablet of youth” (i.e., students who were still beginners) and many have the hallmarks of free composition by a novice.Footnote ¹¹¹ George suggests that the task was “a recognized rite of passage, and maybe they marked formally the boy’s completion of an initial stage of his education.”Footnote ¹¹² Indeed, most of the votive exercise tablets contain school exercises from the most basic stages of scribal education.Footnote ¹¹³

Royal ideology and expectations related to cultic spaces was also represented. One of the most important and public duties of the Babylonian kings these students would serve as adults was patronage of the temples, particularly the Esagil temple of Marduk in Babylon. This relationship between king and cult was perhaps most clearly taught in the curriculum via the so-called “Esagil Chronicle,” a literary text purporting to be a historical letter between early 2^nd millennium kings that is known from the first stage of Babylonian scribal education.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It was still taught into the Achaemenid period: an exemplar from the Ebabbar temple archive in Sippar bears a colophon seemingly belonging to a student or apprentice active during Darius’ reign, though the many notations about breaks and hope that a later scribe will be able to restore the missing texts implies that some of the knowledge was lost in transmission, at least in this geographic and temporal context.Footnote ¹¹⁵

In the composition, the final king of the First Dynasty of Isin, Damiq-ilīšu (ca. 1816-1794 BCE), gives advice to Apil-Sîn (ca. 1830-1813), the king of Babylon and grandfather of Hammurabi, about the expectations around kings’ behavior towards Marduk’s cult and the Esagil temple. The aspects he highlights include not only performing its rituals but also temple maintenance (representing renovation projects), bringing food and wine offerings (representing the daily cult and first fruits offerings), and supporting the temple financially (a sentiment found in royal inscriptions, also under the Assyrians).Footnote ¹¹⁶ He does this by describing how a number of 3^rd millennium kings either patronized the cult or acted irresponsibly, detailing the consequences, whether blessings or curses that usually resulted in death.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The 3^rd millennium setting is anachronistic for Marduk’s importance, but focusing on him and his temple is consistent with the learning objectives for the 1^st millennium Babylonian curricula.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Similar to other curricular texts is the monologue-style advice format and historical-literary letter genre, which is also represented in the first stage of education by a fictional letter about sacrilege sent by Samsuiluna to his officials and priests.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The didactic framing also links to the corpus of “wisdom literature” discussed below. The Sippar exemplar, written in Standard Babylonian, the dialect of scribal professionals, appears to have parallels to Neo-Babylonian royal inscriptions and the composition may furthermore have been used as a historical source for the “Chronicle of Early Kings.”Footnote ¹²⁰ These students would have later taken on professions that were part of the royal infrastructure and the expectations concerning the king’s behavior towards Marduk’s temple cult were a central component of Babylonian royal ideology, which they internalized along with other lessons about kingship and Marduk theology. As with the texts about Babylon above, this learning outcome became all the more important for Babylonian elites to maintain, at least amongst themselves, under non-native kings who did not share these priorities.Footnote ¹²¹

Relationships between Gods and Humans

Relationships between the mortal and divine world and actors were communicated in the written curriculum primarily through literary works that are human- (rather than god-) centered, which included Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the “Counsels of Wisdom.” Both of these compositions are instructive for understanding interactions between deities and ordinary humans.Footnote ¹²² They portray this knowledge as nēmequ “wisdom,” which is itself associated with gods; in these texts, wisdom is linked with Marduk and Ea, respectively.Footnote ¹²³ Both compositions were taught in the advanced Babylonian scribal curricula and exemplars for Ludlul bēl nēmeqi have been found in Babylon, Sippar, and Kiš, while the “Counsels of Wisdom” was found in the same cities plus Borsippa and Nippur.Footnote ¹²⁴ These texts show standardization of pedagogy across geography—with the latter even crossing the northern-southern divide, presumably because Marduk has an unremarkable role amongst the few deities invoked by name—indicating a common set of values being communicated.Footnote ¹²⁵ The use of these compositions in scribal school curricula would have exposed students to how the divine played an active role in their daily lives, theological perspectives on illness that those students who became exorcists or medical practitioners would have been consulted to resolve, and behavioral expectations that were relevant for all imperial elites.

