The role of the Mesopotamian clergy in education has long been the subject of debate. The city of Ur has provided us with a wealth of data, enabling us to see what role the written word played in the training of apprentices and the transmission of traditions. We have successively studied what the house "No. 7 Quiet Street" tells us; then the problem posed by "No. 1 Broad Street", which Woolley considered to be a school; and finally the new information that comes from the 2017 excavations.
Father Burrows, who was the mission's epigraphist in Ur in 1926-1927 when Woolley excavated the EM district, hesitantly wrote of the house "no 7 Quiet Street": "perhaps a scribal school". In lectureno. 7, we studied the history of the purifiers who lived in this house and their particular traditions, which emphasized the god Enki of Eridu and the deities of his entourage; we returned to the school tablets discovered there. There is no trace of the elementary phases of learning, but copies of lexical series and grammatical texts used to teach the Sumerian language. A more difficult exercise consisted in copying letters in Sumerian: one tablet contains the text of six letters, two of which are not attested elsewhere. We also have a few mathematical tablets. Copying historical inscriptions was also a common learning task: we have three from the Akkadian period, three from the Ur III period, two from the kings of Isin and three from the kings of Larsa; some contain gross errors, others are written with a clumsy hand. In addition to these "classic" texts, the "No. 7 Quiet Street" house also contained more atypical texts. While the copying of lists of proper names was a frequent exercise, the one that was found is very special: it is a list of Sumerian names of priests who bore names in praise of the temple they served, and for which the tablet gives the Akkadian translation. UET 6 117 is unique in that the names it contains are those of priestly colleagues of the purifiers living in the house where the exercise was found: this is undoubtedly a reflection of a lecture, with the master explaining (in Akkadian) to a pupil the meaning of the Sumerian names borne by clerics in his family or entourage, whom the pupil no doubt rubbed shoulders with on a daily basis. We have also found hymns that have no parallel anywhere else, and which are clearly linked to the traditions and activities of the purifier-abriqqum dedicated to the god Enki of Eridu, as we have already seen in lectureno. 7. What the "No. 7 Quiet Street" study brought with it, when it was published in 1986, was a very different vision of learning to write from the one that prevailed at the time. The authoritative synthesis of the time, by Å Sjöberg, was largely based on literary texts describing activities in the school (Sumerian é-dub-ba): the school was seen as an independent institution, housed in premises reserved for teaching. The case of "No. 7 Quiet Street" shows that the family character of the transmission of written knowledge, considered by Assyriologists to be typical of the second half of the 2nd millennium and the 1st millennium, actually dated back to the Paleo-Babylonian period.
