Early Dynastic scribes seem to have been considered, maybe even by themselves, as
a type of craftsman, like various other professionals who performed skilled work with
their hands. The high status of some scribes is visible in new ways: at Lagash one of
King Ur-Nanshe’s wall plaques depicts Namazu the scribe alongside the royal family
(Cooper 1986 : La 1. 4 ); King Enanatum’s scribe of the treasury (Cooper 1986 : La 4. 17 )
commissions votive clay nails; and many examples are known from Old Akkadian
cylinder seals of scribes who were honored “servants” of royalty or local potentates.
An unsolved mysteryOne persistently enigmatic scribal habit of the Early Dynastic period is the use of so-
called UD.GAL.NUN orthography. This gets its (modern!) name from a commonly
found combination of three signs – UD, GAL, and NUN – which represented the
name of the god Enlil. The system works on a series of what appear to us to be sign
substitutions. Here UD stands for normal orthography AN, GAL for EN, and NUN
for LIL 2. The substitutions are based on similarities in form, sound or meaning, as far
as can be discerned. This orthography is used sporadically in texts of (almost always)
literary nature, in Fara, Abu Salabikh, and Nippur. UD.GAL.NUN and normal
orthography may switch within a text and even within a word. Some UD.GAL.NUN
sign values are also attested outside the corpus. It has been argued that UD.GAL.NUN
is to be explained as a scribal code, or that it is the survival of an alternative use of
writing. Whatever its origin, the practice soon died out, perhaps actively suppressed,
with only isolated instances surviving. Other old-fashioned practices also survive, such
as the habit of writing ZU.EN and ZU.AB for Suen and abzu, or GAL-combinations
like GAL.USHUM for ushumgal and the LUGAL sign written as GAL+LU 2. Such
orthographic habits, combined with what we know of third millennium practices
in the arrangement of signs, and numerous examples of variant practice in the writ-
ing of noun and adjective pairings in archaic texts, render efforts to use the order of
such pairings to determine the underlying language of the archaic texts futile.
UD.GAL.NUN is exceptional, which is perhaps surprising, given the long history and
numerous scribal centers and cultures of Mesopotamia.
A branching traditionWhen the art of writing spread to new centers such as Ebla in Syria, it traveled as a
package. The scribal practices seem to be heavily colored by Mesopotamian models.
Copies of the lists are being found at many sites, including Tell Brak, Tell Mozan, and
Tell Beydar. These scribes would learn words for species that they would never
encounter, and places they would never visit. We also know from Ebla that trainee
scribes could be sent to more established centers for expert training. The colophons
of two lists from Ebla note a time “When the young scribes came up from Mari”
(Pettinato 1981 : nos. 47 , 50 ). Another Ebla text is labeled as being written by a scribe
of Kish (Pettinato 1981 : no. 73 ). Indeed, Kish seems to have been home to a northern
branch of cuneiform tradition, whose influence was felt at western sites like Mari and
Ebla (Gelb 1981 ). A noteworthy innovation of the Ebla school was a long list of signs
known as the Ebla Vocabulary. The order of signs was governed by that found in the
Standard Professions List. The traveling scribes of Ebla point toward what was
probably a much wider phenomenon. We are unlikely to be too far wrong if we posit
–– The first scribes ––