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June 11, 2006

Overcoming Sexism - Mine

Those of you who had the fortitude to wade your way through my first post on how to identify a scribal school may have noticed that when in need of a pronoun to describe a scribe, a scribal student or a scribal teacher I chose the third person masculine. I actual thought about this but decided to use the masculine because I could not really envision the possibility that any of those involved in the scribal training process were women. I guess I more or less agreed with Jonas Greenfield (79) that "by the nature of things women would not serve as scribes." Well a paper by Samuel Meier showed me just how wrong I could be.

I ran across his paper, "Women and Communications in the Ancient Near East," while doing some additional research for my forthcoming post on identifying a scribal school. And Meier makes a very compelling case for women scribes along side their male counterparts in the Ancient Near East. He even hints that women might have occasionally been teachers.

Some of the names of these women have been preserved; the Neo-Assyrian scribe Attar-palti, Šamaš-eriš from Old Babylonian Sippar and the woman scribe who was also a slave at Mari, Šima-ilat are examples. And then there are the nine women scribes named in an oil ration list from Mari (Birot 57-72). And there is a lot more. These women worked their way through the same difficult curriculum as their more numerous male colleagues.

There were women "instructors" at Mari but as Meier says, "the skill they taught is unknown. (544)"

I have not been able to find an unambiguous example of a female scribe from Ugarit, all the names are masculine, and the scholarly tablets from Amarna just don't give us much to go on at all. But I was clearly wrong to exclude the possibility. In fact, this possibility will open some intriguing doors when I look at the question of the Jerusalem Academy.

References:

Birot, Maurice. “Textes économiques de Mari (IV),” Revue d'assyriologique, 50 (1956): 57-72.

Greenfield, Jonas C., “On Some Neo-Babylonian Women,” La Femme dans le Proche Orient Asiatique. Compte rendu de la 23e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, 1987, 79.

Meier, Samuel A., "Women and Communications in the Ancient Near East," Journal of the American Oriental Society, 111, 3 (July. - Sept., 1991), 540-547.

Posted by Duane Smith at June 11, 2006 10:16 AM | Read more on Scribal Schools |

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