The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture

The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.

1 - Tablets as artefacts, scribes as artisans
2 - Accounting in proto-cuneiform
3 - Numeracy and metrology
4 - Levels of literacy
5 - Literacy and gender
6 - The person in Mesopotamian thought
7 - The scribe of the Flood Story and his circle
8 - Feasts for the living, the dead, and the gods
9 - Cuneiform writing in Neo-Babylonian temple communities
10 - Freedom in ancient Near Eastern societies
11 - Teacher-student relationships: two case studies
12 - Patron and client: Zimri-Lim and Asqudum the diviner
13 - Learned, rich, famous and unhappy: Ur-Utu of Sippar
14 - Music, the work of professionals
15 - The education of Neo-Assyrian princes
16 - Judicial decision-making: judges and arbitrators
17 - Royal decision-making: kings, magnates and scholars
18 - Assyria at war: strategy and conduct
19 - Manipulating the gods: lamenting in context
20 - Magic rituals: conceptualisation and performance
21 - Sheep and sky: systems of divinatory interpretation
22 - Making sense of time: observational and theoretical calendars
23 - Letters as correspondence, letters as literature
24 - Keeping company with men of learning: the king as scholar
25 - From street altar to palace: reading the built environment of urban Babylonia
26 - The production and dissemination of scholarly knowledge
27 - Tablets of schools and scholars: a portrait of the Old Babylonian corpus
28 - Adapting to new contexts: cuneiform in Anatolia
29 - Observing and describing the world through divination and astronomy
30 - Berossos between tradition and innovation
31 - Agriculture as civilization: sages, farmers, and barbarians
32 - Sourcing, organising, and administering medicinal ingredients
33 - Changing images of kingship in Sumerian literature
34 - The pious king: royal patronage of temples
35 - Cuneiform culture's last guardians: the old urban notability of Hellenistic Uruk

Karen Radner (PhD Vienna 1997, Habilation Munich 2004) is the Alexander von Humboldt Professor for Ancient History of the Near and Middle East at LMU Munich. Her main research interests are in Assyria, especially the period from the 9th to the 7th centuries BC, on whose political, social, economic, legal, and religious history she has published extensively. Her books include editions of Middle and Neo-Assyrian archives and a study on how awareness of man's mortality shaped Mesopotamian culture (Die Macht des Namens: altorientalische Strategien zur Selbsterhaltung, 2005). She directs an AHRC-funded research project on the correspondence between the Assyrian kings and their magnates in the 8th century BC (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon). Eleanor Robson is Professor of Ancient Middle Eastern History at University College London. Her research focuses on the socio-political contexts of intellectual activity in ancient Mesopotamia and the online edition of cuneiform texts. She is the author of Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (2008) and director of the AHRC-funded research project, The Geography of Knowledge in Assyria and Babylonia, 700-200 BC (http://oracc.org/gkab).