Scholarly Tablet Collections in First-Millennium Assyria and Babylonia, c.700–200 BCE

The half-millennium 700–200 BCE was the heyday of the cuneiform ‘library’: Pedersén counts nearly forty of them from that period in his foundational book Libraries and Archives in the Ancient Near East (1998). Yet there have been surprisingly few studies of cuneiform libraries per se. This chapter first summarizes, updates, and evaluates Pedersén’s survey, then uses a selection of this impressive array of evidence to explore some questions, raised in the authors’ respective recent work, about the functions of ‘libraries’ in first-millennium Assyria and Babylonia. The chapter focuses on three case studies which examine the relationships between Mesopotamian ‘libraries’ and two other notoriously complex Mesopotamian institutions: the temple and the scribal school. In particular, it is argued that ‘libraries’ as collections of artefacts were much more mobile within the scholarly community than many have acknowledged. Single archaeological find-spots will rarely reveal an intact collection, even assuming perfect conditions of preservation.