This dissertation is a comprehensive study of a set of stars called ziqpu-stars in Babylonian astronomy. These stars were a tool devised and employed by astronomers during the first millennium BCE (or perhaps as early as the late second millennium BCE) in Mesopotamia. The culmination of the ziqpu-stars, or when they reach their highest point during their daily journey across the skies, was correlated with other celestial phenomena, such as a lunar eclipse or the first appearance of a star over the course of the year. In effect, these stars were used as a way to indicate or describe time of specific phenomena that were of interest to Babylonian astronomers.The present study examines all known sources featuring the ziqpu-stars. It explores the different contexts in which ziqpu-stars were used as well as the developments that took place within this tradition. This dissertation also investigates the underlying practices that are reflected in the texts, and advocates that the primary method to producing and utilizing knowledge of the ziqpu-stars was by means of abstract models rather than empirical observation. Approaching the topic of ziqpu-stars by means of models highlights the similarities between these kinds of texts and texts that belong to the so-called mathematical or theoretical astronomy of the Late Babylonian period. It also brings the study of Babylonian astronomy closer to current discussions in the philosophy of science and reaffirms the place of Babylonian astronomy within the history of science.

“Living in a Culture of the Past” is a microhistorical study of a dossier of fifty-one cuneiform texts written or owned by Iqīšā, son of Ištar-šum-ereš, of the Ekur-zakir clan. Iqīšā lived and worked in the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk in the late fourth century BCE, during the transition from the end of Achaemenid dominion in the region to the rise of the Hellenistic successor kingdoms. Following the example of theorist of microhistory Carlo Ginzburg, this dissertation reconstructs Iqīšā's particular perspective on the complex, contradictory time in which he lived. As a member of Uruk's urban elite, Iqīšā was deeply invested in the preservation of the privileged status of his class under a new regime. As a teacher of young scribes, Iqīšā endeavored to pass on and preserve essential elements of cuneiform culture and ensure its vibrancy. As a priest of the Rēš temple, Iqīšā balanced the continuation of tradition with intellectual experimentation and innovation. My analysis of Iqīšā's dossier demonstrates the complexity and diversity of Hellenistic Babylonia, the continued vibrancy of cuneiform culture in the late period of Mesopotamian history, the importance of regional differences to our understanding of the transition between the Achaemenid and Seleukid regimes, and the possibilities that new methodologies open up for the history of the ancient Middle East.

The human activity of making things has a long intellectual history, well predating the Industrial Revolution or even the term “technology” itself. This dissertation examines cuneiform sources written between the second and first millennium BCE in order to determine how technology interacted with and shaped scribal knowledge. With no clear boundary—between genuine and artificial, between the natural and human-made, between theory and practice, episteme and techne, knowing-that and knowing-how—with no term to distinguish between scribe and craftsman, cuneiform texts challenge how we think about both technology and knowledge. The case studies presented herein derive from cuneiform tablets written between the late second and mid first millennia BCE in what is today Iraq. These ancient clay tablets preserve technical recipes, explanatory lists of materials, and rituals bearing the hallmarks of scholarship. For the intellectual historian, they exemplify a discerning interest in the construction and proliferation of technical knowledge at an early stage of Middle Eastern textual history.

The work argues that notions of technology constitute an essential element of cuneiform scribal knowledge. Ignoring the technological component of cuneiform scholarship renders an incomplete portrait of nēmequ—the Akkadian term we translate as “knowledge,” or “wisdom.” Neo-Assyrian glassmaking recipes can function as literary or ritual texts focused on purity, Middle Assyrian perfume recipes can be read as cultural windows into the roles of female experts during the rise of the Assyrian territorial state, and even a solitary tablet containing wool dyeing recipes can expand our knowledge of the cultural role of garments in first millennium Babylonia. Technical recipes, in sum, constitute textual sources that inform and interact with the construction of knowledge at the local level. This work offers close, contextualized readings of Akkadian technical recipes, and utilizes frameworks derived from the history and philosophy of science and technology, in order to generate new methods for investigating the relationship between technology and cuneiform scribal knowledge.

This dissertation concerns the ways in which the ritualized materials and ritualized practice of the Neo-Assyrian temple, through their culturally valued and prioritized visual and experiential characteristics, created and marked the special status and divine aspect of the house of a god, differentiating this built environment within the Neo-Assyrian landscape and making it fit for a god.

In the study ritual is not approached as a distinct entity, but rather as a characteristic of contrasting practice, that is, as a strategic mode of acting that inflects the practice itself and the associated materials, drawing on Catherine Bell's notions of ritualization. Contributing further to the discussion are such concepts as materiality, agency, phenomenology, visuality, and performance. In order to reconstruct ritualized practice and material interaction in the temples, the physical, aesthetic, and sensory features of the architectural, non-portable, and portable works of art stand at the forefront of the discussion. This study also reinserts active agents into the discussion of material culture and practice in Neo-Assyria, and brings the temple itself, as well as the vast collection of materials housed therein, into this discussion. Complementing the material culture is a study of the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions and correspondence, administrative records, ritual instructions, and omen collections. These texts were written in Akkadian, the official language of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, on an assortment of material culture, ranging from clay tablets and prisms to stone statues and wall reliefs.

