readx;? Due to the important role of religion in Sumer, priests occupied an important position in the society of the time. Pen Fun Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

After 3400 B.C., priests and administrators (the two words often mean the same thing) were required to learn the written language, so there were schools attached to the temple precincts to teach the knowledge required of writing and the priestly hierarchy, and these Sumerian schools are the earliest known schools in the history of human civilization. The earliest schools found so far appear in Uruk.

By 3000 BC, these "language textbooks" became more and more complete, forming a fixed pattern and becoming a common textbook in schools in Sumer. In these textbooks, there are glossaries of plants and seeds, of various animals (including insects and birds), of countries, cities and towns, of various gems and minerals. In addition, many of the tablets are inscribed with lists of compound nouns and verb conjugations, indicating the refinement of Sumerian grammar.

More than 100,000 Sumerian texts have been excavated today, most of them inscribed on clay tablets. These include personal and business letters, money transfers, recipes, encyclopedic lists, laws, hymns, prayers, magic spells, scientific articles including math, astronomy, and medicine. Many large buildings, such as large sculptures, are also engraved with words. Multiple versions of many articles have been preserved, as they are often copied (e.g. as writing exercises). Copying was the only way for people at that time to disseminate articles.

From this, we can infer that the number of scribes increased considerably during this period compared to the previous period, and that there were lower and higher scribes, royal and temple scribes, scribes who specialized in a certain administrative act, and scribes became an important class in the government. Scribe schools, which played an important role, flourished throughout the land.

It was only after BC 2500 that schools began to appear in large numbers.

Archaeologists have found three main types of schools in Sumer: those near the royal palace and may have been established by the court or government offices, those located near the temple and may have been established by the temple, and those near the scribes' quarters, which may have been private.

The aim and purpose of Sumerian school education was first and foremost to train scribes for the royal family and the temple to meet the needs of managing the land and the economy, and it continued throughout the entire history of Sumerian schooling.

With the development and expansion of the school, especially the continuous expansion of the curriculum, the school has gradually become an academic center, a center of Sumerian culture and research.

The Sumerian school produced a large number of scholars-scientists, who studied theology, botany, zoology, mineralogy, geography, arithmetic, linguistics, and so on.

The Sumerian school also had a distinctive feature and function that modern schools did not have, namely that it was also a center of literary creation. In Sumerian schools, old literary works were copied and studied, and new ones were created. It is certain that a large number of students will become royal or temple scribes after graduating from school, but there are also many who stay in school and dedicate their lives to teaching and research.

The role of the ancient Sumerian school in promoting the development of Sumerian writing and literature, and in promoting and disseminating Sumerian culture, cannot be underestimated, but it also inevitably had limitations. This is mainly manifested in the following aspects: first, Sumerian schools are basically aristocratic schools, and the students generally come from wealthy aristocratic families, and the children of poor families have neither long-term free time for studying, nor do they have the money to pay the teachers' salaries themselves;

Sumerian education is not education for all. In principle, students can come from all walks of life, but in reality most of them come from wealthy families because the children of the poor cannot afford to pay the school fees and lack the large amount of time required to get an education. Due to the complexity of the Sumerian language, it takes quite a long time for students to learn the language. There is a proverb to the effect that in order to become a scribe, one must rise with the sun every day.

In the thousands of tablets of economic and management literature from 2000 BC, about 500 people described themselves as scribes and wrote their father's name and occupation. In 1946, a German cuneiform scholar compiled a list based on these materials and found that the fathers of these scribes (school graduates) were mostly government officials, mayors, ambassadors, temple administrators, military officials, naval captains, high-ranking tax officials, various priests, administrators, overseers, foremen, scribes, archivists, accountants, etc. In short, the fathers of these scribes were wealthy people in the city. There is no mention of a female scribe in these documents, and it is quite possible that only boys were admitted to Sumerian schools.

The Sumerian school was called "Edumba", which originally meant "mud tablet house". The principal of the school is called the "expert", the "professor", and also known as the "father of the school". In the same way, students are referred to as "sons of the school." The assistant to the "professor" is called the "elder brother", and his duty is to write new clay tablets for the students to copy, and to check the students' copying.

According to a clay tablet that records the life of the students at school, the school was staffed by a teacher who taught drawing, a Sumerian teacher, a person who kept a record of student attendance, a person who established a student code, a person who maintained order in the classroom, a person who managed the entry and exit of students, and so on. We don't know the level of these faculty members, nor do we know the source of their salaries, presumably from the tuition fees charged to the students by the "father of the school".

The curriculum of Sumerian school education can be broadly divided into basic subjects (i.e., language courses), professional and technical courses, and literary creation courses. The language course is a basic course, which mainly teaches Sumerian and is divided into vocabulary and grammar classes. To make it easier for students to memorize and repeat, teachers at the school linguistically categorized the words and phrases that were linked.

In terms of professional skills, students need to learn both computation (algebra) and surveying land (geometry), subject knowledge such as biology, geography, astronomy, medicine, etc. In addition, students learn skills such as how to organize a choir, how to forge silver and jewelry, how to distribute food rations, and how to use various musical equipment.

The course of literary creation includes two aspects: one is to copy, imitate and study past literary works, and the other is to carry out new literary creations. The works for students to copy and imitate are mainly literary works from the second half of the third millennium BC. There are hundreds of these ancient works, all written in the form of poems, ranging in length from a few lines to several hundred lines.