Ludlul bēl nēmeqi, also known as the “Tale of the Righteous Sufferer,” is a first-person narrative describing how the protagonist Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan was abandoned by his personal gods when Marduk became angry with him, and the resulting hardships he suffers.Footnote ¹²⁶ The story is fundamentally about the gods’ roles in misfortune and illness befalling a person (even someone who believes he has acted correctly towards the gods) and the inscrutable nature of divinely inflicted suffering, which can occur without a clear cause. The first part of the composition is a hymn to Marduk, who is the punishing and redeeming deity, and the remaining four parts describe in sequence Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s social ostracism and bad fortune, his reflections on his actions towards the gods and what he could have possibly done wrong, his resulting mental and physical afflictions that confound even exorcists and diviners, and finally his redemption and recovery, concluding with praise and offerings for Marduk and the gods of Esagil. Ludlul’s prologue includes the protagonist’s statement lušalmidma nišī qitruba gamālšin “let me teach the people that their salvation is near,” giving an educational framing to the protagonist’s following monologue detailing his experiences, itself reminiscent of other didactic texts.Footnote ¹²⁷ The speaker himself seems to have had a pedagogical role: “I instructed (ušāri) my land to observe the god’s rites, the goddess’s name did I drill my people to esteem. I made my praises of the king like a god’s, and I taught the populace respect for the palace. I wish I knew that these things were always pleasing to a god!…Where might mere human beings have learned (ilmadā) the ways of the gods?”Footnote ¹²⁸ By means of Šubši-mešrê-Šakkan’s musings, the narrative teaches readers appropriate veneration towards the gods as well as the punishments the gods could impose on them. Tablet II 12-30 in particular mentions as proper conduct food and drink offerings, prayer and prostration, festivals and holidays, conducting rites, upholding sworn oaths, teaching others the correct ways of worship, and praying for the king. These actions, however, do not preclude accidentally angering the god and being punished for them, an acknowledgment that even the righteous endure illness and misfortune.Footnote ¹²⁹

The composition includes various ailments that could befall someone, which require an āšipu to resolve, and it shows parallels to incantations, another genre (particularly relevant for āšipūtu) studied in formal scribal education, sometimes excerpted on the same school tablets as Ludlul.Footnote ¹³⁰ Symptoms are described at length, including migraines, neck weakness, convulsing back muscles, gastrointestinal distress, coughing, fatigue, paralysis, and many others, which Marduk systematically overturns with his incantation (tâšu), with some description of how the symptoms gradually resolve.Footnote ¹³¹ While it is not an instruction manual, that many of the Babylonian students studying this text would become professionals in āšipūtu means that this text orients them to common medical symptoms and the incantations they would learn and implement (following the model of Marduk himself) as well as gives them a complementary patient-forward perspective into suffering caused by malady and hardship. It does not offer clear answers about why a deity would punish an otherwise virtuous person, only that it does happen, and maps the progression of disease and recovery. Several passages also mention an āšipu and his work directly, and the sufferer’s final recovery was aided by, among others, an āšipu from Babylon sent by Marduk to him in a dream, contextualizing the future professional duties of these students and their patronage by the god.Footnote ¹³² Other professionals, including divination specialists (bārû) and dream interpreters (šā’ilu), are also mentioned; at least the former was also trained through formal scribal education.Footnote ¹³³

The “Counsels of Wisdom” provides guidance on the proper behavior of humans towards the divine among other lessons about appropriate actions, moral expectations, and socio-cultural norms that were relevant for literate professionals, especially scribes and administrators, working for the empires.Footnote ¹³⁴ The composition’s format is a didactic monologue by a scholar (ummânu) directed towards a student (called māru “son”), who is commanded to learn these instructions and study his tablets well:

“pay heed to the instructions of E[a], take my advice and excel in virtue… On the basis of what you have learned, read from the tablet: ‘Reverence begets benevolence, sacrifice prolongs life, and prayer atones for guilt. He who reveres a god, benevolence will not elude him. He who reveres a [godde]ss, he will enhance his well-being. He who reveres the Anunna-gods, he will prolong (his) days.’”Footnote ¹³⁵

