Soft clay & grassy muck by rivers — when materials are the medium and the message

Moses is said to write on stone. Ezekiel to write on wood. Zechariah sees a flying scroll, Daniel sees ghost-writing on a wall, and the Israelites are commanded to write on doorposts (mezuza) and in boxes strapped to the head and arms (tefellin).

“The earliest Hebrew writing goes back to the 15th or 14th centuries BC and is found on metal, pottery bowls, and an ostracon used as an abecedary. By the 10th century, royal records were being kept…seals and signet rings go back to the 8th century BC, and writing on ivory goes back to the same period, while the earliest fragments of the Bible (Num. 6:24–6) are found on two silver scrolls that date from slightly later. …Baked clay ostraca were used for receipts, lists, tax records, and drafts. The Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments found between 1947 and 1956 in caves near Qumran, include the earliest surviving biblical texts written on animal skins.” (Craig Kallendorf, “The Ancient Book,” 41)

According to Jodi Magness, 85–90% of the scrolls found at the Dead Sea were made of vellum, a processed animal hide. Papyrus accounts for 8–13% of the scrolls, while about 1% were made of bronze (Magness, 33).

In order to talk about scribal materials — I will develop the example of the clay tablet as a writing substance. I choose clay, not because it is the most common substance of Hebrew textual media, as the above clearly shows. I choose it because Hebrew writing (and the proto-semitic scripts) emerged at a fascinating moment in the history of language and writing materials. Although Cuneiform persisted long past the emergence of Hebrew, the clay tablet died with the demise of Cuneiform writing, while alphabetic scripts like Hebrew could be inscribed on a far greater diversity of writing substances.

Other factors commend this inquiry into the substance of clay, as well. As I will suggest below, clay was especially important to exorcist scribes in Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia’s exorcist scribes learned a large corpus of knowledge and practiced a variety of diagnostic and therapeutic medical services. But they also became important text-makers, text-transmitters, and text-commentators. In their profession, clay was a central material.

West Asian exorcism is a ripe sociological practice and cultural domain of knowledge for this inquiry into the materiality of writing. The exorcist’s pervasive use of clay, their medical knowledge/practice, and their role as scribes in text-making is just far too tantalizing an assemblage to ignore.

But the mucky places and the marshes will not be healed

Ezekiel 47:11

Most importantly, I choose to focus on clay because of the significance of soil-dirt-dust-clay in Hebrew poetics. Examples from Hebrew texts include the phrase, ‘the tablet of the heart,’ the term ‘groundling’ ('āḏām/'ăḏāmâ) for human/man, and the many body metaphors in poetry that invoke clay, pottery, pots, shards, morter, whitewash, dust, ash, silt, dregs, muck, riverbeds, dung, stones, desert, soil, seeds, and fields.

The thesis is simple: the materiality of writing and the bodily experiences with specific material media — matters — for a cultural study of bodies, discourses, and writing. It matters in three ways that follow on each other: (1) How does the scribe handle the material? (2) How is the body of the scribe shaped by the material? (3) What discourses are made possible by the materiality of writing — what ideologies, values, attitudes, concepts, metonyms, and metaphors of experience do or can the substance conjure? and finally…(4) What social domains adopted clay as a material for writing?

(1) First, how does the scribe handle the material?

Clay is engaged by the scribe’s body during four phases of scribal practice: collection, preparation, inscription, and circulation. Someone must collect clay from the ground. Someone must prepare clay by shaping it into a tablet. Someone must inscribe the clay with writing. Someone must circulate the clay writing whether that circulation involves storage, recitation, or transmission. This list: collection, preparation, inscription, and circulation captures the experiential domains of writing — and each of them matters to a cultural study of texts.

For clay tablets, as Haslam points out, the act of inscription likely cannot be separated from preparation, since soft clay hardens relatively quickly.

