Deviant Readings: Local and Communal Variation in the Sumerian ReadingTradition

Several frameworks have been proposed to explain the ability of the Mesopotamian scholarly tradition to forge and maintain cultural unity in the face of political and social fragmentation, ranging from the textual community, defined by a common reading of a shared corpus, to the distributed library of intellectual resources in both text and in memory.

At the same time, there has been a renewed interest in exploring the regional and local variety in format, form, and content often obscured by paradigmatic tablet collections such as those of Old Babylonian Nippur or Neo-Assyrian Nineveh. The symposium addresses how we reconcile these approaches in order to understand patterns of unity and variation in the Sumerian reading traditions of the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE.