Babylonian Grammatical Texts

Publisher Summary This chapter demonstrates Babylonian grammatical texts. As far as is known, the phenomenon first occurred in Southern Mesopotamia (Babylonia), where a tradition of grammatical description is attested in texts from the early centuries of the second millennium BC, and continues to be elaborated until the end of the cuneiform writing tradition in Hellenistic times. Along with the first administrative texts comes evidence of the institution that developed and transmitted the writing system—the scribal school. Already the transformation of the writing system itself from a pure logographic system into a mixed logographicsyllabic system in the course of the third millennium is implicit evidence of a good deal of grammatical and phonological analysis. Unlike the verbal paradigms, the principles underlying the organization of these texts are quite obscure. At the least these texts show that Babylonian scribal institutions possessed a format that could in principle provide a kind of description for the whole of Sumerian morphology.