The Scribal Art

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The Scribal Art

On this thread I am reviewing some notes from Laurie E. Pearce's CANE IV article entitled The Scribes and Scholars of Ancient Mesopotamia. While this subject is more or less revealed indirectly all over the board, I think it would be good to have a formal thread to explore scribal life as we have become engaged with the fruits of this occupation in a myriad of ways. Furthermore the author affirms some information while bringing some new information to my attention; first there are her comments on the technical aspects of the scribal art:



Social Standing/


Pearce: "Scribes and scholars belonged to the social elite. A bilingual Sumero-Akkadian Proverb notes: "The scribal art, receiving a handsome fee, is a bright-eyed guardian, the need of the palace." Students in the scribal school were male children of members of the upper strata of society. Their fathers were well-to-do merchants, priests, governors, ambassadors, kings and occasionally scribes." Some women scribes such as Enheduanna are attested those these attestations are comparatively rare.


Tools Used for Writing/

Pearce: "The stylus used to impress clay tablets was most frequently fashioned out of reed and was known by the Sumerian or Akkadian words for that material, GI and qanû, respectively. At first, the rounded end of the reed was impressed into the tablet. Soon, scribes began to shape the reed's end into a triangular cross-section that gave cuneiform signs their characteristic wedge shape. ... When writing on wax, scribes employed a metal (bronze) stylus because of its strength and durability. Writing on wood was done with ink and brush. With a pointed tool, scribes outlined inscriptions to be chiseled in stone by expert stoneworkers." ( For clarification of the use of ink and brush read below.)


Clay Tablets - Preparation and Layout/

Pearce: "Surviving tablets reflect the quality of the materials available to scribes, as well as the attention paid by the scribe to the preparation of the tablets themselves. Some tablets were prepared from clay filled with inclusions, impurities in the clay such as pebbles, grit, straw, and other organic material. Other tablets were formed from a fine clay body.

The quality of the clay body and the layout of the text were related to the type of text to be written on the tablet. Literary and historical text are the most aesthetically pleasing to the modern eye, because the scribes took great care to proportion the size of the tablet to the amount of material to be inscribed. The standardized and formulaic language of some text genres, such as contracts, encouraged scribes to adhere to a prescribed layout of text on tablet.

A variety of other markings appeared on some tablets. Vertical or horizontal lines, found on literary, historical, lexical, religious, and scientific texts, divided texts into various sections comparable to poetic stanzas or book chapters. The rulings also provided reference points to sections of the text and aided the scribe in allocating the text on the tablet.

Scribes inscribed tablets from the left edge to the right and from top to bottom. Tablets were generally turned on the horizontal rather than the vertical axis: top to bottom, as it were. Multi-columned tablets read from left to right on the obverse, and continued from right to left on the reverse. For want of space, scribes also filled the edges of a clay tablet and occasionally squeezed words between lines."

The author next makes some interesting observations: After the middle Babylonian period, some literary texts were impressed with holes through the middle - the function is still not certain. Large tablets were sometimes fired in antiquity to increase durability. Tablets were sometimes marked with the impression of a fingernail or hem of a garment as evidence of an individuals participation in a transaction, or with a cylinder seal. Scribes may draw maps or representations of astrological material on tablets.


Clay Tablets: Shapes and Sizes/


The author here mentions that the tablets were generally rectangular, with the exception of some Ur III land surveyors who might make round tablets and also Ur III and OB students who may use round tablets for exercises. The smallest tablets may be as small as a few centimeters in length and width, while tablets devoted to literary, political or historical record may be as much as 45 by 30 centimeters (18 by 12 inches.)


Inscriptions on Ivory and Wood/

Pearce: "Another medium for cuneiform inscriptions was writing boards, flat pieces of wood bound together with hinges. Writing boars of silver and gold are rarely mentioned. Writing boards, in use from the Ur III to Late Babylonian periods, were coated with a layer of wax to which orpiment was added. This allowed the wax to flow easily to coat the surface of the boards and to retain its malleability for the inscription. This malleability also made it possible for the scribes to erase and reuse the wax, rendering it ideal for the preliminary composition of texts. Once the preliminary copy was completed, the scribe copied all of the data onto a durable clay tablet. The wax was then erased and reused and this process was repeated... The Mesopotamians depicted the "tablet of life" as a wax-covered board on which the god Nabu recorded the names and deeds of kings and their sons. Some wax boards were attached together by means of hinges to form a "book".

.. Scribes also wrote on papyrus and leather. Because these materials were not easily impressed with cuneiform signs, their use did not become widespread until the development and spread of alphabetic scripts in the first millennium. Inscriptions employing these signs used pen or brush and ink. Scribes who wrote on these materials were designated leather or papyrus scribes, respectively."

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Still to come... notes from Pearce on Scribal learning, titles, and responsibilities