School tablets show Babylonian pupils learned gods by copying cuneiform god lists

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Key facts

• A new study published in the journal Iraq, based on clay school tablets from first-millennium BCE Babylonia, finds that pupils leaving school could name almost 2,000 gods despite religion never being a separate subject
• Formal education was largely reserved for boys from wealthy or ambitious families; there were no school buildings, and a professional scribe typically trained a small group, including his own sons, for years in his own house
• The goal was not literacy as such but to shape future scribes, priests, diviners, healers and officials, with religion woven into complex cuneiform writing exercises
• Beginners copied a god list of over 200 divine names; advanced pupils tackled the god list known as An = Anum, written as equations, running to almost 2,000 entries across seven tablets matching Sumerian names with their Akkadian equivalents
• Many of the gods listed had cults that had long died out; the point was to master the signs and learn how the divine world was ordered, and only a handful of deities were studied in depth
• In northern Babylonia lessons centred on Babylon and its patron god Marduk: pupils copied a hymn to Marduk of over 200 lines, the seven-tablet creation epic Enuma Elish in which Marduk defeats the primeval goddess Tiamat and takes up residence in the Esagila, and Tintir, a text listing the city's temples and gates
• Schools at Nippur largely ignored the Marduk material and taught different local traditions, and Uruk followed Nippur's lead, indicating two rival educational spheres rather than a single imperial syllabus
• Young pupils sometimes collected clay from a sacred place with an incantation, then shaped a tablet carrying an ordinary exercise on one side and a prayer on the other, so a finished piece of homework could become a votive offering in a temple

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