The List & the Ordering of the World

Among the most characteristic Mesopotamian texts are the great lists: enormous catalogues of cuneiform signs, words, professions, gods, animals, plants, stones, and geographic names, copied endlessly in the schools. On the surface they taught writing and vocabulary. But scholars have come to see in them a whole intellectual outlook — a 'science of lists' that grasped and organized the world by exhaustively naming and classifying its contents, rather than by abstract theory. To list was to comprehend. These catalogues, dry as they look, embody an ancient civilization's distinctive method of bringing order to the totality of things.