cuneiform texts were a series of ‘streams of tradition’ that included the authoritative writ-
ten form, extrinsic materials that adjoined and informed the primary texts, and orally
communicated traditions that supplemented each of these components.^1333 Again, Carr’s
view of the primacy of memorisation in textual transmission explains the general ten-
dency for standardisation that seems to co-exist with instances of specific fluidity in the
various sources examined here.
While processes of textual transmission by memorisation allowed for divergence in spe-
cific forms of texts in many cases, from the evidence we have presented it would seem
that such was not the case regarding the ritual and legal texts presented here. In particular
the mīs pî ritual at Nineveh appears to have been transmitted with a degree of attention
given to a specific written form that is not paralleled in the other textual genres. Instead
we find that scribes copying an epic, an observational scientific text and part of an omen
series did so with a much diminished degree of exactitude than did scribes copying a rit-
ual instruction text. In the case of the legal text, the legal material itself may adhere to a
relatively rigid form, but the poetic sections that bookend the laws show levels of varia-
tion on par with the majority of texts examined.
(^) particular tablet was to include and in what order, thus resulting in only a relative stabilization of the word-
ing of the text ... Exact wording does not seem to have been an essential ingredient in textual transmission”
(F. Rochberg-Halton, "Canonicity in Cuneiform Texts," 1333 JCS 36 [1984] 127-28).
The phrase ‘streams of tradition’ is borrowed from A.L. Oppenhein, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of
a Dead Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) 13. Rochberg-Halton also mentions a
possible forth stream constituting scholarly commentaries, explanatory word lists, excerpts, and “other
forms of scholia” ("Canonicity," 130).