Rev. Sh.Gordin, Hittite Scribal Circles (StBoT 59) 2015 ZA 104 (2017) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cuneiform was not just a writing system, it was a culture. The attributes of this “Babylonian” culture expanded to all reaches of the ancient Near East in the course of the second millennium BCE. Hittite scribes adopted and adapted this writing culture to their own needs sometime during the 16th century BCE. In this book I analyse texts from dozens of Hittite scribes copying, editing and writing up cuneiform manuscripts on clay in Hattusa, the capital of the Late Bronze Age Hittite Empire in Anatolia. Beside identifying their manuscripts, I place the scribes in their social and official setting and study the principal elements of their handwriting, in an attempt to identify scribal schools and writing habits, as well as advance our tools for forensic handwriting recognition. The book also contains studies of external features of clay tablets (diplomatics), editions of many colophons and related textual passages on scribes, and a look at scribal signatures and their nature as markers of authorship and scribal specialisation. Links were added to book reviews by: G. Torri 2017 (WZKM) Y. Feder 2017 (RBL)
Review of Hittite Scribal Circles, by Shai Gordin
The reviewed volume is a comprehensive revision of the author's Berlin dissertation on Hittite scribal habits in the Late Empire period, written under the supervision of Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum and Jörg Klinger. It also builds on the author's earlier MA thesis at Tel Aviv University on the prosopography of thirteenth-century BCE Hittite officials, supervised by the late Itamar Singer, to whose memory the volume is dedicated. The primary aim of this review is not to provide a comprehensive evaluation of the book but rather to focus on aspects of this work that will be of interest to biblical scholars and situate it in relation to the current wave of interest in ancient Near Eastern scribal activity. Although the topic is by no means new, it is clear that research on the specialists responsible for text production has enjoyed an unprecedented upsurge of interest in the past two decades—and rightfully so. Scholars such as David M. Carr and Karl van der Toorn have shown how the vast corpora of cuneiform evidence bearing on scribal production and revision of texts, including questions of authorship and authority, can shed light on key questions bearing on the composition and transmission of the Hebrew Bible. Yet, with all due respect to the Mesopotamian archives that have been the focus of much recent discussion, it may be the works of the Hittite scribes that offer the most