Cuneiform originates in clay, and the two make naturally good partners. Already well established in the third millennium not only in Sumer, where it is generally reckoned to have originated, but in Elam to the east and at Ebla to the west, the clay tablet was a textual medium shared by many different languages and cultures. The materials, unlike the scribal skills needed to use them, were not hard to acquire. Rivers provided the clay, marshes the reeds from which styli were cut. The production process was technologically simple. The soft clay was shaped and smoothed, the ‘wedges’ that comprised the characters were imprinted with the stylus, to form those mysterious signs that somehow represented language. (Haslam, 145)

A scribe might even collect the clay. Indeed, collection is required by the exorcist in other aspects of his work — for preparing the clay figurines used for medical therapy and treatment. The exorcist travels to a designated place, often an established clay pit, to harvest the clay he will use to shape a figurine which he will then manipulate and usually destroy in his treatment. Meanwhile, he orally recites the text of this incantation ritual from a hardened clay tablet. He touches clay throughout all phases of his medical practice. It stands to reason that an exorcist would be more likely than other scribal professions to engage all phases of scribal materiality as he collects, prepares, inscribes, and circulates (via healing performance) the substance of his texts.

In preparing to notice the idiomatic power of clay in exorcist discourses (in their roles as not just writers, but healers, diagnosticians, prognosticians, plant-specialists, incantation experts, etc.) — we should pause to appreciate what “clay expertise” would mean: professional knowledge of clay would include features like clay geography, type, color, density, quality, hybridity, time-to-dry, hardness, durability — these features of clay would be well known to working scribes.

He drew me up

out of a tumultuous pit,

out of the miry clay

Psalm 40:2

(2) How is the body of the scribe shaped by the material?

If the writer forms and manipulates the clay, the opposite is also true: the substance forms the writer’s body. In order to discuss how a writing material forms bodily experience, including not just the phenomenon of working with the substance, but also living in the assemblages of social, economic, and political formations that normalize the material practices — I am actually not going to focus on clay as opposed to other writing materials (papyrus, parchment/vellum, and other various materials), but rather on clay texts as opposed to oral texts. It is easier to convey and explore how writing on clay shaped the writer’s body differently from oral knowledge/performance traditions, and frankly, there is just so much more written on the consequential transition from orality to writing.

So, what was the impact on culture, society, and scribalism when antiquity went through its cultural transition from oral to written texts, a transition that many scholars critically study? Perhaps foremost we must recognize that such a transition does not happen quickly. Nor does it permeate everywhere at the same pace or intensity. Clay tablets co-existed beside oral textualities for many hundreds or thousands of years. And different cultures, communities, and individuals mixed their textual media in different ways. But even with all these caveats, written texts introduced intense cultural changes with wide-reaching impact. For instance, Michael Haslam sensitizes us to the embodied experience of “the physical media themselves, the media of poems recurrently instantiated in concretely textualized form, where the eye takes precedence over the ear as the organ of reception.” (Haslam, 142) This sexy phrase, “organ of reception” names the eye as the body part in the physical relationship between an inscribed object and its reader.

The cultural importance of the new “organ of reception” cannot be understated. Here we have a significant, embodied, phenomenological change that is perhaps the single most important social fact — the new role for the eye in both receiving and transmitting texts. From oral to written, the story-teller and text-maker shifts away from the language-making powers of the mouth, tongue, vocal chords, belly, and breath — to the text-making powers of inscription, which engages eyes, hands, fingers, body posture (presumably a seated position), and probably the neck straining against the weight of the head. New body parts are drawn into the cultural domain of text-making, and hence new body parts are “felt” in the practices of text-making, while new body idioms become possible, imaginable, and indeed normed. [This is a point Walter Ong makes in his work on media history, the beginnings of writing, and sensory change].

As much as a list of body parts is fascinating, this question can be deepened by modern theoretical lenses, like thinking about textual material with the phenomological body of Maurice Merleau–Ponty, the practiced body (habitus) of Pierre Bourdieu, and the docile, disciplined body of Michel Foucault, etc. All of the smells involved in making clay tablets, the methods for lighting a tablet surface, the economies of producing clay pits and selling or trading or storing clay, and the new architectural spaces where text-makers work … all of these clay-adjacent built worlds and experiential domains shape new sensory norms, new practical habits, and new disciplinary social structures. Whenever bodies experience broad reaching social changes, a usually vast arena of cultural domains are impacted. Power is always redistributed, sometimes radically.

Meanwhile, even as a class of scribes arise and new practices and idioms related to clay tablets emerge — we should expect to see “relics” of orality everywhere, especially in the idioms of practice. To make this point, it is helpful to look at our own society’s media revolution — the digital transformation of print culture. Even though we today adopt tech media practices, using websites, emails, personal computers, and cells phones, we retain numerous relics of print language, applying them to digital practices: We still say send an email, save in a folder, include an attachment, click on the button, make a web- page, upload the document, write a paper, etc. etc. etc. Called skeuomorphs in modern-day computing, the imitation of print culture in digital media reflects how new technologies recycle design features from older or different artifacts that are made a different materials. These other material artifacts are morphed and embedded in new designs in order to domesticate new “user interfaces” in established practices. This is not just conceptual mimicry. It is a material transference of one materiality into another.

