Ancient Babylonian Students Sometimes Offered Their Homework to the Gods

Clay tablets reveal why schoolwork doubled as worship in ancient Babylonia.

Some 2,500 years ago, a Babylonian student took his homework so seriously that he offered it to a god.

The student’s name was Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur, and he wasn’t just looking to impress the teacher; he was looking to impress the gods.

He ventured into the countryside to collect clean clay from a sacred deposit. He probably hoisted it onto his shoulder and carried it back, where he shaped the clay into a writing tablet and inscribed his exercises. But instead of simply handing in his assignment, he dedicated the finished tablet to Nabû, the Babylonian god of writing, and deposited it at a temple.

A homework with divine ambitions

The student had a rather ambitious wish list: good health, a long life, prosperity for his family, and the chance to raise children of his own. He even asked the tablet itself to intercede on his behalf, although the surviving inscription is damaged.

And it wasn’t an isolated oddity.

A new study reveals that such offerings were part of a much broader educational tradition in ancient Babylonia, in what is now Iraq. By analyzing surviving clay tablets and classroom exercises, Shana Zaia, an Assyriologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, found that religion permeated schooling even though students had no separate religion classes.

For Babylon’s future scribes, priests, and administrators, learning to write also meant learning how to understand, honor, and sometimes negotiate with the gods. School wasn’t just about acquiring skills. It also taught students how their society was supposed to work.

When Homework Became a Prayer

For some privileged pupils, a clay tablet had two purposes. One side carried writing exercises. The other bore prayers and requests for blessings, usually addressed to Nabû.

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Even collecting the raw material could involve ritual. Teachers or religious specialists may have led students to sacred clay pits at dawn, performed incantations, and supervised the gathering of the clay. Students brought their finished tablets to temples as offerings to the gods, either placing them in special compartments or handing them to temple doorkeepers.

One temple of Nabû in Babylon has yielded several thousand fragments of such school offerings. But the temple was not necessarily a school. The students apparently came to deposit their work.

Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur’s tablet describes a slightly different destination: E-babbarra, the temple of the sun god Šamaš, even though the dedication was addressed to Nabû.

In his earlier analysis of Šamaš-riḫtu-uṣur’s tablet, Assyriologist Andrew George suggested that the offering might have marked the completion of an early stage of schooling. The tablet’s errors suggest a novice. The offering may even have functioned as a kind of educational rite of passage.

But these were special devotional exercises, not everyday homework in the modern sense. And the students themselves were hardly representative of all Babylonian children; they were elites. Formal scribal education was largely reserved for boys and young men from families with the means and connections to pursue such training.

No Religion Class, but Gods Everywhere

Babylonian students began with basic writing signs, word lists, and proverbs. Later came hymns, stories, prayers, and increasingly complex texts. Religion ran through much of this material, rather than occupying a separate subject.

“Thus, there was no distinction between ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ education,” Zaia writes in the study.

Some of the exercises were essentially enormous lists of gods.

One beginner’s list contained more than 200 divine-name entries. An advanced work called An = Anum filled seven tablets with almost 2,000 names. It also connected Sumerian and Akkadian names for deities, teaching students how different religious traditions related to one another.

Other texts supplied moral lessons. Students read about divine punishment, proper offerings, and what rulers owed the temples. They also learned that religious allegiance depended partly on where they lived: school curricula associated with Babylon promoted Marduk, the city’s chief god, while those at Nippur emphasized Ninurta and local religious traditions.

In other words, what students copied onto their tablets helped shape how they understood the gods, their city, and political authority. Education was also a way of passing down a particular worldview.

School and Religion

Earlier archaeological research at Nippur, where scholars examined more than 1,400 clay tablets from an ancient scribal school, helped reconstruct how Babylonian children learned to read and write. Zaia’s new study extends that picture to first-millennium BCE Babylonia, showing how classroom exercises also taught religious beliefs, cultural identity, and loyalty to the gods.

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The surviving tablets cannot reveal everything teachers explained aloud, and not every assignment involved religion. But together they show that schooling helped prepare future scribes, administrators, and priests for a world where gods were deeply entangled with government and daily life.

For one young scribe, all of that began with a lump of clay.

The study was published in the journal Iraq