Scholars and scholarship in late Babylonian Uruk
type: Item
instance of: scholarly article
title: Scholars and scholarship in late Babylonian Uruk
zbMATH Open document ID: 1412.01007
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-04176-2
published in: Why the Sciences of the Ancient World Matter
publication date: 2018-11-21T00:00:00Z
review text: This is a very scholary look at ``libraries'' found in two locations from late-Babylonian Uruk, whose aim is to ``exploit both archaeological and internal textual evidence concerning scholarly archives in Uruk in order to investigate the ways in which different genres of scholarship were practiced, interacted with one-another, and resulted in the production of a written record.'' \par The colophons of the tablets recovered from the first site ``indicate that the texts were owned or copied by members of families of \textit{āšipu}s, priests expert in ritual and medicine,'' some being written ``during the second part of the 5th century and early 4th century (approximately 445 to 385 BCE),'' while others being written ``in the late Achaemenid and early Hellenistic periods [$\ldots$] during a period covering approximately 350 to 229 BCE.'' Several hundred scholarly tablets have been recovered from a second site, that of the Rēš temple, which ``date to the late third and early second century BCE and can be associated through their colophons with a relatively small network of scholars associated with the temple, almost all of whom were members of four families.'' \par The first chapter, by the editors, presents the tablets, with tables describing their genre, location, publication number, content, in which chapter of the book they are being referred to, an overview of the book, and a discussion of the cultural context in which they where written. Chapter 2, by U. Gabbay and E. Jiménez, studies ``cultural imports in Uruk commentaries, especially those that originated in the city of Nippur.'' Chapter 3, by the first editor, is on a mathematical collection found in the ``house of the \textit{āšipu}s,'' dealing ``mainly with diverse methods to evaluate surfaces.'' Confronting ancient and new metrological systems, the \textit{āšipu}s re-worked and transmitted ``an obsolete metrology inherited from a distant past'' and confronted ``them to the metrologies of their own time.'' Th…
reviewed by: Victor V. Pambuccian
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01-06
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 01A17
Mathematics Subject Classification ID: 00B15
zbMATH DE Number: 6982471
zbMATH Keywords: late Babylonian Uruk
zbMATH Keywords: scholary archives
zbMATH Keywords: mathematical tablets
MaRDI profile type: Publication
full work available at URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04176-2
OpenAlex ID: W4231965570
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description: scientific article; zbMATH DE number 6982471