Does a Master Always Write for His Students? Some Evidence from Old Babylonian Scribal Schools

International audienceCuneiform mathematical texts from the Old Babylonian (period early second millennium BCE) are the result of the activities of scribal schools and, in this sense, emanate incontestably from a “teaching context”. Mathematical texts are generally considered as evidence of pedagogical activity, meaning they are assumed to have been written either by students or for students. My goal is to show the simplistic nature of such a narrow alternative. Three groups of texts are examined to show that an elementary school text was not always puerile; that a text written for teaching could at the same time serve other purposes and that a text written by a master did not always have an educative objective. The contrasting analysis of these three groups thus allows me to highlight the contextual diversity of both the production and the usage of the texts, all of which nevertheless deriving from scribal schools