Learning to Pray in a Dead Language: Education and Invocation in Ancient Sumerian

The connection between prayer and schools has been a hot-button issue in the United States since their official separation in 1962. Many are in favor of restoring prayer in schools, others, however, find the idea inappropriate.

In the ancient world there was no such distinction between the secular and the sacred, between the schoolhouse and the sanctuary. In ancient Iraq, in the early second millennium BCE – a time known as the Old Babylonian period – we see that schools were not only places of learning about things like writing, grammar, and mathematics, but also about a wide variety of religious concepts. This book, compiled from Dr. Bowen’s 2017 Ph.D. thesis, explores the profound effect education had upon the practice of prayer in second millennium Mesopotamia, shaping traditions and perceptions that resonate through history to our understanding of Judeo-Christian religion today.

This book will:
•Provide a detailed overview of schooling in second millennium BCE Mesopotamia, and how the school curriculum differed from city-to-city.
•Discuss the importance of the prayers of priests, who were responsible for averting disaster through calming the hearts of angry gods.
•Show how a standardized scribal curriculum impacted religious tradition which, in turn, influenced the writers of the Old Testament, and ultimately western civilization.

Dr. Joshua Bowen is an Assyriologist and YouTuber with extensive training in the languages of the Ancient Near East. His first publication, "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners", aimed to make the world's oldest written language available to everyone. He is an enthusiastic communicator of academic information, and works hard to make the ancient world accessible to non-specialists.