Scholars and scholarship in late Babylonian Uruk (Q1626818)

This is a very scholary look at ``libraries'' found in two locations from late-Babylonian Uruk, whose aim is to ``exploit both archaeological and internal textual evidence concerning scholarly archives in Uruk in order to investigate the ways in which different genres of scholarship were practiced, interacted with one-another, and resulted in the production of a written record.'' \par The colophons of the tablets recovered from the first site ``indicate that the texts were owned or copied by members of families of \textit{āšipu}s, priests expert in ritual and medicine,'' some being written ``during the second part of the 5th century and early 4th century (approximately 445 to 385 BCE),'' while others being written ``in the late Achaemenid and early Hellenistic periods [$\ldots$] during a period covering approximately 350 to 229 BCE.'' Several hundred scholarly tablets have been recovered from a second site, that of the Rēš temple, which ``date to the late third and early second century BCE and can be associated through their colophons with a relatively small network of scholars associated with the temple, almost all of whom were members of four families.'' \par The first chapter, by the editors, presents the tablets, with tables describing their genre, location, publication number, content, in which chapter of the book they are being referred to, an overview of the book, and a discussion of the cultural context in which they where written. Chapter 2, by U. Gabbay and E. Jiménez, studies ``cultural imports in Uruk commentaries, especially those that originated in the city of Nippur.'' Chapter 3, by the first editor, is on a mathematical collection found in the ``house of the \textit{āšipu}s,'' dealing ``mainly with diverse methods to evaluate surfaces.'' Confronting ancient and new metrological systems, the \textit{āšipu}s re-worked and transmitted ``an obsolete metrology inherited from a distant past'' and confronted ``them to the metrologies of their own time.'' The possible reason for this interest seems to have been their interest ``in quantifying urban real estate and agricultural lands. The \textit{āšipu}s of Achaemenid Uruk, or scholars linked to them, seem to have produced mathematical tools to calculate surfaces in new metrology with ancient methods, namely, to have applied a sophisticated ancient mathematical knowledge to their `modern' business of land.'' The second author and H. Hunger look, in two different chapters, at tablets of astronomical and astrological character. M. Ossendrijver investigates the evidence for scholarly mathematics in the Rēš temple, and presents an analysis of three mathematical tablets. ``Possible connections between the mathematical tablets from the Rēš and those from earlier libraries in Uruk are explored.'' This is the most mathematically sophisticated part of the tablets found, including computations of reciprocals, some with considerable errors. J. Krul studies the influence of the celestial sciences on temple rituals in Hellenistic Uruk and Babylon. P.-A. Beaulieu explores possible interactions (there is no claim of an influence from one particular side to the other) ``between Babylonian and Greek thought during the Hellenistic period on the basis of two scholarly tablets discovered at Uruk. One is MLC 1866, a description of constellations, and MLC 1890, a list of epithets of the goddess Antu.'' The connection of the former to Greek thought is seen in the transformation of the ancient Mesopotamian constellation of the Hired Man into that of the Ram, while the connection of the latter is with Philolaus and elements of the Pythagorean view of cosmology. A. Jones looks at ``how Uruk and its people were portrayed in Greek and Latin sources.''