Prof. Dr. Paul Delnero

Website: https://neareast.jhu.edu/directory/paul-a-delnero/

Research Interests:

Assyriology, Mesopotamian Religion and Ritual, Transmission of Knowledge, Scribal Education

Biography

Paul Delnero is Professor of Assyriology at Johns Hopkins University. He is an Assyriologist whose research focus is the religion and culture of Mesopotamia and the transmission of knowledge in Mesopotamian scholarly texts. He received his PhD in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006.

His first book, The Textual Criticism of Sumerian Literature (Journal of Cuneiform Studies Supplemental Series vol. 3, ASOR Publications, Boston, 2012), considers how textual variants in copies of Sumerian mythological compositions and hymns provide an essential, but overlooked source of evidence for tracking how cultural knowledge was transmitted and consumed in Ancient Mesopotamia. His second book, How to Do Things with Tears: Ritual Lamenting in Ancient Mesopotamia (Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records vol. 26, de Gruyter, Berlin, 2020), which provides a comprehensive overview of cultic lamenting in Mesopotamia as a ritual means of averting catastrophes, also examines the functions of ritual language.

He is currently working on a book about how literacy was acquired and handwriting was taught in Mesopotamia.

Project Abstract

When the question of time is treated in studies of ancient Mesopotamia, the focus tends to be on long periods of time that extend over decades, centuries, and even millennia. Very infrequently, however, is the question of how time is perceived and differing temporalities are experienced in shorter durations. The proposed study of the scribal exercise copies of the Mesopotamian elementary sign list, Syllable Alphabet B, addresses this question by attempting to reconstruct how long it typically took, in hours, days, months, or years, to learn to write.

Since the quality and accuracy of the script improves incrementally in clearly observable ways with respect to sign formation, legibility, and alignment as pupils learning to write progress from the earlier to the later sections of Syllable Alphabet B, the length of time of each stage of the learning process can be estimated. Because progress was slower in the first stages, the early sections of the lists were copied and re-copied numerous times and improvement in the quality and accuracy of the list appears to have been slow. But as the pupils advanced to the later sections of the list their competence improved and they could copy longer sections with more complex signs more quickly without having to recopy these sections of the list more than one or two times.

The planned result outcomes of the project include a theoretically and empirically informed study of the role of time in learning to write and the changing experience of time at different stages in the learning process, particularly as evidenced by increasing signs of fatigue and lack of concentration in the diminished quality of writing toward the end of long excerpts and repeated copies of the same excerpt from the list.