Like Ludlul, the “Counsels of Wisdom” discusses religious praxis and forms of personal devotion, but in this case explicitly transferring a religious ideology and worldview intergenerationally.Footnote ¹³⁶ It is more straightforward in its lessons, including that one must perform daily veneration, offerings, and prayer in order to remain in good standing with one’s personal deity and reap the rewards of this relationship, while cautioning against specific actions that anger the gods, including interpersonal behaviors unrelated to cult practices.Footnote ¹³⁷ For instance, the student is warned against excessive drinking, gossiping, slacking off work, doing or plotting evil against others, and treating those who are less fortunate with contempt, with several lines affirming that these actions will anger the gods in addition to alienating him from his peers, relatives, and the royalty he serves.Footnote ¹³⁸ These were particularly important values and behaviors to teach the next generation of scribes, administrators, and other imperial professionals. The text furthermore includes proverbs, a genre students studied in formal education as well.Footnote ¹³⁹ The “Counsels of Wisdom” and Ludlul Bēl nēmeqi are thus prime examples of curricular texts in which students learned about the relationships between gods and humans, including appropriate conduct and divinely inflicted consequences of transgressing these norms.

Applications of Religious Education

A final aspect to address is what observable impact this education had on students’ careers and adulthood. The shift between learning and implementation began already with the apprenticeship or specialization phase for those students who entered relevant professions.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ In some cases, application of acquired knowledge was straightforward. For example, several of the cases discussed above concern the āšipus; as mentioned, much of the second-stage curriculum was geared towards training future exorcists, including learning the incantations that they would use as professionals.Footnote ¹⁴¹ These lessons could be implemented directly in the line of duty. However, there are other visible, practical applications of the scribal curriculum that are less direct and demonstrate more creativity; for instance, Tintir was utilized for the Babylonian royal inscriptions and other genres.Footnote ¹⁴²

Religious education also became the basis for introducing and implementing religious changes within the empire, driven by the professionals who had undergone scribal training. The literate elite in Mesopotamia were agents of theological changes or transmitters of religious traditions in the 1^st millennium more broadly and were in a unique position of power when it came to the creation and dissemination of religious ideology. The king is often perceived as the main driver of state-level religious policies, but it was the intellectual classes who had direct access to and control over written traditions and ritual procedures. While the king’s authority means that, in most cases, innovations came by royal order, these specialists designed their actual implementation.Footnote ¹⁴³ Scribes and priests were educated and trained in traditional customs and texts, which they could use for two opposing purposes: either to uphold longstanding practices or to exploit them as a means by which to hide a change behind the veneer of antiquity. In making changes, specialists had considerable agency, even when it was done on the king’s behalf.

A common motif is that innovations and changes, particularly in the religious sphere, were framed as a return to ancient and venerable customs or a continuation of longstanding practices, however artificial this claim may have been in reality. Many studies have addressed antiquarianism and invocations of the past in Neo-Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian inscriptions, which take the form of describing deeds of past kings, using antique place names, claiming that a building project restored a temple or city to ancient specifications, and many more.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Modern scholars often perceive religious conventions in Mesopotamia as conservative, which they by and large were, but breaking from convention in religious ideology and practice was acceptable as long as it was portrayed as conservative. The shift to non-native rule starting in 539 BCE with the conquest by the Achaemenid and, later, the Seleucid Empire provides an opportunity to see traditional scribal education applied in practice in this way. In general, the less involved the king was, the more clearly one can observe priests and scribes’ initiatives to effect religious changes that were designed either to persuade the king to act as their patron or to position one priestly community above the others for some tangible benefit for their cult. Many of these strategies hinged on the religious education these specialists received during their formal training, which seemed to remain largely consistent despite changes in imperial structures around them.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

For the priestly community of the Anu temple in Uruk, starting in the Achaemenid period, the freedom to innovate came not only from the disengagement of the kings, but also from political circumstances. After a series of revolts early in Xerxes’ reign, he harshly retaliated against Babylonia’s elites, removing the officials in charge of major temples including Ištar’s Eanna temple in Uruk.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The power vacuum left by Uruk’s most prominent temple largely ceasing operations and Xerxes’ lack of interest in (re)shaping the cultic landscape of Uruk meant that a local Anu cult was able to grow until it dominated the city in the Seleucid period.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ This cult’s community produced texts that argued for their important role and for the antiquity of their temple: the An/Anu temple was one of the original temples in 3^rd millennium Uruk but was consistently secondary to Inana/Ištar’s and had become a minor cult by the 1^st millennium.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

