A round school exercise tablet in the Library of Congress, left unfired so the clay could be reused.
Schooldays, a Sumerian poem known to scholars as Edubba A, follows a boy through a day at scribal school, a string of canings and a dinner at which his father wins the teacher over with a garment and a ring. Samuel Noah Kramer, who published the reconstructed text in 1949, described the boy’s plan as the first case of “apple-polishing.” Every surviving copy listed by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative comes from Nippur and dates to the Old Babylonian period, about 1900 to 1600 BCE.
Ancient Content, November 7, 2026
