“BEFORE PHILOSOPHY”: ANCIENT MESOPOTAMIA

As an example of the kind of organized knowledge that precedes the ancient Greek amalgamate of philosophy and field-specific knowledge, this chapter describes the development of ancient Mesopotamia. Writing was invented in Southern Mesopotamia in the later fourth millennium bce as a tool for book-keeping, used for nothing else. Around 3000 bce, the unipolar social order dissolved into a system of city states, but the administrative tools survived, and around 2500 bce a distinct scribal profession making use of it arose, not only for administrative but also for literary purposes and in the earliest investigation of mathematics going beyond the bureaucratically useful. The scribal profession remained pivotal for state power during the following two millennia, in spite of a sequence of sweeping transformations of the social system and of expansion to the whole of Mesopotamia and beyond. The analysis concentrates on the Sumerian period, ending with the extremely centralized Neo-Sumerian period (21st c. bce); the mature Old Babylonian (ca 1800–1600 bce) and the Neo-Assyrian (ca 1200–600 bce) periods and the rather different types of scribal culture that were formed in these. Text examples with commentary illustrate the ideology of the Old Babylonian scribal culture; mathematics; extispicy (divination based on inspection of the liver and other entrails of sacrificial animals); medicine; exorcism; and farming instructions.