ABSTRACT

We can only really approach scribal ethos obliquely via the writing system andsuch documentation as was written using it and has been excavated, published and understood by modern scholarship. Explicit statements on what it meant to be a scribe, and what values a scribe should hold, are completely lacking from the third millennium. Virtually all the material available to us is administrative in nature, often laconic, and not always easy to understand. We can pick out numbers and commodities, personal names, official titles, some processes, and a few dates. The context behind the documents is rarely spelled out, since such information was self-evident for those producing the documentation. Some progress has been made in reconstructing the various bureaus and their systems, but more needs to be done. And of course the sources available to us are far from evenly distributed. Our knowledge of the archaic period is dominated by the texts from Uruk, almost all found in tertiary context in a small area of the site; our knowledge of ED IIIa is dominated by archives from Fara (a major center, but most of whose texts may derive from a single year) and Abu Salabikh (a minor one, which has yielded almost entirely scholarly texts); that of ED IIIb by an archive from Girsu, documenting maybe twenty years of one household. Most of what we know about Sumerian literature derives from a brief period of time in a post-Sumerian age, and is dominated by remains from the education of a small handful of scribes. Such textual hotspots are accompanied by numerous smaller finds of tablets, from a range of sites across Mesopotamia and neighboring areas. Were we able accurately to date and provenance every single available text, and display the results in a single image, we would see scattered specks of light against an overwhelming sea of darkness, punctuated by a few spots of intense brightness. We can only hope that what survives gives us a reasonably representative impression of what once existed. The history of the field suggests otherwise, however.