A literate culture built on clay
Babylon’s reputation for learning rests on one material: clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform. Because baked and even unbaked tablets can survive for millennia, tens of thousands of Babylonian and wider Mesopotamian texts are known today, covering letters, contracts, school exercises, prayers, omens, mathematics, literature and astronomical records. The question is not whether Babylon had a rich scholarly culture, but how to separate what happened in Babylon itself from what comes from other cities and from the Assyrian libraries that copied Babylonian works.
How scribes were trained
In the Old Babylonian period, roughly the early second millennium BCE, scribal training took place in schools often called the “tablet house” (edubba in Sumerian). Excavations of houses at sites such as Nippur and Ur found large numbers of student exercises, which show a regular order of study. Pupils began with basic signs and lists of names, moved on to lists of words, and then copied proverbs, hymns and literary works. Sumerian was by then a learned language rather than a spoken one, and students studied it much as later Europeans studied Latin. Scribal teaching in earlier centres, including the Uruk temple schools of southern Mesopotamia, lies behind this system, which spread across the Babylonian cities.
Training was often passed within families, and a scribe could go on to work as a record-keeper, a temple official, a diviner or a scholar. Women were largely excluded, although a few women are known from Old Babylonian Sippar who worked as scribes in cloister communities.
Temple libraries and tablet finds
Babylonian scholarship was strongly linked to temples. Libraries and archives belonged to the great institutions such as the Esagila temple of Marduk in Babylon and the Ezida temple of Nabu in nearby Borsippa. Many tablets from Babylon itself were recovered during nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century excavations, but the water table and the city’s long reuse as a brick quarry mean the record is incomplete. Some of the best evidence for Babylonian learning comes from outside the city, such as the library assembled by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh in the seventh century BCE, which held many copies of Babylonian works and sought out Babylonian scholars. Large collections from Sippar and Uruk, whose tablets are now in museums around the world, show the same traditions at other centres.
Literature
Babylonian scribes copied and reshaped older Sumerian works and composed new ones in Akkadian. The standard version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, in twelve tablets, is attributed in later tradition to a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni and was worked from older poems. Babylonian creation poetry, known from its opening words as Enuma Elish, celebrated the god Marduk. Other works include the Atrahasis epic, which deals with the creation of humans and a flood, and wisdom poems that reflect on undeserved suffering. These works survive in copies from different periods, so scholars carefully distinguish when each version was composed.
Mathematics
Babylonian mathematics used a place-value system based on sixty, a legacy that remains in our division of hours and minutes into sixty parts. Students memorised multiplication tables and tables of reciprocals, and they solved problems about areas, volumes, interest and quadratic-style questions. Famous examples include a tablet in Yale’s collection that gives a close approximation to the square root of two, and Plimpton 322, an Old Babylonian tablet whose numbers are linked to right triangles. Scholars still discuss exactly what Plimpton 322 was used for. Beyond the sexagesimal number system, Babylonian mathematics was practical but also showed an interest in solving problems for their own sake.
Astronomy, omens and medicine
Scholars at Babylon and other cities watched the sky carefully. Their long series of observations, including the Astronomical Diaries that run for several centuries, supported later mathematical methods for predicting the moon, planets and eclipses. The details are covered under Babylonian astronomy, and later Greek astronomers used some of these records. Scribes also compiled huge collections of Babylonian omens, which interpreted events as signs the gods sent, and medical texts that mixed practical remedies with ritual. The Mesopotamian healers who used these texts are often linked with priestly exorcists.
Why the picture is still incomplete
Several limits should be kept in mind. First, most tablets were found in large digs of the nineteenth century, often with poor records of where they lay, so the exact context is sometimes lost. Second, many learned texts were copied for centuries, which makes dating difficult. Third, the people we know by name were a small educated minority, and we know much less about how ordinary Babylonians experienced these traditions. Even so, the surviving tablets make Babylon one of the best-documented centres of learning in the ancient world.