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Post by sheshki on Aug 9, 2016 17:58:57 GMT -5
Today i was reading an article by Veldhuis called "The Early Dynastic Kiš Tradition", which was about Early Dynastic Sumerian tablets with lexical lists found in the semitic speaking north of Mesopotamia and how the scribes there used them... There i found this nice quote which i´d like to share.
"It is hard to appreciate now what these compositions really meant to an Ebla scribe. All these lists where some eight centuries old, and were crowded with words that even in the Babylonian heartland made little sense anymore. The Ebla scribes, who used cuneiform writing primarily to write their own language in a heavily logographic system, were many steps removed from the context in which these lists had been composed and were meaningful. The intimate connection between cuneiform writing, the Sumerian language, and this corpus of ancient lexicography was strong enough for the Ebla scribes not only to copy those texts, but also to study them, as witnessed by the unorthographic versions of several of these compositions. By engaging in this tradition the scribes identified themselves with a rather abstract, supra-historical and super-regional community of scribes – extending all the way to the very beginning of writing." Niek Veldhuis, The Early Dynastic Kiš Tradition
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