The preceding three paragraphs explored, (a) the body parts that are experientially engaged by the media material, (b) the cultural domains and arrangements of power created around the new media, and (c) the way language idioms apply old media to new media experiences. These three points all anticipate my third question — what discourses are made possible by the new media

(3) What discourses are made possible by the materiality of writing — what ideologies, values, attitudes, concepts, metonyms, and metaphors of experience do or can the substance conjure?

As I just mentioned, new discourses could emerge in relation to (1) sensory bodies engaged by the material media, (b) the cultural domains that emerge around the material media, or (c) the way old language can be reapplied to new contexts. As I write this, I am more clear than ever that numerous discourses can be made possible by the materiality of writing.

To take a less obvious implication of my question — what values and attitudes towards texts can the specific substance generate or norm? For example, today we read books that bear text on paper made from the woody pulp of trees, though we rarely stop to think about those origins. We are more likely to recall the place the book sits on the shelf or the person who gave it to us — such is the materiality of modern consumerism and global industrial capitalism. Modern society and its embodied, material, lived worlds are significantly divorced from the materiality of production. However, the materiality of our print-media, i.e., the woody substance of books, would be more palpable to us if we were involved in book–making, which is a more accurate analogy for ancient clay tablets (less-so animal skin or papyrus leaves or rolls). Nevertheless, even without mashing tree pulp to make paper, we may yet conjure thoughts about the materiality of books. Depending on the context, we might have very different values and associations with tree-pulp and paper making. Just one example, but a dramatic and intense context for thinking about print/paper-making — the era of climate change and the rise of global warming. With this frame on media — most of us are aware that we do not have enough trees to swallow the monstrous plumes of CO2 in the air. This knowledge may lead us to gaze on books differently, categorizing them with toilet paper instead of the Western canon of great literature. To put my point succinctly, the materiality of media can shape people’s aesthetics and attitudes about the texts carried by the media. In my example, print-media in the era of mass industrial production and climate change can absolutely shape people’s aesthetic appreciation for what a century ago would have been a “world classic” of literature. [unfinished…]

(4) What social domains adopted language written on clay? — a growing list…

• Sumerian cuneiform writing emerged in “economic” or exchange contexts. Writing came to be useful as an arithmatic and representational short-hand. It was inscribed onto small clay pods, called bullae, which held little figurines or tokens marking the transaction. The tokens themselves seemed to originate as small cones, spheres, or discs, but more complex tokens emerged, like pots, plants, tools, and animals — to keep track of exchanges of livestock, grain, and other goods. [See Schmandt-Besserat 1992, 1996, and her website at UTexas].

• But the more developed concept of “writing” emerged in Mesopotamian contexts of commemoration and afterlife. Schmandt-Besserat argues that the early scripts on tokens needed the Mesopotamian belief in an afterlife to invent writing. “The Mesopotamians believed that to secure eternal life their names had to be kept alive by being spoken after their death. To insure the eternal vitality of their names and their ghosts, the Mesopotamians repurposed the old accounting symbols into phonetic signs “spelling” out a person’s name. Individuals’ names were inscribed on funerary offerings and served, in effect, as perpetual utterances of a name. Over time, the phonetic name inscriptions evolved into phonetic sentences appealing to the gods for eternal life. These impassioned supplications were the final stage of transition from the clay tokens of old into the first writing.” [Schmandt-Besserat] Intermediate steps between the economic and funerary social domains, according to Schmandt-Besserat, included (a) A more complex exchange practice where tokens began to function more like lexical lists that could be used as a teaching tool; (b) Temple tithes, a religio-economic social context, initiated written inscriptions of individual names, using a new language technology of phonetic scripts. (c) Ironically, it was metal or more precious materials that transformed what writing could be and do. In Schmandt-Besserat’s account, one of the crucial social contexts where writing developed was in burial contexts. For example, in Ur’s royal cemetery, writing was etched onto valuable funerary goods that surrounded the deceased — metal, furniture, etc. Continued development of writing can be seen on alabaster figurines of people where scripted language named them and developed a poetics of prayer to a god or temple that would guarantee the person’s afterlife. Dated to roughly 2700-2300 BCE, the writing on these valuable materials supercharged the emergence of “literature” — by 2000BCE, we are in the “classical period” of Babylonian writing.

