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The excavations of various archaeological sites along the Habur and the Middle Euphrates region since the 1970s have supplied us with a great amount of inscriptional sources that shed new light on the scribal culture, society, and history of those areas and their relations to their surroundings. Particularly in order to reach a comprehensive understanding of the scribal education and traditions in the region, the conference "Cultures and Societies in the Middle Euphrates and Habur Areas in the Second Millennium BC: Scribal Education and Scribal Traditions" was held in Tsukuba, Japan, in December 2013.
This volume includes ten papers by assyriologists who participated in the conference. Next to various analyses of local and regional scribal traditions from fresh philological and archaeological viewpoints, new texts are published and studied. Dealing with the scribal education and traditions examined in the written sources from Mari, Terqa, Tabatum/Tabetu (Tell Taban), Emar, Ugarit, Hattusa, and southern Babylonian cities, the volume makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the aspects of transmission, diffusion, and interaction of local and regional scribal cultures in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Anatolia during the second Millennium BC.

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