Texts and Contexts

Paul Delnero, Jacob Lauinger, Paul Delnero, Jacob Lauinger

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781614519638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Langues anciennes

This volume assembles scholars working on cuneiform texts from different periods, genres, and areas to examine the range of social, cultural, and historical contexts in which specific types of texts circulated. Using different methodologies and sources of evidence, these articles reconstruct the contexts in which various cuneiform texts circulated, providing a critical framework to determine how they functioned.

Paul Delnero and Jacob Lauinger

1 Introduction

Reassembling the Social from Texts and Contexts

For those who read and study cuneiform texts as sources for reconstructing and understanding the history and culture of ancient Mesopotamia, the textual record from this time and place frequently presents itself as a self-contained body of evidence, which, if examined and understood in its entirety, would reveal the answers to any questions that are asked of it within the limits of what is recorded in the surviving texts. Although cuneiform texts are recorded on physical media such as clay tablets and stone monuments, scholars and other interested readers almost always interact with their content through photographs or drawings of the original sources, or even more indirectly, through transliterations and translations produced by others who have studied the texts before them. In all of these instances, the different means employed to reproduce the sources share the intention of making their content available for further study as accurately and accessibly as possible. Since most reproductions of cuneiforms sources are intended for scholars interested primarily, if not exclusively, in their content, and it is not possible to replicate all of the features of a three-dimensional object in a two-dimensional space, let alone in transcription, the emphasis on reproducing the content of these sources is to a certain extent inevitable and unavoidable. But one of the unintended consequences of emphasizing content over the other aspects of the sources is that the content is presented as an abstraction that exists apart from the medium on which it appears. The exposure to the content of cuneiform sources as disembodied abstractions is so deeply embedded in the experience of studying Mesopotamian texts that even when working directly with an actual tablet or monument, it is very difficult not to ignore everything else about the object itself and to focus instead solely on transcribing and interpreting its content.

While Assyriologists have long been aware of the importance of context for interpreting cuneiform texts, and it would be difficult to find a study from the past thirty or forty years that does not address, in some form or another, the archaeological, if not also the historical, cultural, or political context of the textual sources that are treated, the extent to which the content of a text is examined in isolation from its function as a material object has a subtle, but fundamental influence on the way the relationship between texts and their contexts is conceptualized. One of the most substantial effects of separating texts from their physical instantiations is that it detaches the content of a text from its immediate spatial and temporal anchoring so that it becomes a static, unchanging abstraction, which can be studied as a fixed and self-contained system of meaning, removed from the dynamics of the social world in which it was produced and circulated. Since freezing language so that it is no longer bound by time and space is one of the primary attributes of writing as a technology, examining the verbal content of a text without taking into account the multiplicity of meanings it might have had in the social context in which it was originally recorded, uttered, or conceived is justifiable, particularly when the text was intended to be read by readers in different times and places. But very few, if any Mesopotamian texts are likely to have been produced with the intention of transcending the circumscribed local and institutional contexts in which they were compiled. Moreover, with the exception of monumental and votive inscriptions addressed to deities or future rulers, it is unlikely that many cuneiform texts were ever intended to outlive the finite purpose for which they were written. However, when texts are bound to specific spatial and temporal contexts, the relationship between the content of a text and its audience is less stable than it would be for texts that were composed for an ideal audience of present and future readers who could be hoped to understand their meaning at any place or time. When understood as material objects with limited, but clearly defined spatial and temporal trajectories, the meaning of texts can be expected to change as they move through social space and the significance of their content is conditioned and transformed by the hands through which they pass and the different recipients who view and use them. In studying texts independently from their materiality and their movement through space and time, and examining their content instead as a fixed abstraction, a critical dimension of their meaning and their context is lost.

The papers in this volume were first presented in their initial form at a one-day symposium organized by the editors at Johns Hopkins University on November 19, 2013. The goal of the symposium, and the articles in this volume which resulted from it, was to bring together specialists working on texts or textual corpora from different periods, genres, and areas of the cuneiform world to consider the relationship between Mesopotamian texts and their contexts specifically with respect to how different types of cuneiform texts moved and functioned as objects in social space. The purpose of asking the participants to address the question of text and context from this perspective was two-fold:

1.To provide a broad array of text-or corpora-specific studies that illustrate a range of social, cultural, and/or historical contexts in which texts of specific types circulated and to show how these contexts may have conditioned and transformed the meaning of the texts examined as they moved through space and time.

2.To present different methodologies and sources of evidence that can be used to reconstruct the contexts in which the texts in question circulated, in order to provide a critical framework for determining how these texts functioned.

In keeping with these two goals, all of the papers presented at the symposium, and the articles that developed out of them for this volume, address the movement and function of texts in social space with respect to texts of many different types and from a wide range of methodological perspectives. The texts and periods covered by these studies comprise late-second millennium ritual texts from Emar (Daniel Fleming), Old Assyrian incantations from Kanesh (Gojko Barjamovic), early second millennium Sumerian laments (Paul Delnero), late-fourth millennium administrative texts from Uruk (Christopher Woods), Ur III administrative texts from southern Mesopotamia (Steven Garfinkle), Neo-Baby-lonian administrative texts from Uruk (Michael Kozuh), Old Babylonian Sumerian literary compositions from Meturan (Sara Milstein), Middle Babylonian divinatory reports from Nippur (Matthew Rutz), Akkadian epics from the second and first millennia (Christian Hess), and Neo-Assyrian treaties from the core and periphery of the Neo-Assyrian empire (Jacob Lauinger). Although the methodologies applied to this broad array of texts and textual corpora are diverse and multi-faceted, each study emphasizes one of three more general approaches to the dynamic relationship between texts and contexts with respect to their function as material objects that move through social space:

