Schooldays and Hours

When the question of time is treated in studies of ancient Mesopotamia, the focus tends to be on long periods of time that extend over decades, centuries, and even millennia. This is evident both in the historical and archaeological division of time into periods, as well as in studies of cultural memory that consider how earlier historical periods are re-imagined and constructed in a later period. Less frequently is the question of how time is perceived and differing temporalities are experienced in shorter durations of an hour, a day, a week, a month, or a year by individuals (as opposed to societies or institutions) considered. This book addresses the experience of time on a shorter, individual scale, by examining the objective and subjective experience of time when learning to write in ancient Mesopotamia. The basis for this study is a list of simple cuneiform signs, known as Syllable Alphabet B, which survives in hundreds of copies produced by scribal pupils at the beginning of their education and which is examined to determine how long it took to learn to write in early Mesopotamia, and how the temporality of the learning process might have been experienced.