ABSTRACT
Late Babylonian intellectual life is known from thousands of cuneiform texts datingbetween the eighth and first centuries BC and unearthed in the libraries of palaces, temples and private houses. Most of the sources from the eighth and seventh centuries originate in Assyria, especially in the libraries collected by king Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. Although Assyria exerted its hegemony over the entire Near East during that period, Babylonia remained culturally dominant and Babylonian texts of every kind were avidly collected for the royal libraries (Parpola 1983b). Even scholarly texts in the Assyrian script were as a rule composed in the Standard Babylonian dialect of Akkadian and largely recorded knowledge compiled in Babylonia. Therefore it is not surprising that after the fall of Assyria at the end of the seventh century the cuneiform tradition retreated to Babylonia, where it had begun nearly three millennia earlier, and continued its existence in temples and the private houses of scholars until the Hellenistic and Parthian periods. While Babylon and Uruk stand out as the two most important intellectual centers of the late Babylonian period, important finds were made at other sites, notably Sippar, Borsippa and Nippur. Our sources consist largely of texts belonging to the so-called “stream of tradition.” This is the generally accepted term to designate the corpus of authoritative editions of texts which stood at the core of ancient cuneiform scholarship. Another very important source is the correspondence between the Assyrian kings of the Sargonid dynasty (721-610 BC) and the scholars who advised them. Many of them were Babylonian and their correspondence helps us understand how they interpreted the knowledge recorded in scholarly texts.
