L. Peyronel, A Varied World of Written Words. Some Thoughts on the Oldest Materiality of Scribal and Record-Keeping Practices in the Ancient Near East, c. 3500-2400 BCE (original) (raw)
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Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East
Announcing the publication of a new online, open access journal: Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East Aims and Scope The study of the human past has conventionally been divided between two distinct academic disciplines depending upon the kind of evidence under investigation: "history", with its focus on written records, and "archaeology", which analyzes the remains of material culture. Archaeology and Text: A Journal for the Integration of Material Culture with Written Documents in the Ancient Mediterranean and Near East aims to bridge this disciplinary divide by providing an international forum for scholarly discussions which integrate the studies of material culture with written documents. Interdisciplinary by nature, the journal offers a platform for professional historians and archaeologists alike to critically investigate points of confluence and divergence between the textual and the artifactual. We seek contributions from scholars working in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Contributions with a theoretical or methodological focus on the interface between archaeology and text are especially encouraged. By publishing all of its articles online, Archaeology and Text seeks to disseminate its published papers immediately after the peer-review and editorial processes have been completed, providing timely publication and convenient access. Editors-in-chief: David B. Small (Lehigh University) Yonatan Adler (Ariel University) Former Editor-in-chief (Vol. 1): Itzick Shai (Ariel University)
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)
The Tablet and its Scribe: Between Archival and Scribal Spaces in Late Empire Period Ḫattusa
This study explores the personal copyist statement in the tablet colophons, the scribes who appear in them and the tablets’ findspots in order to demonstrate the relationships between text, scribe and the scholarly work environment of Hattusa in the late Empire period (second half of the 13th cent. BC). It is initially demonstrated how Hittite scribal statements were appended to specific types of texts and had a recurring structure that reflects their purpose. A look at festivals follows. Two large Hittite festivals, the hisuwa and AN.TAH.SUM, were both prepared by scholars related to or working under Walwaziti, the chief scribe of Hattusili III, and his family. However, at some point, perhaps during the reign of Tudhaliya IV, the complex work on the AN.TAH.SUM festival came under the authority of another scribal group, that of Anuwanza. In this context it is also considered whether certain shelf lists may have been accounts of tablets removed from an archival section.
The Judaean Desert documents (often named 'the Dead Sea Scrolls') constitute the largest corpus of texts in non-lapidary scripts providing information about scribal habits in early Israel relating to biblical and non-biblical texts. They may be compared with other texts in Hebrew and Aramaic in non-lapidary scripts, especially the large corpora of Elephantine papyri and other Aramaic manuscripts from the 5 th and 4 th centuries BCE. These two groups of documents are highly significant as comparative material for the present analysis; among other things, evidence shows that the manuscripts from the Judaean Desert continued the writing tradition of the Aramaic documents from the 5 th century BCE in several respects. For the purpose of this study, the following areas have been singled out from the many scribal aspects of manufacturing and preparing the Judaean Desert documents: the local production of written material in the Judaean Desert, special characteristics of the Qumran corpus, the reasons behind the scribal peculiarities of the Qumran corpus, internal differences between the Qumran caves, and chronological differences between the corpora.
Scribes and their handnotes: the Linear B documents from rooms 7-8 in the Mycenaean palace of Pylos
2024
This paper investigates the information that can be drawn from the Linear B tablets in Rooms 7–8 (Archives Complex) and their context, which advocate the ephemeral character of these documents. The morphological and syntactical traits of the various scribes, as well as the physical characteristics of the artifacts themselves, point to non-conventional organisation patterns. The lack of systematic arrangement at all levels of scribal production raises questions regarding the likelihood of having a storage area for tablets kept in the Archives Complex (AC) for an extended period, from several months to a year. Whether these rooms could cope with storing long term (from 2–3 months up to 1 year?) an ever-increasing number of written documents is now open to question. In all aspects, the Linear B documents and their spatially limited context present us with difficulties in accepting their categorisation as an official, archival, assemblage. Moreover, all the archaeological data point to a more temporary and slipshod corpus of tablets than previously thought.