The Three Types of Scribes

J. Bottéro suggests that most of the population from the Old Babylonian period knew the 30 gods mentioned in the so-called Code of Hammurapi (LH; ca. 1750); however, he doubts that this population was familiar with most of the other gods known to us.1 These other gods are the gods whose names appear in lexical god-lists, and they are the concern only of the theologians and clerics. With the lexical god-lists in hand, these theologians and clerics had the opportunity to reflect on their universe in a way that the rest of their contemporaries could not, examining the world as one of abstraction rather than the concrete and mundane.2 According to Bottéro, the lexical list tradition in Mesopotamia imposed a linear thought process upon the ancient scribes.3 Aided by this linear thought, the scribes established a hierarchy of principals, which included not only lists of deities, but of laws, plants, or any other imaginable category. For Bottéro, it was precisely this production of and access to lexical lists that allowed the Mesopotamian scholar-scribe to establish a hierarchy within the scribal class itself and thus maintain its position at the top.

Scribal training in ancient Mesopotamia provided students with access to highly skilled instructors who were specialists in their fields.4 Training is a long process, and the

1 _{Bottéro 2001, 54. Bottéro’s assumption that all 30 gods would have been familiar to the general} population of Hammurapi’s Babylon may itself be an overreaching assumption, especially given that Dagan’s primary residence was upriver in Tuttul, near Mari. (See Tables 2.1-2.3 for lists of gods who appear in the Laws of Ḫammurapi and contemporary royal inscriptions.)

2 _{J. Bottéro, Mesopotamia: Writing, Reasoning, andtheGods (trans. Z. Bahrani and M. van der Mieroop;} Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 172.

3 _{Bottéro 1992, 173.}

4 _{M. Van der Mieroop challenges the traditional “standard opinion” that scribal instruction began in schools} with professional teachers and moved into the home with fathers teaching their sons sometime in the second millennium. Instead, he argues that scribal education may have retained the same school-based form throughout Mesopotamian history, even though there is no archaeological evidence supporting the school house theory (M. van der Mieroop, TheAncientMesopotamianCity [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999], 220). That Sumerian texts describing school life remained in the literary canon into the first millennium suggests the school based form continued (p. 221). A. R. George also argues against the standard view of large-scale

students were expected to learn more than simply reading and writing. Standard subjects taught also include literature, grammar, calculus, geometry, and music. As students progressed, their subjects became more esoteric, and their forms of writing became more complicated.5 However, according to A. Lenzi, most students completed their education when they were prepared for administrative work and did not advance to the esoteric texts6; specialization only occurred when the student needed the extra training.7 The scribal students followed a set curriculum, depending on the anticipated job of the student, as evidenced by correspondence between teacher-scribes and the king: Marduk- šumu-uṣur, Naṣīru, and Tabnȋ had to request permission to revise the series so that two extispicy tablets replace two tablets consisting of hard-word lists in the curriculum (SAA 10 177:15-r. 5). The student appears to have been training to be a diviner, so the king’s chief haruspex Marduk-šumu-uṣur and the other scribes argued that his needs would be better served by additional practical education rather than further lexical development.

As one might expect, the level of expertise a scribe reached depended upon the length of his training. A. Leo Oppenheim distinguished three distinct scribal groups

schooling, suggesting that most scribal training would have taken place in an outside courtyard rather than inside a building, even in the Old Babylonian period (A. R. George, “In Search of the é. dub.ba.a: The Ancient Mesopotamian School in Literature and Reality,” in “AnExperiencedScribeWhoNeglects Nothing”: AncientNearEasternStudiesinHonorofJacobKlein [eds. Y. Sefati, et al; Bethesda: CDL Press, 2005], 131). This is why there is an absence of archaeological evidence for the school building in the early second millennium. However, according to George, the presence of school buildings at Ur in the late third millennium may be indicative of the increased need for scribes in the highly bureaucratic system of the third dynasty of Ur III and Shulgi’s desire to have a repository of religious texts for future generations of scribes (pp. 133-135).

5 _{Van der Mieroop 1999, 221.}

6 _{Lenzi, A. SecrecyandtheGods: SecretKnowledgeinAncientMesopotamiaandBiblicalIsrael (SAAS} 19; Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2008), 146. Lenzi provides a good discussion on the amount of training needed for a scribe in the Old Babylonian period in n. 53.

7 _{U. Koch-Westenholz notes that Adad-šum-uṣur started out as a scribe but was later trained as an exorcist} when Esarhaddon needed a personal exorcist (U. Koch-Westenholz, MesopotamianAstrology: an

IntroductiontoBabylonianandAssyrianCelestialDivination [CNI Publications 19; Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1995], 57).

according to their needs and their training: the bureaucrat, the poet, and the scholar.8 The bureaucrat class was responsible for most of the documents produced in ancient

Mesopotamia, which included bookkeeping for the economic needs of businesses and temples, royal and administrative texts, as well as documenting private contracts and legal disputes. According to Van der Mieroop, most scribes worked outside of the palace and temple. “A study of Babylonian texts of the first millennium found 3,060 names of scribes who wrote Akkadian on clay tablets. Of those 2,681 worked for private

individuals, 11 for the palace, and 368 for the temples.”9 Thus, approximately 88% of these scribes worked for the public, writing contracts and receipts, and 12% worked in the temples, keeping records of cultic inventory and the disbursement of goods, among other tasks.

Only a tiny minority of Mesopotamian scribes belonged to the poet and scholar categories. Of the 3,060 scribes in van der Meiroop’s survey, the eleven who worked at the palace would be counted among those responsible for promoting the royal ideology. According to Oppenheim, the poet-scribes employed by the palace wrote and copied hymns and royal inscriptions – annals, building inscriptions, and memorial stelae, the work through which history has been passed to us today – and preserved (and revised) the epics.10 Their work allowed the Mesopotamians to maintain their cultural and intellectual heritage despite the arrival and/or invasion of the Amorites, the Kassites, or the

Arameans.11 Already in the third millennium and continuing into the first, the invading

8 _{A. L. Oppenheim, “Position of the Intellectual in Mesopotamian Society,” Daedalus 104 (1975): 39.} 9 _{Van der Mieroop 1999, 221.}

10 _{Oppenheim 1975, 40.}

11 _{J. Van Seters argues that the learned and folk traditions in ancient Mesopotamia had little in common.} Because the myths, epics, and other literary traditions that have survived to us today were written by learned members of society, little information exists about the native/vernacular literary traditions of the

nonurban kings recognized the superior status of this second-tier class of scribes,

including their well-to-do socio-economic rank, and retained their services, creating their own kingdoms but borrowing the scribes’ culture and bureaucratic know-how.12