Recovered from Clay, Read by Specialists

Mesopotamian religious texts survive on cuneiform clay tablets, a durable medium that has preserved an extraordinary volume of material, including entire scribal school archives and major royal libraries such as that of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh, from which important texts including the Great Hymn to Shamash are known, but reading this material requires specialized training in cuneiform script and the relevant ancient languages that only a relatively small number of scholars worldwide possess, meaning the practical accessibility of this corpus to general audiences depends heavily on translation work done by that comparatively small specialist community.

The survival of texts in multiple copies across different periods, as with the Exaltation of Inanna's more than one hundred surviving Old Babylonian school copies made centuries after its original composition, gives scholars unusually strong evidence for how certain especially valued compositions were actively used in scribal education long after their original composition, a level of evidence for ongoing use that is not available for every text within the broader corpus. This entry records the corpus as a whole, while individually recoverable and datable hymns, including those catalogued separately elsewhere in this atlas, rest on this specialized cuneiform scholarship for their translation and interpretation.