Daily Life in Babylon

Most houses in this region were built around an enclosed courtyard with only a single door opening onto the street. Privacy was a treasured commodity for most families. A family room with several small bedrooms attached was often centered around the courtyard and those of the more prosperous citizens would also have room for two or three slaves.

No one knows who stumbled among the secret of making glass from sand, soda, and limestone. Possibly it may well have been a jeweller in Mesopotamia. What is known is that the skill had been acquired , both in Sumer and Egypt, before 2000 BCE.

Both men and women used bluish-black antimony to line and highlight their eyebrows and eyelashes to give them a dramatic look. Some women and a few men were also known to paint their face in white lead and in contrast colored their cheeks and lips with henna. Henna was also applied to their fingernails and the palms of their hands. They smoothed their skin with pumice stone, took perfumed baths and curled and perfumed their hair. Among the women's toilet articles that have been recovered, there has been shell-shaped gold cosmetic cases (found in tombs near Ur dating for 5000 BC), eyebrow tweezers, metal toothpicks and small metal rods for pushing down cuticles.

It is clear that education was not a practice available to all. It was restricted to the children of the wealthy and influential and most likely limited to sons. These were the folks who could afford to maintain their children non productively for a long period. Examination of the parentage of a several scribes at this time indicates they were all sons of such men as governors, senior civil servants, priests or scribes.

It has been assumed that schools were attached to temples. After about 2000 BC, this may not have always been the case. A number of buildings have been found which their excavators claimed based on the layout of the rooms or from the presence of school tablets, may have been school rooms. The most convincing of the buildings are two rooms, complete with benches found at Mari.

The school was known as "the tablet house". Ancient sources refer to 'early youth' as the starting point for formal education, but this isn't very revealing so we don't know exactly at what age the education process started. What we do know is that the pupil, in his early years at least, was a day student. He lived at home, got up at sunrise, collected his lunch and headed off to school. If he was late, he was caned and the same fate awaited him for any misdemeanor during school hours or the failure to perform the exercises adequately.

The day consisted of copying out texts and most likely memorization. There is a contemporary document that substantiates this. It begins with the question "Son of the tablet house, where di you go in your early days?" The student replies:

I went to the tablet house.....
I read out my tablet, ate my lunch,
Prepared my (fresh) tablet, inscribed it (and) finished it......
When the tablet house was dismissed, I went home.
I entered (my) house. My father was sitting there.
....I read over my tablet to him and he was pleased....