The Stream of Tradition (Canonical Learning)
For two thousand years the same core of texts was copied, fixed, and handed on — a civilization's curriculum.
Also: stream of tradition · canonical learning · cuneiform curriculum · Ashurbanipal library · Nineveh library · scholarly tradition
Beyond the day-to-day records of administration, Mesopotamian scribes maintained a stable core of learned texts that were copied generation after generation: the great myths and epics, the omen series, the god-lists and word-lists, the rituals and the medical and mathematical knowledge. The Assyriologist A. Leo Oppenheim called this the 'stream of tradition' — the canonical curriculum that defined an educated scribe and that gives Mesopotamian intellectual life its remarkable continuity across two thousand years. Its first-millennium crown is the library Ashurbanipal assembled at Nineveh.
In short
The body of standardized, copied-and-recopied scholarly texts — myth, omen, lexical, ritual, medical — that formed Mesopotamia's transmitted 'curriculum' of learning (Oppenheim's 'stream of tradition').
Where it’s found
A scholarly-historical category (Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia) describing the corpus as a whole rather than one composition; instantiated by the serialized first-millennium editions (akkadian-pending) and the Sumerian school corpus (in corpus)
How the idea developed across Sumer, Babylon & Assyria
The phrase is Oppenheim's scholarly model (label as interpretive framing, though widely adopted). The 'stream' becomes increasingly standardized in the first millennium ('Standard Babylonian' editions, serialized omen and incantation series); Ashurbanipal's library is its great collection.
'Stream of tradition' is Oppenheim's interpretive coinage (now standard); flagged as a scholarly model.