• Numerous clay figurines have been discovered in ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant.

  • Popular in Mesopotamia during the late third and second millennium (until about 1700 BCE), clay molds (referred to as terracotta plaques) indicate that figurines were mass produced (Graff). Usually the molds formed nude females although males and couples are attested. Scholars most frequently associate the figurines with fertility or erotica.

  • Based on her excavations, Carolyn Nakamura has rethought the diachronic categories of clay figurines. [See “Mastering Matters”]

• Figurines are mentioned in numerous ritual and medical texts. For example,

to be continued….

[draft thoughts below…]

The Physical World of Alphabetic Scripts: Ideograms, Proto-Canaanite Scripts, and Hebrew Abjads

The techniques of writing that invented alphabetic scripts are widely agreed to have emerged in the Levant / Eastern Mediterranean. The alphabet’s origins in ideograms matters.

For more information about the development of the alphabet, see “The Alphabet, a Remarkable Journey from Sinai to Beijing” (Expedition Magazine), The Penn Museum’s “Evolution of the Alphabet” in their Eastern Mediterranean Exhibit, Johanna Drucker’s Inventing the Alphabet (U Chicago Press), Marco Conderelli, “A Short History of Writing,” Christopher Rollston, “The Emergence of Alphabetic Scripts,” Denise Schmandt-Besserat’s “The Evolution of Writing,” and The History of Visual Communication (based on P.B. Meggs, The History of Graphic Design).

Video Credit: Published in the digital presentation of Penn Museum’s new Eastern Mediterranean Gallery

A (aleph) is regularly traced to a symbol for an ox. It was used as a dinger, a symbolic shorthand for economic notations. B (bet) is traced to a symbol for a house. R (resh) to a symbol for a head. But others are less secure and not widely agreed upon.

Published proposals for bodily origins of alphabetic symbols that I have seen made by scholars are:

• G (ג) — foot

• H (ה) — breath

• I (י) — hand

• K (כ) — palm of hand

• M (מ from mayim) — water

• O (ע) — eye

• P (פ) — mouth

• R (ר) — head

Michael W. Haslam, “The Physical Media: Tablet, Scroll, Codex” in John Miles Foley (ed), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Blackwell, 2005).

• ‘The Lord of Aratta scrutinized the clay. But the spoken word was a nail’ (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta).” (Haslam, 145)

• “the physical media themselves, the media of poems recurrently instantiated in concretely textualized form, where the eye takes precedence over the ear as the organ of reception.” (142)

• “The principal media may be said to be three: clay tablet, papyrus scroll, and parchment codex. That will mundanely determine the organization of this chapter. Underlying the physical forms is the intersection of writing systems and materials. Cuneiform script(‘‘wedge’’-writing) is correlated with clay, while alphabetic Greek came into the Egyptian tradition of papyrus and ink. That is a mini-set of data with implications and ramifications that go far beyond the scope of this chapter. Another important factor is the cultural function performed by textualization. Written epic is typically not put on public display,does not take the monumental form of incised stone. Rather than memorializing, it preserves and transmits itself, in the more dynamic form of what may broadly be called books.” (142)

• “A stripped-down narrative account would go like this. The standard textual vehicle throughout the Near East (Egypt apart), for some three thousand years, was the clay tablet. It died not with the advent of papyrus but with the death of cuneiform, killed off by Aramaic. Sumerian and Akkadian epic went with it, as did Ugaritic (see Chapter 16,by Wyatt). Greek and Latin literature was carried on papyrus scrolls. Later the codex form superseded the scroll, and papyrus was displaced by parchment. That account embeds more than facts, and certainly needs refining and contextualizing, but it is usable.The main divide, unmistakably, is between Near Eastern on the one hand, in cuneiform,and Greek and Latin on the other, in pen and ink; the interface between the Ancient Near East and early Greece (see Chapter 20, by Burkert) did not extend to the written medium.The papyrus scroll, for its part, has as long a history as the cuneiform clay tablet, but within the Greek-Latin continuum something remarkable occurs: a shift of medium, as the scroll gave way to the codex.” (142)

