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ScriPTS – Scribal Performance in First Millennium Cuneiform

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Throughout the 1st millennium BC, the unchanging stream of cuneiform tradition seems to have offered a solid node of cultural stability against the rise and fall of the great Assyrian, Babylonian, and Achamenid empires and in the face of a long decline and death of Akkadian against a global Aramaic. Most modern histories agree on one thing: the cosmopolitan cuneiform tradition always contended with numerous local and temporal variations. There is less agreement on how these variations affect our understanding of standardization or canonization as a social process.

Stemma of the relationship among Ea/Aa, Sa, and Sb proposed by M. Civil, MSL 14 (1979), 167.

The project takes this problem of diversity and standardization in scholarly texts as a starting point to explore the role of the mechanics of writing within models of cuneiform canonization. At the heart of the project is the series known as Syllabary B (Sb), attested in more than 450 tablets across numerous tablet collections in Asssyria and Babylonia. Through its wide currency and use as one of the curricular rudiments to cuneiform education, the series provides a unique view into how concrete practices of writing map onto the multiple, intersecting, and overlapping scribal communities of first millennium Mesopotamia.

The project “Scribal Performance and Textual Standardization” (ScriPTS) is funded through a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the period 2022–2024 (Grant ID: 101063660) under the program Horizon Europe. It is hosted by the working group Histoire et Archéologie de l’Orient Cunéiforme in the research unit UMR 7041 – Archéologies et Science de l’Antiquité at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Nanterre.