Abstract
While traditional Sumerian scholarship continued to flourish in Babylonia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC, an Akkadian-speaking elite developed in the main Amorite city-states, who could read and write and also produced Akkadian knowledge, particularly in the field of divination. Specialists soon developed who received, expanded and transmitted the global knowledge of the time.This lecture will introduce the general theme, define scholarship and scholars, highlight the difference between scribes and scholars, explore the question of the beginning of the professionalization of scholars, and describe the increasingly differentiated " knowledge of power " (" Herrschaftswissen ") from the early 2nd millennium BC onwards, which seemed essential to successful government .
