This book uses insights from religious studies, literary theory, and the history of science for understanding the Sumerian composition "Nanse and the Birds" in the context of the Old Babylonian scribal school. It contains editions of all the relevant Sumerian texts.

Niek Veldhuis, Ph.D. (1997) in Assyriology, University of Groningen, is Assistant Professor of Assyriology at UC Berkeley. He has published extensively on Babylonian scholarship, religion, and literature, and is director of the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts (http: //cdli.ucla.edu/dcclt/dcclt.html).