Lecture: Paul Delnero

The Cuneiform Sign List Proto-Ea: Scribal Exercise or Scholarly Text?

Paul Delnero (Johns Hopkins University)

The study of Mesopotamian scribal education, which has led to a paradigm shift in how Sumerian literary and lexical texts are interpreted, has also resulted in two claims that have had a substantial influence on how these texts are conceptualized. One is that they are exercises produced by apprentice scribes as part of their training to read and write Sumerian. The other is that they had little practical educational function beyond indoctrinating the pupils who copied them to become guardians of an invented tradition that was inaccessible to anyone outside this small and elite group. How these seemingly opposed conceptions have shaped the interpretation of Mesopotamian lists and literary works is particularly evident in the diverging views of the intended function of the sign list Proto-Ea. Was it a global sign list describing how all cuneiform signs in use at the time were pronounced or was it a scribal exercise with locally specific interpretations of their pronunciations that had a purely pedagogical function limited to the educational contexts in which the list was taught? In this paper this question will be addressed by comparing Proto-Ea with Syllable Alphabet B, another sign list taught in the elementary stage of scribal education at Nippur, with which it shares direct similarities in structure and content, but also significant differences.