• “But other media too come into play, which fit less neatly into this already over-tidy schema.Sometimes used for high-class library texts in Mesopotamia, alongside clay tablets but far less visible in the archaeological record (see Chapter 9, by Sherratt), were wax-surfaced boards (or tablets) of wood or ivory. Two things give wax tablets special interest. They bridge the cuneiform/alphabet divide. And unlike clay tablets they can be joined together; the most familiar form is the diptych, a joined pair, but they were often multiple.” (143)

• “And then there is skin. For ink-written scripts in the Near East and other regions where papyrus was not available (it was an Egyptian product), and sometimes even where it was, suitably prepared animal skins were used; they could be cut to shape and stitched together. Preparation techniques are complex, but skin and papyrus make com-parable writing materials. Unfortunately, the history of writing-skins prior to the emergence of the parchment codex early in the Roman empire is exceptionally hard to track,and their use for epic is quite uncertain. These matters will receive more attention below,as will the well-attested but relatively short-lived papyrus codex, a second-generation bastard.” (143)

• “‘Book,’ ‘epic’ – we are dealing in terms and concepts far more at home in Greek and Latin context than in ancient Near Eastern, where the continuities of discourse with our own culture are less direct, the category systems less transparent, the goal of a truly historicized account further beyond reach (see Chapter 14, by Sasson). It is rightly harder to think of a clay tablet as a book than to think of a papyrus scroll as one, and it is highly questionable whether any Near Eastern civilization had any notion of epic (see Chapter 1,by Martin). Cultural distortion is built in. But the problems of relativization can here be skirted without too much intellectual discomfort, at least in one important respect; for however we may choose to define it, epic has no medium peculiar to itself. Greco-Roman epic is one literary genre among others, the most prestige-laden to be sure, but not mediumistically distinct from other kinds of literature. In the Near East the category itself is more dubious, but it is on the basis of textual form and content, not of medium, that modern scholarship affixes or withholds the label. ‘‘Literature’’ has various ways of distinguishing itself from other kinds of document – calligraphy, dedicated storage areas (libraries) – but otherwise shares its media with much else. In the cuneiform world formal communications and records of all kinds were committed to clay, and archived. In the Greco-Roman world, where writing had greater social penetration, papyrus scrolls served an even more extensive range of purposes; the codex, a more elaborate and custom-made product, is less multi-purpose, but still quite versatile. To say that the media of epic are not genre-specific is not to say that epic manuscripts are entirely without distinctiveness as a class. If epic is defined formalistically – as composition in dactylic hexameter in Greek and Latin, less straightforwardly in Akkadian – the look of the text as laid out on (so to speak)the page enables a Greek or Latin epic text to be recognized as such at a distance,practically at a glance, without reading a word. That may not be quite the case with tablet texts, but experienced eyes have little difficulty identifying the nature of a text by appearance alone. Something all the media have in common is materiality, and a text which in consequence is artificially broken up. Until the codex becomes sufficiently capacious to accommodate epics in their entirety, the text has to be parceled out over more than a single carrier object.That makes for practical problems of continuity and sequentiality, and may have less obvious effects on poems’ stability and identity, as well as conditioning their internal articulation. Size matters.” (143-144)

• “Akkadian epics can be transmitted inno less faithfully fossilized form, but tend to be ontologically more labile. Scholars talk of different ‘‘versions’’ or the like, but the point at which a poem evolves into a different one is not readily fixed. The opening words serve as a poem’s identifier,however, and subscriptions (‘‘colophons’’) define a particular tablet-set’s place in the world. Clay tablets may get chipped, or crack and break, but can last practically forever.Portable but bulky, they tend not to move far from home, except when carried off as booty. Tablet-texts from one place may be copied onto new tablets at another, and a copy may record points at which the exemplar was damaged. Tablets are local products, whereas papyrus as a writing material is a commodity imported from Egypt in the form of made-up scrolls ready for use; it is the written scroll that is the local product, easily transportable in turn, and with a shelf-life comparable to that of modern books. Scrolls were liable to suffer wear and tear at the edges and especially at the beginning; a cedar-oil preservative was sometimes applied to protect them from insect and worm damage; if torn, they could be repaired.” (144)