This comprehensive, analytical, and interdisciplinary approach to the Neo-Assyrian temple built environment offers a means of accessing previously unrecognized and under appreciated characteristics of the Neo-Assyrian imperial elite that produced and used these spaces, reevaluating notions of culturally meaningful practice, the role of material and architecture in such acts, culturally valued sensorial experiences, social relations, and the place of ritualized performance within the larger social network. The experiential dimensions of the raw materials and crafted works of art from the temple manifest a prioritization by the Neo-Assyrian elite for what was seen: the brilliance, texture, and polychromatic qualities of this built environment acted as both sign and substance; yet the stimulation of additional senses, such as touch and smell, was also of import. The material and textual evidence from the temple also demonstrates the ways in which this built environment controlled and isolated spheres of practice that served critical functions in the dynamics of the Neo-Assyrian royal court, in particular in the relationships between the king and the scholarly elite. The temple served as a mediating point between the king and the ummânus—scholarly experts and skilled craftsmen—and both with the gods. The variability of these relationships materialized in the developments of the temple during the Neo-Assyrian period, the attitudes and preferences of particular kings toward scholarly knowledge and the gods finding expression in their temple work and practice. Moreover, the king's relationship with the temple differentiated this space from the Neo-Assyrian royal palace. Though constructed using the same raw materials and personnel as part of royal building projects, the palace's prioritization of the king—in both material culture and practice—illustrates a different inflection of ritualization for a royal dwelling place of Neo-Assyria.

The outcomes of this study of the Neo-Assyrian temple make an important contribution to the ongoing dialogues in art historical, material culture, post-colonial and globalization studies regarding the role of material worlds and ritualizing activity in social and political arenas. The textual and material evidence from the Neo-Assyrian temple makes an argument for recognizing degrees of ritualization as an element of ritual theory and practice; for acknowledging meaningful variations in the individual's experience; and for appreciating the variability that results from discrete preferences and attitudes, as characteristics of ritualized practice alongside culturally-grounded traditions and rules. The ritualizing power of the materials and practices explored in this study acted to constitute the divine nature of the temple, a sign of its status as the house of a god in Neo-Assyria. The outcomes of this study therefore also lend themselves to the larger discussion of the house-owner relationship—in Neo-Assyria and beyond—and the formative role of the latter in conferring and displaying status.

The present study demonstrates the close connection in scribal practice between language and scholarship. During the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800 B.C.E) in the city of Nippur in southern Mesopotamia, scribal apprentices learned to write cuneiform by copying lists of words and cuneiform signs. At that time, most copies of these lexical compositions reflected a linguistic ideology valorizing the language of Sumerian and were, accordingly, unilingual. Exceptionally, some exemplars from the curricular stage Advanced Lexical Education (ALE)--particularly the word list Izi--exhibit explicit Sumerian-Akkadian bilingualism. I argue that such examples of explicit bilingualism in scribal education represent an innovative form of knowledge, a mode of scholarly interpretation I term analogical hermeneutics. The present study thus explores the intersection of language and scholarship in a period in which these subjects have not yet been extensively explored together.

The word list Izi, a two-chapter list comprising approximately 1,025 entries, provides the core dataset for the study. The list was previously edited in the series Materials for the Sumerian Lexicon 13 (Civil, 1971). I provide a new introduction, synopsis edition, translation, and commentary. The present edition is based on collation of all known Izi exemplars, including over forty previously unpublished manuscripts. Izi characterizes the compositions of ALE, the curricular stage during which scribes internalized analogical hermeneutics as scribal practice and began applying such habits interlingually.

Analogical hermeneutics is a form of analogical reasoning that is well recognized in later periods of cuneiform culture as a technique for determining relationships between epistemic objects. Analogical hermeneutics juxtaposes the particular to the particular--phonology, graphic shape, semantic referent, among others. The practice of analogical hermeneutics produces possibility. A scribe may base scholarly interpretations on similarity in seemingly dissimilar, even spurious, objects.

My analysis contextualizes the study of Izi in its linguistic and educational setting. I first provide conceptual tools from semiotics in order to frame the relationship between a sign and its referent and between a Sumerian lemma and its Akkadian counterpart. Moreover, I adopt the sociological language of P. Bourdieu's practice theory to establish how scribal practices were inscribed in student scribes as habitus. Scribal apprentices copying texts during ALE reproduced ideologies regarding Sumerian language and traditions, the possibilities of polyvalency and polysemy embedded in the cuneiform writing system, and analogical hermeneutics. The scribes established their scholarly credentials through their aptitude in writing Sumerian and in producing analogies, taking positions within the field of scholarship and, thereby, reproducing the field.

I show that tokens of Akkadian found in unilingual compositions reflect analogical hermeneutics, allowing interlingual correspondences based on perspectives other than semantic correlation. Thus, many Sumerian-Akkadian correspondences lack semantic commensurability. Explicit bilingualism is thus an extension of the practices scribes employed throughout ALE. The possibility of interlingual analogical hermeneutics is grounded in the polyvalency and polysemy of the writing system, allowing scribes to demonstrate their aptitude with the writing system in the interlingual space. The emergence of analogical hermeneutics during ALE marks a transition in ancient scholarly practice, wherein analogical hermeneutics, rather than Sumerian language use, became the primary characteristic of cuneiform scholarship until the end of cuneiform culture. I show that the manipulation of the writing system and language and similar unconventionalities in written text should not be understood as idiosyncratic scribal play, but as knowledge production, an important facet of scholarly practice.