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May 23, 2006

The Role of "Literature" in Scribal Training

While working of the second installment of my series on how one might identify a scribal school, I came across an interesting paper by Laurie Pearce. Yeah, Yeah, I haven't posted the first installment. But I will as soon as I get a few minutes with a book I ordered over the weekend.

In Pearce' paper, she looks at "statements of purpose" as seen in the colophons of a large number of Babylonian "literary and scientific" texts from the first millennium BCE. Specifically, she looked for indications of why the texts were written or copied. Her conclusions are simple to summarized, "These texts were written for one or more of the following reasons: for performance, for study, or as a votive." Here I want to look at the texts that she refers to as "for study." The first is BM 96273, which Millard called, "Another Babylonian Chronicle Text." Here is what Pearce says about this tablet,

The colophon indicates that the scribe, Nabû-kaşir, a descendant of Elilūta-ibni, copied excerpts from other tablets to a wax covered writing board, from which BM 96273 was prepared. The culling into one tablet of lines bearing no particular relationship to each other supports the statement by the scribe that the tablet was prepared for study, either by himself or by a patron.

The key phrase in this colophon is ana tašlimiti, "for instruction" and this is the only example of the phrase in the collection she studied. But several other phrases also occur. ana qabî, "for dictation" occurs in two colophons. CT 16 18 is an excerpt from utukku lemmūti and LKA 4 is an excerpt from the second tablet of Enūma Eliš. She found ana tāmarti, "for teaching," in the colophon of twenty five tablets, sometimes alone, sometimes with ana šitassi(šu), "for (his) reading." The tablets with these kinds of expressions in their colophons ranged from a hymn to Ninurta (KAR 305) to an Enūma Anu Enlil excerpt (AAT 24a) to an incantation against paralysis. On two tablets (both published in CT 12) she found ana balaţ napšātišu ana šitassišu, "for the life of his soul, for his reading," in other words, both for reading and for spiritual enrichment. Finally, she points out that the astronomical text ACT 192 has the following in its colophon, [PN] ana ahāzišu išţurma, which she translates, "[PN] wrote the tablet for his own instruction." Was it written to learn astronomy, to learn writing, or to learn how to write about astronomy? It is not clear.

Just about everyone believes that many mythological and literary texts were used in the education of scribes. It's interesting to see this literally spelled out in these colophons. I took a quick look at the few colophons from literary texts from Ugarit. The only one of interest is from the "Wisdom of Šubê-awilim" (RS 22.439), which I mentioned in connection with my brief comments on van Soldt's "Babylonian Lexical, Religious and Literary Texts, and Scribal Education at Ugarit and its Implications for the Alphabetic Literary Texts." That colophon simple says,

13') By the hand of ME.DI.A.UM son of Adbu the sc[ribe]
14') student of ALIM.SAG?[ ]
15') servant of Nabu and Nisaba (?)
16') servant of Marduk and Sarpanitum

No mention of the purpose of the exercise but as van Soldt pointed out, the fact that the scribe mentions his teacher may well indicate that writing this tablet was part of his education although it may have been "for the life of his soul" also.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at May 23, 2006 9:31 AM | Read more on Ugarit |

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