• “Cuneiform originates in clay, and the two make naturally good partners. Already well established in the third millennium not only in Sumer, where it is generally reckoned to have originated, but in Elam to the east and at Ebla to the west, the clay tablet was a textual medium shared by many different languages and cultures. The materials, unlike the scribal skills needed to use them, were not hard to acquire. Rivers provided the clay,marshes the reeds from which styli were cut. The production process was technologically simple. The soft clay was shaped and smoothed, the ‘‘wedges’’ (or ‘‘nails’’) that comprised the characters were imprinted with the stylus, to form those mysterious signs that some-how represented language: ‘‘The Lord of Aratta scrutinized the clay. But the spoken word was a nail’’ (Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta).” (145)

• “Most significantly of all, there was what may be termed metatext, in the form of the colophon, a subscription appended at the end of the main text. Its first and most indispensable item is the tablet’s self-identification: ‘‘tab. 3, Enuma elish’’ (the poem’s first words serving in effect as title). By these means a text’s sundered members could be united. A reader (scribe/librarian/priest/scholar/functionary) would know what tablet came next in the series (as well as what came first), whether or not he could find it.” (146-47)

• “In the main Mesopotamian tradition, Sumerian and Akkadian, the written text consists of stichoi, lines of verse, each of which is at the same time a sentence or something like it, sense-units and verse-units being coextensive. …This contrasts with the practice in Greek and Latin poetic manuscripts, which conspicuously make no attempt to regularize the line-length of metrically equal lines. …In short, there is correlation between the formal layout of the lines on the one hand and their poetic structure in terms of syntax and sense on the other, both at the level of the verse (with the privilege of a line to itself)and also within the verse (the medial articulation).” (147)

• “The Ugaritic ‘‘epics’’ (see Chapter 16, by Wyatt), curiously, do not observe this tradition of stichic layout. Though internally they appear to show comparable verse-forms, and were written on multi-column tablets, they are written simply as continuous text, not in lines that correspond to the verses, or only intermittently so. They are not acknowledged as poems at all” (148)

• “Soft clay is not the only substance that will take and hold an impression, and so be suitable for cuneiform. There is also wax. The waxed writing-board – sometimes referred to as a stylus tablet, to distinguish it from the hard-surfaced pen-and-ink tablet – in fact outlasted the clay tablet, for it successfully made the transition from the cuneiform world of the Near East to the non-cuneiform world of Greece and Rome.” (148)

• “As far as epic is concerned, the papyrus scroll was a medium in waiting. It had a long time to wait. There is no clear evidence for use of the papyrus scroll outside of Egypt before the first millennium.” (151) [The process of manufacture was again fairly simple, the technique already perfected by the end of the fourth millennium. (150)]

• “Within Mesopotamian and Anatolian orbits, the dominance of clay and cuneiform was slow to yield. The case of Ugarit is telling: a city with trade access to Egypt, and with a proto-alphabetic script, yet rendered in cuneiform.In between northern Syria and Egypt, however, peoples emerged who did not write their texts in clay. The Phoenician script and its congeners, Aramaic and Hebrew, and alphabetic Greek, were non-cuneiform, suited to writing with pen and ink. If there was Phoenician epic, and it took written form, it was written on scrolls. The same is true of Hebrew epic.None of the poetic books of the Bible can be called epic (see Chapter 19, by Niditch), but some scholars have envisioned epic poems lying behind some of the transmitted prose narratives, and the excerpt quoted at Josh. 10: 13 is suggestive.” (151)

• *** “Whether such scrolls were of papyrus or rather of skin, as some prefer to assume, the point of primary importance is the mediumistic divide between cuneiform and non-cuneiform writing systems. This is neatly epitomized by Assyrian reliefs of the eighth and seventh centuries depicting a pair of standing scribes, officials or clerks, identical except for their equipment. One (the one to the front, significantly) holds either a clay tablet or a hinged diptych – on some representations it is unambiguously a diptych, the spine clearly marked, on others it looks more like a tablet. The other holds a scroll –whether papyrus or parchment, or sometimes one and sometimes the other, is disputed,and it may be wrong to think of the question as resolvable even in principle, when both materials were in use (a letter of the time of Sargon II acknowledges receipt of papyrus scrolls). There is no ambiguity about the basic differentiation. The kings of Nimrud and Nineveh kept records both in cuneiform Akkadian and in pen-and-ink Aramaic. But Akkadian literature was stuck on the older side of the divide, and its classic medium was the clay tablet. Its tenaciousness persisted –Gilgamesh was still being copied in Babylon around the end of the second century BCE– but the literature and the medium diminished and died together.” (151)

