In the past few decades, scholars such as Alison Beach, Diane Watt, Pamela Robinson, Henrike Lähnemann, and Kim Haines-Eitzen-to name just a very few- have made important strides in emphasizing how many pre-modern female scribes existed, and how many texts and manuscripts they helped to transmit and create. Some of the most studied surviving manuscripts and texts-including one of the earliest and most complete Bible manuscripts and the earliest Old English chronicle-have been associated with female scribes at one time or another. “Who is your favourite pre-modern, female scribe?” If you were to ask any cataloguer, librarian, curator or scholar of pre-modern writing that question, they would probably have a few interesting examples.įrom ancient Mesopotamian scribes like Amat-Mamu to illuminators like Enda to famous poets like Christine de Pizan, female scribes existed in all regions and time periods. Image above: Christine de Pizan writing, from a manuscript that contains her autograph (Paris, BnF Français 835, f. Writing in Iraq from Sumer to the Islamic period An overview of writing in Iraq from Sumer to the Islamic period, with objects to investigate.By Alison Hudson, University of Central Florida Mesopotamian and other Flood stories Mesopotamian and other Flood stories The Flood Tablet A History of the World in 100 objects: the Flood Tablet listen to the programme or read the transcript. The origins of writing in Sumer Article on the origins of writing in Sumer. īrief account of Uruk Brief account of Uruk with further links. The development of writing An introduction to the development of writing on the British Museum website. Another tablet, deciphered only recently, gives instructions for building the boat.Ī discussion on a similar tablet A History of the World in 100 objects: this discussion is based on a similar tablet listen to the programme or read the transcript. Probably the most famous cuneiform tablet relates an episode in the story of the hero Gilgamesh, in which a man survives a great flood sent by the gods by building a boat. Later cuneiform tablets provide examples of scientific observation, religious ritual, treaties, letters, poetry and insights into how life worked in the Mesopotamian world. While record-keeping and administration were the reason for the development of writing, it was soon used for stories, beliefs, memories and other creative outputs. The scribes formed, in effect, a civil service and we know from later tablets that they worked in different aspects of the administration such as the palace, the weaving mills or the temples.
MESOPOTAMIA SCRIBE PROFESSIONAL
These in turn required a body of professional scribes and an organised, regulated system of training them. It required a high level of accuracy, mathematical competence, and a standardised set of measurements appropriate to the different commodities being recorded. Once writing had been invented, it quickly became the preferred system of record-keeping, replacing the earlier methods. We can tell from the written tablets what needed to be recorded: quantities of crops such as barley and emmer, foodstuffs such as beer and bread, the numbers of sheep and cattle, the numbers of labourers in the workforce, the size of fields and the amount of seed required to sow them.
The uses of early writingĪs the activities of the early Mesopotamian city-states became increasingly complex, organisational structures were put in place to administer and control the economy, and methods of keeping records were developed based on clay tokens and simple mark-making. The simpler back of the tablet is the sum of the calculations on the front. Other signs record the official responsible for the transaction. There are four distinct numeral signs: large and small circles with and without two extra strokes. The symbol for barley appears six times front and back, represented by a single stalk with ears at the top. This tablet is marked with symbols showing quantities of barley rations for workers. The writer used a stylus made from a stick or reed to impress the symbols in the clay, then left the tablet in the air to harden. Most writing from ancient Mesopotamia is on clay tablets. Cuneiform script spread from Sumer and eventually was used to write around fifteen different languages in ancient Iraq and other parts of the Middle East down to the 1st century AD. In later cuneiform there were more than 600 symbols which could be used to write very efficiently. Gradually, these pictograms were made more abstract and developed into a form of writing known as cuneiform which used wedge-shapes to form symbols. The first Sumern writing used simplified pictures called pictograms which represented objects. The earliest examples of writing known anywhere in the world are from Sumer and date to around 3200 BC.
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