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The Stream of Tradition (Canonical Learning)
For two thousand years the same core of texts was copied, fixed, and handed on — a civilization's curriculum.
Beyond the day-to-day records of administration, Mesopotamian scribes maintained a stable core of learned texts that were copied generation after generation: the great myths and epics, the omen series, the god-lists and word-lists, the rituals and the medical and mathematical knowledge. The Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim called this the 'stream of tradition' — the canonical curriculum that defined an educated scribe and that gives Mesopotamian intellectual life its remarkable continuity across two thousand years. Its first-millennium crown is the library Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh.
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