• “Though little is known of patterns of production or usage, writing-skins were unques-tionably in use before Herodotus’ time not only in Ionia but in Syria and Palestine, inMesopotamia, and in regions further east, written in ink in Aramaic and related scripts,alphabetic Greek quite possibly among them. But in some parts papyrus too was present.The earliest actual survival is an eighth-century Hebrew letter found in Judaea; this shouldnot surprise, given contemporary attestation of papyrus use in Assyria. The most tantalizingtraces come in the form of bullae, or sealings. Papyrus documents, like others, were sealedwith clay; nothing remains of the papyrus except for a few fibres caught by the clay, or theimpression left by them. This form of evidence has been found in Phoenician, Hebrew, andAssyrian contexts in the earlier centuries of the first millennium, and continues to come tolight.” (152)

• “Papyrus manuscriptsrepresent themselves not as text-carriers but as text-instantiations. This Greek practicecontrasts with the self-labeling of cuneiform texts, according to which each tablet-text isan entity with a distinct and defined place in the scribal-textual universe. The fact that thetitle comes at the end rather than at the beginning has sometimes been seen as a carry-overfrom Near Eastern practice, illogical on a papyrus scroll since if the scroll has been properlyrewound the reader would not arrive at it before getting to the end. But the function ofthe notice is not to inform the reader what the text is but more to ratify its completion. Itsactual end may be signalled by a coronis, the conventional marker of the end of any text ormajor textual unit.” (156)

Michael F. Suarez, S.J. and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.), The Book: A Global History (Oxford, 2013)

From logogram to alphabet

• “The earliest writing is logographic (picture writing), beginning with a simple drawing (pictogram), then developing to a sign that represents a number of concepts associated with the original object (ideogram). When the sign represents the sound of an object’s name, the logogram has become a phonogram; only when the sign comes to represent consonants, or consonants and vowels, does the system become phonetic. Most early writing systems were mixed, and some have remained that way.” (Craig Kallendorf, “The Ancient Book,” 39)

• “The first well-attested alphabets belong to ancient Ugarit, today’s Ras Shamra on the coast of Syria, where a 30-sign cuneiform alphabet was used in the 14th century bc; and to the Phoenicians in Canaan in the late 2nd millennium bc, who used 22 consonantal letters.” …the origin of alphabetic writing is highly debated without very much evidence to adjudicate. The author proposes children, engagingly referencing: “In the 20th century, Rudyard Kipling’s child protagonist in ‘How the Alphabet Was Made’, Taffimai, designs what she calls ‘noise- pictures’. The letter ‘A’ is a picture of a carp with its barbelled mouth wide open; this, Taffimai tells her father, looks like his open mouth when he utters the sound ah. The letter ‘O’ matches the egg-or-stone shape and resembles her father’s mouth saying oh. The letter ‘S’ represents a snake, and stands for the hissing sound of the snake. In this somewhat far-fetched way, a whole alphabet is created by Taffimai.” (Andrew Robinson, “Writing Systems,” 10)

• “Subsequent discoveries in Lebanon and Israel have shown the Sinaitic theory of the alphabet to be a romantic fiction. These inscriptions, dated to the 17th and 16th centuries bc—a little earlier than the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions—suggest that the people then living in the land of Canaan were the inventors of the alpha- bet, which would be reasonable. They were cosmopolitan traders at the cross- roads of the Egyptian, Hittite, Babylonian, and Cretan empires; they were not wedded to an existing writing system; they needed a script that was easy to learn, quick to write, and unambiguous. Although unproven, it is probable that the (proto-)Canaanites were the first to use an alphabet. …[but] In 1999, two Egyptologists, John Coleman Darnell and his wife, Deborah, announced that they had found examples of what appeared to be alphabetic writing at Wadi el-Hol, west of Thebes, while they were surveying ancient travel routes in the southern Egyptian desert. The date of the inscriptions is c.1900–1800bc, which places them considerably earlier than the inscriptions from Lebanon and Israel, and makes them the earliest known alphabetic writings. The two short inscriptions are written in a Semitic script and, according to the experts, the letters were most probably developed in a fashion similar to a semi-cursive form of the Egyptian script. The writer is thought to have been a scribe travelling with a group of mercenaries (there were many such mercenaries working for the pharaohs). If the Darnell theory turns out to be correct, then it appears that the alphabetic idea was after all inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphs and invented in Egypt, rather than in Palestine. This latest evidence is by no means conclusive, however, and the search for more alphabetic inscriptions in Egypt continues. ” (Andrew Robinson, “Writing Systems,” 12)

