13 Teaching with a Dose of Humor in the Mesopotamian Unica
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Excavations from Mesopotamia have yielded hundreds of school-texts of different types. The number of copies of any given school-text range; some are only attested in ten copies or so, while others, particularly those integral to the curriculum, number as many as two hundred. A small subset of these pedagogical texts, however, are unica, or texts that are attested in only a single copy. Scholars posit that some of these texts were written by teachers or perhaps advanced students. Intriguingly, two of these texts, âWhy Do You Curse Me?â and a fictional court case, point to the creation of humorous, pedagogical pieces from scratch by teachers for their students. These cases in turn point to a different way of conceptualizing the relationship between âauthorâ and âaudienceâ in Mesopotamia.