Encoding metalinguistic awareness: ancient Mesopotamia and beyond

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The Ancient Near East exemplifies the dynamics of knowledge transfer across time and space, showcasing continuous exchange, adaptation, and negotiation among emerging civilizations. In the late fourth millennium, the development of supraregional notational systems in southern Mesopotamia initiated a cognitive revolution, leading to the widespread adoption of writing as a dominant cultural technique. Over millennia, wedge-writing proliferated throughout southwest Asia, giving rise to various indigenous cuneiform subcultures. These distinct forms were unified by shared teaching practices, core textual materials, and systematic methods for representing speech and notation, forming a cohesive cuneiform tradition. Despite the challenges in translating cuneiform sources into other traditions, which limited their broader scientific application, these factors contributed to the survival of cuneiform culture in Mesopotamia and Syria for millennia. A key element in this process was the practitioners' awareness of language and its influence on knowledge generation, particularly regarding linguistic patterns. Among the vast array of textual artifacts from the ancient Near East, some explicitly and implicitly reveal this linguistic awareness. The contributors to this volume came together to explore these traces of (meta)linguistic awareness, including P. Delnero, J. C. Johnson, E. Cancik-Kirschbaum, I. Hajnal, A. Payne, J. S. Pettersson, F