The Scribal Tablet-House in Ancient Mesopotamia

Abstract

THE PIVOTAL ROLE of the scribe in the development of Mesopotamian culture can scarcely be exaggerated. His was the cohesive force that helped preserve and enrich one of mankind's very earliest civilizations throughout its long historical career, that impressed upon it its unique form and character, and that maintained and revitalized its vast body of traditions, customs, and ideals over the span of almost three millennia, doing so in spite of repeated social, political, and intellectual changes. With the deployment of the first practical system of writing-an innovation which obviously lent societal mores a permanence and continuity heretofore lacking-the scribe emerged early as a central figure in the workings of Mesopotamia. Thus armed with a means of fixing thought on clay, it was inevitable perhaps that the tablet-writer should come to occupy a strategic position in his several roles as temple functionary, court secretary, royal counselor, civil bureaucrat, commercial correspondent, poet, and scholar. The role and importance of the tupsarru, it has been rightly observed, might be likened to those of the clergy in medieval Europe; his lore, tupsarrutu, to that extensive body of knowledge, skills, and savoir-faire covered by the Islamic term adab. (1) Any holistic appreciation for the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, arguably, will accord pre-eminence to the scribe and his craft in ancient Near Eastern society. Traditional Assyriological scholarship, it must be said, has been duly cognizant of the practical and literary achievements of the Mesopotamian scribe, and has explored in some detail the scribal contribution to the historical evolution of both form and content in the extant - albeit fragmentary-corpus of Sumero-Akkadian and Babylonian literature. Less well developed, however, (with a few notable exceptions) has been concern and appreciation for the pedagogic means whereby scribes were prepared for their vocation, the institutions in which their training and subsequent scholarly endeavor were conducted, the character of those documents employed as objects of study, and, generally, the nature, content, and organization of formal school curricula. This is to say that while the appli