By The European Times | Created at 2026-10-02 08:42:00 | Updated at 2026-10-02 09:53:27
1 hour ago
Clay tablets containing cuneiform exercises reveal how students in ancient Babylonia studied the gods, temples, and religious customs, reports Phys.org—based on a study published in the journal *Iraq*.
Research by Shana Zaia of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam shows that religious knowledge was not taught as a separate subject. Instead, it was part of the general education of young men—primarily from wealthy families—who were preparing for careers as scribes, administrators, and religious ritual specialists.
Students studied the names and characteristics of hundreds of gods, as well as temples, sacred sites, and rituals. They acquired this knowledge by repeatedly copying word lists, hymns, literary texts, and long lists of divine names.
The researcher analyzed extant cuneiform school tablets and compared exercises from various cities, including Babylon and Nippur. In doing so, she traced how the curriculum evolved as students progressed and how the knowledge they acquired related to their future professional work.
The curricula reflected local religious traditions. In Babylon, for example, students studied the city and its patron deity, the god Marduk. In Nippur, this material was not part of the local curriculum, which focused instead on that city’s specific religious traditions. Some of the educational exercises also served a practical religious purpose. Students sometimes produced exercise tablets that were subsequently dedicated to deities in local temples.
Divine Names and Characteristics of the Gods: “The first observable learning outcome for religious education is a familiarity with both the basic and extended pantheon(s). It is unclear how much knowledge about individual deities the students would have acquired before formal education, but one might assume that they were aware of the major gods in their cities as well as any personal or familial deities. Much broader pantheons were presented in the scribal curriculum: among the lexical lists that students learned and excerpted are the so-called god-lists, which sometimes included hundreds of deities, the simplest of which listed deity names while the more complicated lists presented both the Sumerian and Akkadian names and, occasionally, pronunciations, epithets, or other identifying characteristics. In 1st millennium Babylonia, students primarily learned two longstanding god-lists: the An list (previously known as the “Weidner god-list”) and the An = Anum list. The former was part of the first stage of the elementary curriculum, while the latter was taught in the second stage. This correlated with increasing conceptual complexity, moving from a simple list of divine names written in logograms in a single column (An) to a two-column list of equations or identifications between Sumerian and Akkadian divine names (An = Anum)”.
According to Zaya, the absence of separate religious instruction indicates that there was no clear distinction between “secular” and “religious” education in ancient Babylonia.
Religious knowledge remained important even after the completion of one’s studies. Former students might become advisors, scholars, or temple officials, and their understanding of religious traditions enabled them to apply and adapt these traditions to specific circumstances.
Source: Shana Zaia, Gods in the classroom: Religion and education in 1st millennium BCE Babylonia, Iraq (2026). DOI: 10.1017/irq.2026.10057
Illustrative photo: pexels-bilgekutukoglu-8349847
