Learning before literature
When people imagine learning in an ancient city, they often picture libraries of stories. At Uruk the earliest evidence is humbler. The first written tablets from the site, from the late fourth millennium BCE, are not poems or myths but accounts: signs for numbers and for commodities such as grain, beer, sheep and cloth, together with signs for officials and offices. Several thousand such tablets come from the Eanna precinct, along with a smaller set of lists in which signs and words are arranged by theme.
These lists tell us something important about how learning began. To use a new system of writing, people had to be taught its signs, and the lists appear to have been tools for that purpose. One of them, a list of titles and professions, was copied for many centuries, with the same ordering of entries appearing in different periods. That kind of continuity suggests a stable group of specialists passing on training long before there was a “school” in any modern sense.
From signs to a scribal profession
Over the following centuries the script changed from pictures to wedge-shaped marks pressed into clay, and the signs began to record the sounds of spoken Sumerian. This development of cuneiform writing allowed scribes to write names, sentences and eventually literature. Sources from the third and early second millennia BCE describe the “tablet house,” edubba in Sumerian, the place where scribes were trained. Much of the detailed information comes from the Old Babylonian period and from sites such as Nippur, so the picture of Uruk’s own early training rests partly on inference from the lists and from later accounts.
A typical education, as reconstructed from surviving exercises, began with basic wedge forms, then personal names and sign lists, then longer word lists, proverbs, and finally literary works copied from teachers’ models. Students were children of well-off families for the most part, and literacy stayed a specialised skill, a point that applies to Sumerian literacy as a whole. Teachers and pupils in the Mesopotamian system differ in many ways from what is known of ancient schooling in Greece and Rome, where reading was taught to a somewhat broader group and in different settings.
Temples as centres of knowledge
In Mesopotamia, temples were large landholding households that needed administrators, so many scribes worked for them. In Uruk the temples of Inanna and Anu were prominent. Scribes recorded offerings and rations, but over time temple communities also preserved hymns, lamentations and ritual instructions. This helps explain why the learning of the city was religious as well as practical. The same people who kept accounts might copy a hymn to the goddess or recite an incantation.
Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh
Uruk figures prominently in Sumerian literary traditions about its legendary kings. A Sumerian king list names a line of early rulers of Uruk, among them Enmerkar, Lugalbanda and Gilgamesh. A poem usually called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta imagines Enmerkar sending messages to a distant ruler and, when the messenger cannot remember a long speech, inventing writing on clay to carry it. This is a story, not a historical report, and it should not be taken as an account of how writing actually arose. Even so, it shows that Uruk’s scribes liked to link their craft to their city’s kings.
Gilgamesh is the best known of these figures. Sumerian poems about him, such as Gilgamesh and Huwawa and Gilgamesh and Agga, date to the late third or early second millennium BCE in the forms we have, and they were later reworked in Akkadian into the longer Epic of Gilgamesh, compiled in its standard form around the late second millennium BCE and traditionally attributed to a scholar named Sin-leqi-unninni. Whether a real king named Gilgamesh ruled Uruk in the Early Dynastic period is debated; no contemporary inscription that is certainly his is known, though the name appears in later king lists. What is clear is that the stories were copied and studied in scribal schools. The friendship of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, central to the epic, belongs to that later literary tradition.
Uruk’s late scholars
Uruk’s most surprising chapter comes much later. In the Seleucid period, roughly the late fourth to the first century BCE, temples at Uruk such as the Reš and the Irigal supported communities of priests and scholars. These men copied older texts and also produced astronomical diaries and mathematical tables in cuneiform at a time when Greek and Aramaic were widely used. Family names of scribal lineages are known from colophons, the notes at the ends of tablets. Their work belongs to the tradition that scholars call Babylonian astronomy, and it includes mathematical tables based on a base-60 counting method, the sexagesimal number system, whose traces survive today in the way we divide hours and degrees.
Uruk was not the only centre of such activity, since Babylon and Borsippa had similar communities, but it was among the last places where this tradition was practised. Texts there help historians reconstruct how Babylonian science passed into the Hellenistic world.
What is and is not known
It is worth being clear about limits. Tablets survive unevenly. A great deal of Uruk’s early material was found in the debris used to fill and level buildings, not in the rooms where it was written, so its original use is partly inferred. Much of what is said about schools comes from other sites. And the heroic narrative of Gilgamesh is a literary construction, not a biography.
Even with those cautions, the picture is consistent. Uruk was one of the places where writing was developed, one where scribes learned to read and copy, one whose past was turned into stories that outlasted the city, and one where scholarly tradition survived to the very end of cuneiform culture.