GODS IN THE CLASSROOM: RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN 1ST MILLENNIUM BCE BABYLONIA | IRAQ | Cambridge Core

Identifying “Religious Education” in Mesopotamia Although religions were “embedded” within Mesopotamian societies,Footnote 1 it was nonetheless necessary to teach members of the rising generations, particularly elites, about religious conventions and theological traditions actively and systematically, especially as many of these comprised specialized knowledge that went beyond normal or daily praxis. Many high-status professions explicitly required different forms of this expertise, ranging from career paths a modern reader would recognize as more clearly religious—priests and other cultic personnel—to practitioners (medical, astronomical, and so forth) for whom rituals and communication with the gods were central to their work. Because religious ideology was intrinsically bound up with the state, however, certain theological ideas such as the king’s relationships with and responsibilities to the gods were also instilled in rising elites who did not have explicitly religious mandates, such as scribes and officials. It is no surprise, then, that religious content was incorporated into the formal “school” curriculum followed by scribes, scholars, and other specialists. However, there was no discrete scholastic unit about religion or theology, nor was there a core text or set of texts that functioned as “holy scripture” like the Bible around which religious education could be centered.Footnote 2 Instead, texts with content related to religion or theology represent a variety of genres and were integrated into different parts of the curricula on the basis of the complexity of the skills students were meant to learn, taught amongst other socio-cultural norms and expectations. Thus, there was no distinction between “secular” and “religious” education, and even those “schools” that were found in temple complexes were not primarily religious institutions. Some local “schools” produced priests because of demographics—e.g., the teacher was himself a priest—but were not seminary equivalents.Footnote 3 Regardless, it is still possible to speak of religious education in Mesopotamia, and other studies have already established the merits of this subject for the ancient world, including in Greece and Rome.Footnote 4 Tanaseanu-Döbler and Döbler, in an introduction to a volume about religious education in pre-modern Europe, define the concept of religious education as “models and processes of transmission and acquisition of knowledge and competences inside religious traditions,” with religion defined as “a socio-cultural praxis, a web of discourses and practices based on the assumption that there is another level of reality behind the sphere of empirically graspable everyday life.”Footnote 5 Similarly, Salvo and Scheer, introducing a volume about religious education in ancient Greece, argue that “when elements of education are specifically geared towards religion, the concept of religious education becomes a useful analytical tool,” specifically identifying four components of religious knowledge: mythology, local traditions, ritual competencies, and the “right behaviour to be directed towards the gods and to be shown to the other members of the community as a display of piety.”Footnote 6 Following these frameworks, this study will refer to “religious studies” and “religious education” with respect to education about religious systems, concepts, and practices, including ideas about the nature of gods and relationships between humans and deities.Footnote 7 In general, children and adolescents in Mesopotamia would have encountered religion and ritual practices primarily at home, and this is true even for those children who would later undergo formal education. For instance, the ancestor cult was based within the household, as family members were typically interred there, and children would grow up witnessing or taking part in the ritual, as well as rites and beliefs related to other life cycle events.Footnote 8 Moreover, there were personal and family deities, and children would have had their parents as models for and access points into religious practices in the home.Footnote 9 Visits from specialists such as healers and exorcists was another means by which children would experience the practical application of religious ideas. Children may have accompanied their parents to make votive offerings and donations to the local temples and to visit local shrines, institutions they would also have encountered simply living in the city or town.Footnote 10 The boys whose fathers were cultic personnel, in particular, likely learned about temple service long before they took over their father’s positions, either through active instruction or observing their fathers’ duties, and there is evidence that apprentices conducted some rituals.Footnote 11 Children would have also witnessed public rituals, such as festivals, and it is possible that parents would teach their children the stories and mythology behind these events on such occasions.Footnote 12 Publicly displayed monuments and religious imagery would have shaped children’s impressions as well. It is plausible that children might have grown up hearing stories about the gods and kings from their family and had more spontaneous learning experiences and opportunities, such as observing the stars in the night sky or asking their parents questions about life and the world around them.Footnote 13 Informal education about religion was likely the norm for most young men and women, and unfortunately it is not preserved in the written record. In considering the specific competences transmitted to students through formal education, there are several observable learning outcomes related to religion. This study focuses on religious education in Babylonia during the Neo- and Late Babylonian periods of the 1st millennium BCE. Babylonia during this period was heir to longstanding local religious and educational traditions and the region was united under native Mesopotamian empires (first the Neo-Assyrian and then the Neo-Babylonian empires) that largely upheld these customs before being conquered by foreign kings (the Achaemenids and then the Seleucids) with whom Mesopotamians did not share religious or educational systems. These case studies are not meant to be comprehensive but illustrate a range of types of religious knowledge that students in the 1st millennium acquired in the course of their formal education. Specifically, these comprise discrete outcomes including education about the pantheon, the characteristics of gods, religiously significant spaces including temples, the theological landscapes and cultic importance of Babylon (and, to a lesser extent, Nippur), and the relationships between gods and mortals. Formal Education in Babylonia Most professions and vocations were passed down from father to son, who would begin working alongside his father to learn through imitation and hands-on methods until he had mastered the necessary proficiencies. While literacy and scribal knowledge were transferred between generations as well, it was more clearly formalized and structured: this process of education followed a relatively standardized curriculum and was more pedagogically comprehensive than focused, career-based training and apprenticeships.Footnote 14 Formal education was largely intended for professions that required literacy, e.g., scribes who would write texts ranging from administrative records to royal inscriptions, cultic personnel, and specialists in āšipūtu (“exorcism”), bārûtu (“divination”), kalûtu (“cultic singing”), and asûtu (“healing”). Regardless of their future professions, students followed essentially the same learning plan, with their intended profession dictating how far into the curriculum they continued.Footnote 15 Elementary education was followed by an advanced specialization stage, essentially an apprenticeship phase.Footnote 16 Exact ages are difficult to determine, but scribal students began their education young and entered their specializations or apprenticeships as adolescents, while their peers in other trades would have started working as children.Footnote 17 Formal education was essentially the privilege of boys and young men from elite or aspirational families.Footnote 18 Scribal education took place in private, household-based contexts, not dedicated educational institutions or academies.Footnote 19 The instructors were adult professionals, often the father of one or more of the boys in the “class,” to whom other prominent or upwardly mobile urban families would send their sons.Footnote 20 Because students belonged to the highest socio-cultural classes, education’s purpose was two-fold: to train students in the skills needed for their future career, as well as to impart cultural values, norms, and ideals as part of their enculturation into adult society.Footnote 21 The exercises and texts they were taught were selected to achieve both of these aims, and the “schools” were a setting in which boys socialized with peers from comparable socio-economic backgrounds and developed their identities as the future elites of their communities. Education also played an important role in transmitting information, ideas, and skills across generations.Footnote 22 This is true of the texts themselves as well: while most written exercises were disposable, many library copies of texts were composed by scribal apprentices or professional scribes at the beginning of their career, shortly after completing their education, building archival collections and preserving them for future generations to use.Footnote 23 The extant written material produced during formal education, referred to in modern scholarship as “school texts,” demonstrates how education transmitted ideas and values beyond literacy skills. School texts were either written by students and contain their class exercises and assignments or were composed by instructors for pedagogical purposes. In some cases, these texts