The List & the Ordering of the World
To name and classify everything — signs, gods, beasts, stones — was, for the scribes, to comprehend the world.
Also: lexical list · list · Listenwissenschaft · sign list · Urra · vocabulary · god list · science of lists · DCCLT
Among the most characteristic Mesopotamian texts are the great lists: enormous catalogues of cuneiform signs, words, professions, gods, animals, plants, stones, and geographic names, copied endlessly in the schools. On the surface they taught writing and vocabulary. But scholars have come to see in them a whole intellectual outlook — a 'science of lists' that grasped and organized the world by exhaustively naming and classifying its contents, rather than by abstract theory. To list was to comprehend. These catalogues, dry as they look, embody an ancient civilization's distinctive method of bringing order to the totality of things.
In short
The vast lexical lists — catalogues of signs, words, gods, professions, animals, stones, and things — that taught cuneiform and also expressed a distinctively Mesopotamian way of knowing: ordering reality by enumerating it.
Where it’s found
The lexical lists (DCCLT corpus; akkadian/sumerian, mostly akkadian-pending in our ingest); the practice underlies the whole scribal curriculum (in corpus)
How the idea developed across Sumer, Babylon & Assyria
The lexical tradition (DCCLT material) is one of the oldest and most continuous Mesopotamian genres, from Uruk-period sign-lists to the standardized first-millennium series (Urra=ḫubullu, etc.). The 'list as a mode of knowledge' reading is interpretive (von Soden's Listenwissenschaft; W. G. Lambert, Veldhuis) — label as scholarly framing.
'Listenwissenschaft' (the list as a mode of knowing) is an interpretive scholarly framing — flagged as such.