Are there any existing foreign language teaching texts from the Ancient Near East?

Question

The various cultures of the Ancient Near East spoke a wide array of languages and we know that there was plenty of communication between cultures. We even have a language like Akkadian that served as a lingua franca between many different cultures. Diplomats, and others, must have received training in foreign languages. Do we have any written grammars from the Ancient Near East used for such teaching? Dictionaries? Explanations of points of grammar? Even exercises used by students?

Answer 1

The Bronze Age city of Ebla in modern Syria was a big training center for scribes, and among the famous "Ebla tablets" excavated from the site in the 1970s were many scratch pads, word lists, and student exercises for translating between Sumerian and Eblamite. Although we can infer from these finds that other such training sites existed, so far the Ebla tablets are one of the most complete ancient "libraries" ever found. Their preservation is a factor of the area where they were stored having been burned in antiquity, effectively firing the clay tablets and hardening them.