This study investigates the use and transmission of the lexical lists unearthed at the Late-Bronze-Age sites of Hattusha, Ugarit and Emar.
It addresses three principal research foci: (1) the specific modes of transmission that guided the textual spread of the lists from Mesopotamia to those `peripheral' sites, (2) the modes of transmission by which scribes handed down the lists within their local traditions, and (3) the role the lists played in local scribal training as well as thepractices that were involved in their usage.
For the lists of 13th-centruy Hattusha and, to a certain degree, of 13th-century Emar, their transmissional and functional context can be shown to differ not inconsiderably from the context reconstructed for scribal traditions in Mesopotamia proper: the practices involved in scribal training as well as in the preservation of the texts appear to have mainly built on writing-based (instead of memory-based) techniques. So it seems lexical lists were not anymore the core medium of (primary) scribal training, but the subject of a later, 'academic' phase of education.