“The most important part of teaching is
to teach what it is to know.”
-Simone Weil, 1943
This lenticular clay tablet was used to help scribes learn to write the Sumerian and Akkadian languages using the triangle-like cuneiform script.
Such elementary exercises were often completed on tablets that were small and round, easily fitting into the palm of a hand. The teacher would write in the obverse side and the pupil would copy the written word.
On this tablet, the name of the deity Urash was copied six times by a student , some 4,000 years ago…
It’s interesting that this “learn from my example and repeat after me” modality of supervised transmission of learning has been compromised to a large extent.
It was the essence of the “Guru-Shishya” parampara (master – disciple transition ) in India.
(Cuneiform tablet: student exercise tablet
Babylonian c. 20th–16th century BCE
at The Met , 5th Avenue , NYC)