To achieve this revival, Urukean priests and scribes exploited their formal training and extensive historical knowledge, recreating ritual texts and copying historical and historical-literary texts, often adapting the originals for a Seleucid context.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Significantly, their archives contained god-lists that were part of the Neo- and Late Babylonian curriculum, particularly An = Anum, as well as the related list An = Anu ša amēlu, which both put Anu at the very top of the pantheon and were used to justify elevating him and giving him universal qualities.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Ištar was demoted this way as well, as she was moved to a lower place in the pantheon and became an aspect of Anu’s consort Antu, who absorbed Ištar’s characteristics. She is listed in An = Anum Tablet I line 28 as ^dnin.šar₆ = an-tum ^d iš-tar.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Commentaries on these god-lists and other texts in the archives pushed these claims even further, with one Seleucid period example from an Urukean āšipu’s private house (possibly itself a site of education) establishing Anu’s supremacy and power over all existence:

3´. […] ^d geš ₂ : lugal <<:>> kiš-šat : geš ₂: ^d a-nu-um

[…] Anu (^d60) means “king of totality”; 60 means Anu

4´. [dingir] : i-lum : dingir : be-el :: dingir : šar-ri

[dingir] means “god”; “dingir” means “lord”; “dingir” means “king”

…

6´. […] : ba-nu-u ₂ : dingir.meš : ṣal-mat <<:>> sag.du

[…] [Anu] (is) creator of the gods (and) black-headed (people)

…

9´. […]-meš an-e u ki-tim

[…] of heaven and earth.Footnote ¹⁵²

Many of these compositions were part of the local scribal curriculum, which would have perpetuated the new ideas until they could become traditional. This program of religious innovation was entirely driven by the educated elite families in Uruk with the aim to promote their god, and thereby their professional community and themselves, above others.

This resulted in clear changes in the religious practices and landscapes of Uruk. Of particular influence was the Ah’ûtu family, which held power in both the religious and political spheres of the city. In 244 BCE, one member of this family, governor Anu-uballiṭ (Nikarchos) built a large temple complex for Anu and his consort Antu which he called the Bīt Rēš, the “main temple,” supplanting Eanna as the most important local temple.Footnote ¹⁵³ Another member this family, Anu-uballiṭ (Kephalon), who served as an administrator of the city and temples, renovated the Bīt Rēš in 202 BCE. He commemorated this project with stamped bricks, and the inscription stressed the ancient nature of the (still relatively new) temple using the trope that it was built by the mythical sage Adapa (Oannes), who lived before the ancient flood and was credited in the Epic of Gilgameš—itself still part of the school curriculum at this time—with helping to found Uruk in the first place due to his role as one of the seven sages.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Moreover, in referencing earlier construction works on the temple, Anu-uballiṭ’s scribes used the very same techniques used in earlier royal inscriptions, which they would have had access to and the ability to read and exploit.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ This program’s success was not in attracting the attention of the Seleucid kings—there is no evidence any of them ever invested in the city’s cults—but rather in producing texts attesting to Anu’s antiquity and his historical role at the head of the pantheon that put the Anu-affiliated elite families in such politically and theologically powerful roles that they were able to act as their own patrons in Uruk.

Another, smaller cult used similar strategies to make a home for itself in Uruk: the Anšar temple, an Aššur cult that survived the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. When Sargon II conquered Babylon, the king may have been looking for a way to establish Aššur’s uncontested supremacy over all gods, especially Marduk. His scribes cleverly reinterpreted the god Anšar as Aššur by simply changing the writing of the name Aššur to an.šar ₂. The identification took hold and Aššur’s name was frequently written as an.šar ₂ in the Sargonid period Assyrian royal inscriptions.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Anšar was one of the primordial gods in Enūma eliš and an ancestor of Anu in the god-lists, so this identification meant Aššur outranked most other deities (including Marduk) in age and status. The initial change was endorsed by the kings, but it lived on because of its utility for the post-Assyrian Aššur temple in Uruk, which may have been founded by immigrant, refugee, or deported Assyrian priests.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ With no Assyrian king left to set religious ideology, this cult was entirely driven by the priests. However, historically, Aššur was an exclusively Assyrian god, one not shared with the Babylonians, and closely linked to his patron city of Assur and the Assyrian Empire. Aššur may not have been a very welcome or natural presence in Babylonia, and the cultic personnel needed to make him palatable to the Urukeans. Thus, these priests and scribes invoked what had once been an innovation but, by this point, was an older convention: this equation between Aššur and Anšar, as the latter was an acceptably recognizable god for their southern colleagues, who also studied Enūma eliš and the relevant god-lists in their curricula. Therefore, a change facilitated initially by religious education was perpetuated through it as well, despite having to cross cultural borders.

