One Thousand and One Conjectures

Modern language courses teach the commonest words first, a principle usually credited to twentieth-century corpus linguistics. Old Babylonian scribal schools drilled students on long thematic lexical lists — trees, wooden objects, stones, professions — whose internal ordering is conventionally explained as associative…

The Babylonian stream of tradition — the set of compositions still being copied a thousand years after their creation — is usually explained by religious and literary prestige, as if a canon committee had chosen the classics. But transmission physically ran through…

Trainee scribes copied model contracts — fictional sales, loans, adoptions with dummy names — and these school pieces are usually mined as evidence of contemporary law. Every modern student knows a rival truth: textbooks trail practice, because teachers teach the forms they…

Scribal colophons sometimes certify a copy's pedigree: written according to an old original from Babylon, checked and collated. Historians of the art and relic trades know that provenance claims proliferate exactly when authority is contested and buyers are nervous. The conjecture: colophonic…

Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh is the most famous collection of the ancient world, and the default assumption is that its texts sit at the end of a continuous chain of copies — Old Babylonian to Middle Babylonian to Neo-Assyrian, each generation copying…

Sumerian stopped being spoken around 2000 BCE yet remained written for nearly two more millennia — but it retreated from writing genre by genre, not all at once. Second-language pedagogy supplies the mechanism: material drilled earliest and hardest is overlearned and cheapest…