From this we can make the preliminary observation that, based on the mīs pî sources from
Nineveh in the first millennium BCE, ritual texts may have been more likely to attain and
maintain a level of stabilisation throughout their transmission than some other types of
texts. The same may be said of legal texts based on LH, but the extent to which this is an
effect of the accidental preservation of the tablets is unclear. Our samples of ritual texts
stemming from a centralised locus reflect the highest levels of stabilisation among the
cuneiform sources encountered in this examination. As will be discussed below, this find-
ing is supported by recent scholarship on the history of the transmission of the biblical
text in its ritual context.
In a recent publication D.M. Carr put forward a theory for the transmission of the biblical
text in the first millennium B.C.E. that emphasised the role of education mechanisms in
the propagation and stabilisation of what he called ‘long-duration texts.’^1326 Carr’s idea is
that the process of educating scribes in various ancient Near Eastern cultures was focused
on the memorisation of culturally significant texts. This process, by which scribes were
trained to commit whole texts to memory, instilled apprentice scribes with an arsenal of
established structures, phrases and motifs that could be utilised to reproduce culturally
significant texts, or, at more advanced levels of training and aptitude, to produce new
texts based on the skeletal structures and motifs acquired through the earlier memorisa-
(^1326) D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature (^) (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005) 4. Carr’s term ‘long-duration texts’ describes “texts that have been used over a long
period of time,” quite often in multiple editions and recensions, and that have been copied and transmitted
by generations of scribes within a given textual tradition. This definition naturally precludes ‘one-off’ texts
such as mathematical tablets, autographed correspondence, astronomical diaries, accounting texts, etc. Such
texts have also been precluded from the present study, for which see above, page 55.