BIBLICAL LIBRARIES
the sacrifices, the officials and employees ... of the temple of Ningirsu ... and other temples" (Jastrow).
The vast majority of the 50,000 or so tablets from Sippara (Abu Habba) were temple archives, public and private business documents like those of Lagash, but they include "some hundreds" at least of "literary texts," hymns, prayers, incantations, a deluge narrative and other religious texts as well as a school outfit.
This school collection at Sippara has a great interest. Being connected with a school it identifies the ground plan of one of these ancient schools and its contents exhibit the method of teaching so fully that as Scheil says "it was not hard to unravel the system which prevailed in the teaching of reading and writing in Babylonia under the first dynasty of Babylon" — a subject which has been continued from the school collections of Nippur in the University of Pennsylvania publications.
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