Repurposing, repackaging, or even recreating older texts and customs to evoke a real or imagined past was the established method by which priests and scribes could innovate within the religious arena in the 1^st millennium, what varied is to what end and to what extent. These were not theoretical changes but ones that sought a specific outcome, such as to advance a royal agenda, to persuade the king to act as patron to the cult, or to establish and promote a temple’s personnel within in their community. The scribes and priests, due to their formal training and access to historical documents, had the toolbox and blueprints to change traditions in acceptable but creative ways, and the scribal curriculum was a means for them to perpetuate both ancient and reimagined customs. Their religious education, in particular, equipped these specialists well for preserving or reshaping conceptions of the gods, cultic practices, and even entire religio-political communities.

Conclusion

While religious education was not a discrete “track” or discipline in Mesopotamian formal education, the case studies from Babylonia demonstrate that the texts scribal students copied during their training oriented them to a relatively broad set of learning objectives related to the pantheon, religious spaces, and the relationships between mortal and divine worlds. Some, like the god-lists, were based on longstanding curricular traditions using standardized texts passed down for generations, a method of orienting students to the extended theoretical pantheon. Others were targeted more towards religious praxis, such as activities related to the temple cult and religious spaces. Compositions such as Ludlul bēl nēmeqi and the “Counsels of Wisdom” were meant to instruct scribal, specialist, and royal elites in a unified set of normative behaviors related to piety and humans’ interactions with the gods, bringing the focus of the learning outcomes to a markedly individual and personal level and cultivating a specific image of what made for a proper and loyal servant of the empire. These texts instrumentalized religious beliefs, particularly what was deemed pleasing or displeasing to the gods, as a powerful means by which to communicate, regulate, and enforce daily and routine behaviors as well as professional standards. These lessons did not exist in a vacuum but supplemented students’ experiences with religion in their daily lives and their preparations for independent praxis outside of the “school” environment. Moreover, these lessons were not simply internalized in youth but actively applied by these elites later as part of their professional activities.

In 1^st millennium BCE Babylonia, it was also critical to instill in these future elites the core beliefs around Marduk and Babylon’s centrality, initially to support the official ideology of the empire (in the case of reigns of the Neo-Babylonian kings and, to a lesser extent, the Neo-Assyrian kings who ruled over Babylonia) and, later, to continue to transmit traditional Babylonian religio-political values and knowledge under the non-Mesopotamian empires of the Achaemenids and the Seleucids and beyond. Indeed, the apparently increasing intensity in the contemporaneous religious curriculum regarding Marduk and Babylon, already set in motion by the Neo-Babylonian Empire’s reclamation of Babylonian independence after the end of Assyrian hegemony in the region, may have been catalyzed by the socio-political developments of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, which endangered this identity. As discussed above, much of the “Marduk syllabus” is attested only in Neo- and Late Babylonian manuscripts—especially in terms of school text exemplars, either for the first time or with increased production—and continue to be produced well beyond the end of native Babylonian rule, with exemplars from the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods. In contrast, much of the Nippurean curriculum maintained its longer roots, having already weathered minority status under both native and non-native rule. For many generations, Marduk and Babylon had been consistently core to a pan-Babylonian ideology, particularly within the political arenas, but the remarkably strong insistence upon them in Late Babylonian education suggests an active and defensive response to external factors challenging or threatening this supremacy, otherwise it would not be necessary to expand the pedagogical materials to underscore Marduk and Babylon’s standing in this way. Incorporating these compositions into the school curriculum may have thus been a concerted effort to preserve a certain religio-political ideology and ensure its continuation among new generations being raised in a changing world where even longstanding traditions could no longer be taken for granted as the status quo.

Acknowledgements

I am profoundly grateful to Aino Hätinen and an anonymous reviewer for their careful reading, thorough comments, additional references, and astute corrections. They have greatly improved the quality of this study and inspired me to explore additional lines of inquiry. Any remaining faults are my responsibility.

Abbreviations

SAA 10 = Parpola, S. 1993. Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Online SAAo editions.

SAA 18 = Reynolds, F. 2003. The Babylonian Correspondence of Esarhaddon and Letters to Assurbanipal and Sîn-šarru-iškun from Northern and Central Babylonia. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. Online SAAo editions.

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