In recent years, I have been intensely involved in the study of the development of Mesopotamian scholarly texts from the 2nd and 1st millennia BC. Several Assyriologists and I have published new metatexts containing information on important scholars, as well as debating who had the authority to influence the " traditional current ". Our image of ancient Oriental knowledge and Mesopotamian scholars has thus changed rapidly in recent decades. I intend to present these new developments and their partly surprising results in the wider context of the history of the development of scholarship in the ancient East, and to set them out in four lectures.
