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September 24, 2008
What Does It Say and How Does It Say It?
I've been spending a little time studying the various tablets that support the possibility, even probability, that Ashurbanipal was literate. Alasdair Livingstone worked with the most important of them in his 2007 study. A short, fragmentary, letter struck me as abnormally interesting because of the nature of the evidence it brings to the question. The letter is CT 53, 147 (SAA 16, 19). Livingstone, 106-107, provided a picture of the obverse, a transliteration, and a translation. He translated the tablet,
To the king, my lord,
your servant Ashurbanipal.
Good health to the king, my lord,
May Nabû and Marduk bless the king my lord.
But here is what is abnormally interesting about this tablet.
As can be seen from Fig 2 [of Livingston's paper] the letter is very clumsily written and exhibits unusual orthography for a professional letter to the king. . . . A lacuna destroys all but the end of the next three lines [the three lines following those translated above] and the reverse is extent but blank. Simple writings include MAN for king, U for lord, the numerical iá sign and the simplest possible writing of the name Ashurbanipal, all in a very small compass. The letter is not rich in content: the SAA project, normally a wizard at dreaming up captions for letters, draws a complete blank here. Could this be a letter from Ashurbanipal to his father that was actually written by himself? The coincidence of large and beginner's ungainly and uneven script, the simple writing as well as the brevity and general lack of content suggest strongly that this was the case. This of course involves the supposition that there was a fast track royal curriculum designed to prepare Ashurbanipal to write a letter to his father at an early stage in his education.
Livingstone discussed a couple of other letters with less than profession qualities but none of the others purport to be from Ashurbanipal. They do, however, relate to the question of Ashurbanipal's literacy.
Does CT 53, 147 indicate that Ashurbanipal may have been literate? Yes. Is it, by itself, definitive? No. Every one of the features of this letter, including the source in the second line, is explainable as part of the education of someone else. Remember, we have a letter supposedly from Gilgamesh that student scribes studied and copied. In addition, letters written by student scribes sometimes use the names of actual people.
The real point I am trying to make is not that Ashurbanipal was literate. I happen to think that when one considers all the evidence it is very probable that he was. But that is not the point of this post. The point of this post is that we need at look a lot more than just the content of a tablet to harvest all the evidence it offers. The actual writing on the tablet and the use of the tablet space are also part of the evidence available on the tablet. This is all the more true if questions of literacy or scribal training are on the table or the tablet.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at September 24, 2008 7:39 PM | Read more on Akkadian |
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