gramme reinforced the use of increasingly standardised textual forms in building a
scribe’s stock of culturally significant material.^1331
Despite this trend towards standardisation, the idea that written texts were somehow
‘canonised’ in this period must be rejected. As can be seen from the number of variants
recorded for the majority of textual forms examined in this study, it is clear that, although
there is a recognisable integrity to the general forms of our sources, the specific details of
those written forms remained quite fluid in the first millennium B.C.E. This is true even
of texts that are ostensibly part of the same localised collection, such as is the case with
many of the tablets recovered from Kuyunjik. This would seem to support Carr’s model
of a principally memory-driven mode of textual transmission, for which written forms of
the text served as authoritative reference points to aid a scribe’s recollection, but were
ultimately not the primary source for the reproduction of long-duration texts. The primary
sources that a scribe dealt with, even in the first millennium B.C.E., were those that had
been committed to memory.
This point has been well discussed in the scholarly literature. In an important paper F.
Rochberg-Halton argued that the concept of ‘canonisation,’ as it relates to first millen-
nium B.C.E. cuneiform literature, can only apply to very generalised conceptions of tex-
tual stability and fixed tablet sequence.^1332 Beneath these generally standardised forms of
(^1331) D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart (^) , 46.
(^1332) Rochberg-Halton notes that by the seventh century B.C.E. some cuneiform ‘scientific’ series (particular
divinatory, medical and magical texts) had “attained a kind of literary stabilization in the sense that old
material was conscientiously maintained in its traditional form and new material was no longer being in-
corporated ... [but] a degree of flexibility remained permissible in the content, in terms of exactly what a