CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ADMINISTRATORS AND SCHOLARS:

THE FIRST SCRIBES



Jon Taylor

W

e can only really approach scribal ethos obliquely via the writing system and
such documentation as was written using it and has been excavated, published
and understood by modern scholarship. Explicit statements on what it meant to be a
scribe, and what values a scribe should hold, are completely lacking from the third
millennium. Virtually all the material available to us is administrative in nature, often
laconic, and not always easy to understand. We can pick out numbers and com-
modities, personal names, official titles, some processes, and a few dates. The context
behind the documents is rarely spelled out, since such information was self-evident
for those producing the documentation. Some progress has been made in recon-
structing the various bureaus and their systems, but more needs to be done. And of
course the sources available to us are far from evenly distributed. Our knowledge of the
archaic period is dominated by the texts from Uruk, almost all found in tertiary context
in a small area of the site; our knowledge of ED IIIa is dominated by archives from Fara
(a major center, but most of whose texts may derive from a single year) and Abu
Salabikh (a minor one, which has yielded almost entirely scholarly texts); that of ED
IIIb by an archive from Girsu, documenting maybe twenty years of one household.
Most of what we know about Sumerian literature derives from a brief period of time
in a post-Sumerian age, and is dominated by remains from the education of a small
handful of scribes. Such textual hotspots are accompanied by numerous smaller finds
of tablets, from a range of sites across Mesopotamia and neighboring areas. Were we
able accurately to date and provenance every single available text, and display the
results in a single image, we would see scattered specks of light against an over-
whelming sea of darkness, punctuated by a few spots of intense brightness. We can only
hope that what survives gives us a reasonably representative impression of what once
existed. The history of the field suggests otherwise, however.

THE FIRST SCRIBE(S): THE LATE URUK PERIOD

A technological revolution

With the benefit of hindsight, the invention of writing is recognizable as one of the
most momentous events in human history. Modern life is unthinkable without it. Yet
at the time, this extraordinary invention would have gone largely unnoticed. And even