• “The eastern alphabetic link is indicated by the fact that in Mesopotamia, by the 5th century BC many cuneiform documents carried a notation of their substance in the 22 letters of the Aramaic alphabet, inked onto the tablet with a writing brush. From the time of Alexander the Great onwards, cuneiform was increasingly superseded by Aramaic; it eventually fell into disuse around the beginning of the Christian era, with the last cuneiform inscription dated AD 75.” (Andrew Robinson, “Writing Systems,” 13)

Hebrew writing and scripts

• “Hebrew writing used Canaanite characters, which were eventually replaced with an Aramaic form of script known as the ‘square script’. The process of writing was accomplished by using metal implements for the hard surfaces of stone and metal. A stylus was used for writing on clay or wax, a brush for various materials with paint or ink, and a reed pen with ink.'“ (Carl Olson, “The Sacred Book,” 21)

• “The earliest Hebrew writing goes back to the 15th or 14th centuries BC and is found on metal, pottery bowls, and an ostracon used as an abecedary. By the 10th century, royal records were being kept, and Deuteronomy 6:4–9 presents an early commandment that sacred texts were to be written on doorposts (mezuza) and in boxes bound on to the head and arms (tefellin). The Bible also refers to seals and signet rings that go back to the 8th century bc, and writing on ivory goes back to the same period, while the earliest fragments of the Bible (Num. 6:24–6) are found on two silver scrolls that date from slightly later. Inscribed stones with the teachings of Moses were displayed publicly (Josh. 8:32), and Ezekiel was commanded to write on pieces of wood (Ezek. 37:15–20). Baked clay ostraca were used for receipts, lists, tax records, and drafts. The Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments found between 1947 and 1956 in caves near Qumran, include the earliest surviving biblical texts written on animal skins.” (Craig Kallendorf, “The Ancient Book,” 41)

Cuneiform to Aramaic to Arabic

• “The “characteristic wedge shape that was easily impressed into the wet clay in which they were usually written, giving the system its name: cuneiform (Lat. cuneus, ‘wedge-shaped’). This system was developed initially by the Sumerians, but by the middle of the 3rd millennium bc it had been adapted to Akkadian, which became the common language of the Near East, and it was later taken up by the Elamites, Hurrians, Hittites, and Persians. Ancient Mesopotamian writing is occasionally found on stone, seals, metal weapons and craft objects, leather, and the wax tablets that were ubiquitous in the ancient world for note-taking, letter-writing, etc. The classic Near Eastern book, however, was made of clay. The most common shape was oblong, flat on the top with a convex underside, written on while wet with a reed in horizontal rows, starting at the top-left corner on the flat side and continuing to the lower- right corner, then on to the convex side if necessary, where the writing then went from right to left. The tablets were dried in the sun, or kiln-fired in later periods. Important documents were sometimes put into a protective clay envelope. Several tablets could be joined together to make books, which were collected into libraries. The largest of these was the Ashurbanipal (r. 668–27 bc) Library at Nineveh; the archive at Ebla was notable for its systematic organization, and that of Nippur for its catalogues.” (Craig Kallendorf, “The Ancient Book,” 40)

• As for Aramaic and Arabic, “The Aramaic script is the ancestor of modern Arabic, the sacred script of Islam, and of modern (‘square’) Hebrew script, as used in Israel. (A second Hebrew script, known as ‘old Hebrew’, evolved from the Phoenician script and disappeared from secular use with the dispersion of the Jews in the 6th century BC.) The first independent Arab kingdom, that of the Nabataeans, centered on Petra in modern Jordan, spoke a form of Arabic but wrote in the Aramaic script. The presence of certain distinctively Arabic forms and words in these Aramaic inscriptions eventually gave way to the writing of the Arabic language in Nabataean Aramaic script. This was the precursor of the Arabic script, which arose during the first half of the 1st millennium ad and replaced the Aramaic script. Both the Arabic and Hebrew scripts write only the consonants, not the vow- els, in their respective Semitic languages, using 28 letters in Arabic and 22 in Hebrew.” (Andrew Robinson, “Writing Systems,” 13)

“A groundling becomes vapor just like his days, like the shadow passing by”

Psalm 144:4