Thursday Lecture: Piotr Michalowski
When: Thu, 06.06.2024 4:15 PM until 6:00 PM
Where: Warburgstraße 26, 20354 Hamburg
Sumerian Literary Manuscripts in Material Contexts: The Archeology of Learning
Piotr Michalowski, George G. Cameron Professor Emeritus of Ancient Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations an der University of Michigan
The earliest collections of Mesopotamian literary compositions known to us date from the middle of the third millennium BCE but it was only hundreds of years later, in the 18th century, that large numbers of such texts appear in archaeological sites. None of these were kept in libraries. Rather, they are the material remnants of instruction in reading and writing at a time when literacy had spread beyond the domains of a limited number of specialists in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (today’s Iraq) and beyond. Recent scholarship has made much progress in the study of the way in which specific texts were ordered in curricula, based on internal textual data. This presentation will focus on the contextual aspects of clay tablets in the ground, focusing on manuscripts as material objects. The study of the neighborhoods and specific houses in which they were found can contribute to the analysis of the social life of the Mesopotamian clay tablet literary manuscripts, complementing textual analysis, blending archaeological, sociological, and philological study to further our understanding of the dynamics of ancient literacy.