The Graeco-Babyloniaca (singular: Graeco-Babyloniacum[1]) are clay tablets written in the Sumerian or Akkadian languages using cuneiform on one side with transliterations in the Greek alphabet on the other.

Bilingual tablet, Graeco-Babyloniaca, c. 50 BC to 50 AC (Harvard Semitic Museum)

Quoting Edmond Sollberger:

They are obviously school texts written by some Greek student, or students, of Sumerian or Akkadian some time during the late second or early first centuries B.C.[2]

As worded by M. J. Geller, they indicate that both Babylonian languages "written in cuneiform characters were still legible in the Seleucid and Parthian periods in Mesopotamia".[3]

References

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  1. ^ Cartlidge, Ben (2020). "Herodicus in Babylon: Greek Epigram and the Near East". Mnemosyne. 73 (6). doi:10.1163/1568525X-12342750.
  2. ^ Sollberger, Edmond (1962). "Graeco-Babyloniaca". Iraq. 24 (1): 63–72. doi:10.2307/4199713. JSTOR 4199713. S2CID 249894854.
  3. ^ Geller, M. J. (2012). "Graeco‐Babyloniaca". The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. doi:10.1002/9781444338386.wbeah01077. ISBN 9781444338386.

Further reading

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  • Maul, Stefan. "Graeco-Babyloniaca". Brill's New Pauly. doi:10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e427120.
  • Stevens, Kathryn (2019). Between Greece and Babylonia : Hellenistic intellectual history in cross-cultural perspective. Cambridge. pp. 120–143. ISBN 9781108303552.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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