Ancient Knowledge Networks: A Social Geography of Cuneiform Scholarship in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia

by Eleanor Robson

Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book about how knowledge travels, in minds and bodies as well as in writings. It explores the forms knowledge takes and the meanings it accrues, and how these meanings are shaped by the peoples who use it. Addressing the relationships between political power, family ties, religious commitments and literate scholarship in the ancient Middle East of the first millennium BC, Eleanor Robson focuses on two regions where cuneiform script was the predominant writing Assyria in the north of modern-day Syria and Iraq, and Babylonia to the south of modern-day Baghdad. She investigates how networks of knowledge enabled cuneiform intellectual culture to endure and adapt over the course of five world empires until its eventual demise in the mid-first century BC. In doing so, she also studies Assyriological and historical method, both now and over the past two centuries, asking how the field has shaped and been shaped by the academic concerns and fashions of the day. Above all, Ancient Knowledge Networks is an experiment in writing about ‘Mesopotamian science’, as it has often been known, using geographical and social approaches to bring new insights into the intellectual history of the world’s first empires. Praise for Ancient Knowledge Networks 'In this important new book, Eleanor Robson offers a rich and fascinating sketch of cuneiform intellectual culture in Assyria and Babylonia from the late thirteenth century through the second half of the first millennium BC. ...The book will be of interest not only to specialists in ancient Near Eastern studies but also to ancient historians and archaeologists studying other world areas and eras in which ancient writing systems developed.' American Antiquity 'A thoughtful, well written, modern approach to the study of cuneiform culture. An essential read for those of us studying any aspect of cuneiform writing.' Archaeological Review from Cambridge 'This is an engaging volume that takes an original approach to understanding the agents of knowledge networks and the social, geographical and cultural factors that shaped them.' Antiquity 'The second chapter ...is a useful chapter for students and scholars of the Ancient Near East ... Arguments are based on excellent studies of archives and salient observations about ancient communities elucidated from scanty but revealing evidence. Where the book innovates, however, is in tying all of these scholars and knowledge together.' Journal of Near Eastern Studies 'The book complicates and humanises the categories that have streamlined the study of cuneiform scholarship. In its own words, this is a book about ‘how knowledge travels’ through the people who carry it, their writings, their responsibilities and their benefactors – human and divine. It animates the lives of scholars through their movements, their works and the movements of their works, until the end of cuneiform culture in Babylon and Uruk. Ancient Knowledge Networks is a study of the history of knowledge that restores context to text – an invaluable re-evaluation of the sources to the modern scholars of Assyria and Babylonia.' History Today 'Eleanor Robson’s Ancient Knowledge Networks offers a fascinating portrait of the social and geographical life of cuneiform scholarship, scribal learning, or ṭupšarrūtu. It examines high cuneiform culture in the terms of the texts' own taxonomies of knowledge, while taking full account of relevant archaeological evidence and employing micro- and macro-geographical analysis. A lucid presentation of new ideas concerning the Assyrian and Babylonian first-millennium intelligentsia and their patrons, Ancient Knowledge Networks is a book for cuneiformists as well as non-specialist readers outside the ancient Middle Eastern fields.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

517 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 14, 2019

About the author

Eleanor Robson is a Reader in History and Philosophy of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, vice-chair of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq and a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
Robson is the author or co-author of several books on Mesopotamian culture and the history of mathematics. In 2003, she won the Lester R. Ford Award of the Mathematical Association of America for her work on Plimpton 322, a clay tablet of Babylonian mathematics; contrary to previous theories according to which this tablet represented a table of Pythagorean triples, Robson showed that it could have been a collection of school exercises in solving quadratic equations. She has also been widely quoted for her criticism of the U.S. Government's failure to prevent looting at the National Museum of Iraq during the Iraq War in 2003.

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