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May 5, 2007

Were Seal Engravers Trained Scribes?

The evidence for the southern Levant seems to indicate that they were not. Christopher Rollston (1966) argued that there is sufficient evidence to hold that formal scribal training was part of the eighth through the sixth centuries BCE process of learning to read and, more importantly, write Old Hebrew. He analyzed the paleography as well as other aspects of the epigraphic material primarily from sources other than seals to come to this conclusion. In a future post, I will review his evidence and arguments but for the purpose of this post, I will assume that Rollston is correct. In the meantime, you may want to checkout Charles Halton's take on Rollston's paper at Awilum. It must be said that for Rollston to be correct it is necessary (but not sufficient) that evidence show significant "synchronic consistency and diachronic development" of the individual letters.

If we now turn to Andrew Vaughn's paper on Judean seal inscriptions, one sees something quite different.

First, the conclusion is drawn that the seals from the late eighth century and from the late seventh century exhibit a much wider variation than might be expected. This situation is compounded by the fact that each of the Hebrew letters evolves at a different rate, making the variations in some letters more pronounced than in others. It is seen that this variation makes it almost impossible to distinguish an isolated seal as belonging to either the eighth century group or the late seventh century group except in the case of a few letters. The only letters with diagnostic forms that allow dating to one or the other pegs are he, waw, nun, alep, samek, and qop. [60, references omitted]

While Vaughn does suggest a "set of working pegs" for the paleographic dating of seal inscriptions, he is clearly not as impressed with either the synchronic consistency or a clear diachronic development of the letters on seals as is Rollston with regard to the individual letters on the other epigraphic material. Again, I will leave a more detailed analysis for another day.

Assuming that both Rollston and Vaughn are correct, what can account for such an apparent difference between the one dataset from the seals and the other dataset from the non-seal material? Two, likely interacting, possibilities come to mind. There may be others that I need to consider but just haven't thought of. If you have some ideas, I'd like to hear from you. First, seal engravers cut their letters in mirror image so the letters would look correct when impressed. This could have resulted in a different paleographic tradition than what one sees in the other epigraphic material. The, in general, smaller scale of the letters on seals may be a related secondary factor. Second, the seal engravers may not have been trained scribes. In other words, they were not trained or skilled in the formal, curricular, ways of writing as argued for by Rollston with regard to the scribes of other epigraphic material. Seal engravers may simply have copied, as best they could, in mirror image, the text that some scribe wrote for them. If so, one would not expect the same degree of synchronic consistency that one sees in the hands-on work of trained scribes. The lack of formal training would also influence the nature of diachronic development of seal paleography. There may be hints of this is the writing itself but this too will need to wait.

Is there additional supporting evidence that seal engravers were not trained scribes? From a somewhat earlier period there sure seems to be. Last December I discussed the Revadim Seal where the inscription appears upside down. You may remember that Sass ([1983], 170 and [1988], 93) suggested that the engraver was illiterate.

Update: May 12, 2007
Fix a couple of weird errors

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at May 5, 2007 6:46 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |

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Posted by: G.M. Grena at May 12, 2007 8:58 AM

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