persist so long and why were they so widespread in the Near
Eastern world? It may all have had to do with tradition, and a
relatively‘closed shop’when it came to the acquisition of literacy
skills. Scribes in all ancient Near Eastern cultures formed an elite
professional class. Given that the great majority of the population
were largely if not entirely illiterate, the scribe’s services were
indispensable at all levels of society–even to their royal masters.
The more difficult it was to master literacy skills, the greater the
importance of those who did, and the more privileged their
position. The status scribes enjoyed, particularly those at the top of
their profession, made well worthwhile their many years of training
and the undoubted tedium associated with acquiring the skills
demanded of the profession. Some of the most important scribes
became close confidantes and advisers of the king. And those at the
lowest levels of the profession, who served as clerks and copyists,
might well have looked forward to career progression through ever
higher levels of importance and responsibility.
So let’s imagine what we might call the scriptoria of the Hittite
world, the places where the scribes carried out most of their
work.Figure2.1is a reconstruction of one of these. The scribal
establishments were closely associated with the palace and the
temples of the capital and regional centres of the Hittite world.
Hatti’s vassal states must also have had such establishments, where
copies of the treaties imposed upon local rulers would have been
kept, along with letters, or copies of them, that passed between the
vassal and his overlord. Clay was the most common writing
material used for these documents. But there was a special category
of scribes who wrote on wood–as we know from references in the
clay tablets to‘scribes of the wooden tablets’.
Unfortunately, no wooden tablets have survived from the
archives, so we can only guess what their contents or functions may
have been. Quite likely, they were used for ephemeral matters, such
as memos or bulletins, or for making temporary records of
accounts, grain distribution, inventories of goods and the like.
To judge from the remains of a wooden tablet found in a Bronze
Age shipwreck off the southwestern coast of Anatolia, the wooden
tablets may have been diptychs–that is, two hinged tablets, with a
18 WARRIORS OF ANATOLIA