Editing the Sumerians, How and Why?

The science of pedagogy in Babylonia in the early second millennium BCE was based on a two-part curriculum: students began their study of Sumerian by copying and memorizing lists of signs and words, and then progressed to copying connected texts. All surviving manuscripts (in the form of cuneiform tablets) of Sumerian literary compositions from that time are school copies produced by students following the second part of the curriculum. This contribution examines how the editing of these compositions and the representation of individual text witnesses and their variants have evolved in the eight decades since the first scientific edition of a Sumerian literary composition in 1937, and defines what a reconstructed and edited Sumerian composition actually represents.