The geography of knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700-200 BCE: a diachronic comparison of four scholarly libraries

Where is knowledge generated? How does that knowledge replicate and spread? Where is it consumed? Who owns knowledge, and who may access it? Under what circumstances, and in what places, does it flourish or die out? How are its transmission and reception influenced by social and political factors? These are central questions in the history and sociology of science today.

To answer those questions of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, amongst the oldest literate civilisations in world history, we will undertake a comparative study of four scholarly libraries of cuneiform tablets, dating from the 7th to the 2nd centuries BC, for which adequate archaeological data exist:
* a Neo-Assyrian temple library in the royal city of Nimrud/Kalhu in northern Iraq;
* the library found outside a priestly family house near Harran, at the edge of the Neo-Assyrian empire, destroyed, like the temple library, in 612 BCE;
* the library from a private house from in Uruk, owned by two separate families of scholars, c.450-300 BCE;
* the library of the temple of the great sky god Anu-Zeus in Uruk, c.200 BCE.

We will use open, standards-based encoding to edit these 1400 cuneiform tablets. Our freely available, online corpus of manuscripts (tablets), compositions (composite texts), translations, and bibliography follows Cuneiform Digital Library and CDLI specifications.

We will make quantitative analyses of their linguistic and orthographic features to look for small-scale and large-scale geographical and diachronic change. We will use methodology from the history of science to explain those continuities, changes, and idiosyncrasies in relation to the social, intellectual, and political contexts of the libraries and their users.