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The clay tablet book in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria

Robson, E; (2019) The clay tablet book in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria. In: Eliot, S and Rose, J, (eds.) A Companion to the History of the Book. (pp. 175-190). Blackwell: Oxford, UK. Green open access

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Abstract

After a brief survey of the mechanics, media, and cultural context of cuneiform writing, I take three case studies to try to determine whether – and, if so, when, where, and how – we can talk of books in the first three millennia of recorded human history in the Middle East. Writings from a school house from the eighteenth century bc city of Nippur show that Sumerian literary culture was primarily oral, with surviving tablets the ephemeral by-products of the memorization process. In seventh-century Nineveh, Assyrian king Ashurbanipal acquired his famous library through copying, inheritance, and wartime plunder as an assertion of imperial control. Five centuries later in Hellenistic Babylonia, chief-priest-to-be Shamash-êtir belonged to a tiny community of cuneiform-literate men who made celestial observations, calculations, and rituals in a last-ditch attempt to preserve traditional temple culture.

Type: Book chapter
Title: The clay tablet book in Sumer, Babylonia, and Assyria
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1002/9781119018193.ch12
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119018193.ch12
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1476493
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