During the Old Babylonian period (ca. 2002–1595 B.C.), Nippur emerged as a key center for Sumerian culture, renowned for its scribal schools (edubba, meaning “the house of the tablets”). These schools served a dual purpose: training scribes in essential skills for documenting daily affairs and preserving cultural heritage. In the final stages of education, students learned formal rhetoric related to administration and law through compilations of “model contracts,” “model court cases,” legal phrasebooks, and collections of legal principles. While these documents were not functional but rather didactic, they adhered to common Sumerian contract types and encompassed a wide range of transactions relevant to everyday economic life, including loans, real estate deeds, marriage contracts, and adoptions. This work publishes the Sumerian model contracts from Old Babylonian Nippur found in the Hilprecht Collection, Jena. It includes transliterations, translations, and commentaries on the entire corpus, as well as duplicates from other cuneiform collections. The indexes feature personal names, deities, toponyms, and a glossary, while the plates at the end showcase handcopies and photographs of all the HS tablets.