1.Textual circulation and performance (Fleming, Barjamovic, and Delnero)

2.Textual circulation and administrative praxis (Woods, Garfinkle, and Kozuh)

3.Textual circulation and the mechanics of production (Milstein, Rutz, Hess, and Lauinger)

Numerous scholars have treated the topic of Mesopotamian texts and contexts from a wide range of perspectives, resulting in studies that have yielded an abundance of valuable insights into the historical, cultural, and social contexts in which cuneiform texts circulated. Many of these studies have focused on illuminating one obscure side of the relationship between the content of texts and their contexts by focusing on the other. That is, context creates a framework for (re)approaching a text’s content, or content provides the means for (re)constructing a text’s context (historical, cultural, social, or otherwise). Still other studies self-consciously place content and context in a dialectical relationship. In the following section, we briefly summarize selected examples of these three methodologies–content to context, content from context, content and context–to illustrate how, explicitly or implicitly, the contributions to this volume are indebted to and build upon previous scholarship. The subsequent three sections then introduce in more detail the three main themes that organize the contributions to the present work.

1 Previous Approaches to Texts and Contexts

ContentfromContext

The so-called “archival approach” has been the dominant method in Assyriology for investigating the relationship between content and context over the past half-century. Briefly, the archival approach posits that the reason why an assemblage of texts (either excavated or reconstructed)was brought together in antiquity has the potential to inform and transform the content of the constituent texts. If Gelb’s 1966 presidential address to the American Oriental Society (published as Gelb 1967) can be considered a call-to-arms for the archival approach, the theme of the 30^th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, “Archives and Libraries,” (1983, papers published as Veenhof 1986) demonstrates its orthodox status less than twenty years later. Therefore, it seems appropriate that our illustrative examples come from the proceedings of this seminal conference, even if choosing only two papers does not do justice to the volume’s richness.

The first paper is Charpin’s (1986) study of the transmission of titles to property in Old Babylonian family archives (see Charpin 2010: 53–69 for an updated version). This study develops Charpin’s (1980: 156–59) earlier work on an Old Babylonian family archive from Tell Sifr which held several instances of two temporally distinct contracts concerning the same parcel. In each instance, the person purchasing the parcel in the earlier transaction acts as the seller in the later transaction so that it becomes clear that the seller gave his original purchase contract to the parcel’s new owner at the conclusion of the transaction. Subsequently, Charpin is able to demonstrate that other legal transactions, including bequests and dowries, could also occasion the transfer of purchase contracts together with the relevant property and that the records of bequests and dowries could themselves be transferred when the property documented therein was sold. Charpin (2010: 66–67) documents one such chain of transfers that extended for 180 years. Accordingly, the content of Old Babylonian legal texts was not static. As the texts circulated in space from sellers to buyers or from parents to children, they were qualitatively transformed from titles to property into episodes in larger transactional histories that confirmed the licit transfer of property over time. Yet this transformation in content is only perceptible in an archival context, in which temporally distinct transactions concerning a single parcel are brought together.

Our second example from the published papers of the 30^thRAI is Foster’s (1986) study of Sargonic archives. In this paper, Foster (1986: 46) uses archival texts “to define more closely than hitherto what was ‘imperial’ about the Sargonic empire.” He observes that within some archives certain groups of records were intended for inspection by imperial authorities. These records have a standardized form and content and manifest the imperial writing style that cuts across geographic regions. Foster gives examples of such archives from Sumer, Akkad, and the Diyala. For instance, an archive from Pugdan in Akkad contains a document about a royal official inspecting records of commodities to make sure leases of crown land paid on time. Foster (1986: 49) points out that “a group of tablets within the Pugdan archive is drawn up in the imperial style, and is detailed and explicit in formulary, as opposed to other groups which are less explicit and detailed and less neatly drawn up.” For Foster, it is in the Pugdan archive’s “imperial” group and in other similar groups of administrative texts in other archives that we see the Sargonic empire in action. Importantly, it is only the co-existence of the imperial group with the other, regional, group within the Pugdan archive, that is, the archival context, that transforms the content of this group of administrative texts from straightforward accounts into an active statement of empire (cf. Garfinkle’s contribution to this volume).

Content to Context

Gelb’s 1966 presidential address, cited above, was aimed at what he saw as a relatively unreflective approach current in Assyriology that privileged content over context (and, relatedly, literary studies and religious history over social and economic history). In the years following this address, the pendulum has undoubtedly swung in the direction Gelb desired, again as mentioned above. Yet sometimes, an archival approach is not the best choice for an investigator, who instead chooses to move from a text’s content to its context. A modern example of such a self-reflective choice is found in Holtz’s (2009) monograph, which aims to reconstruct Neo-Babylonian court procedure. Holtz (2009: 14) remarks that:

The archival approach is of inestimable value for the proper understanding of the Neo-Babylonian texts, and, more generally, for the understanding of numerous aspects of ancient society and culture. Nevertheless, when it comes to the elucidation of questions of law, the archival approach is of only limited use. In order to describe the adjudication of legal cases, one cannot simply look at one archive, since any one archive may or may not contain litigation records. Furthermore, not every litigation record can be securely assigned to a specific ancient archive. To be sure, the results of the archival approach are necessary; situating a litigation record within an archive, when possible, often illuminates the legal question at hand. A comprehensive understanding of legal procedure, however, requires cross-archival and extra-archival research in order to select the relevant litigation records.

In other words, an archival approach would be of limited value to reconstructing Neo-Babylonian adjudicatory procedure, as a given archive might lack relevant legal texts and, conversely, a relevant text might lack a provenience. Instead, Holtz highlights the content of individual legal texts and especially the relevance of that content to the question at hand. Holtz (2009: 4) posits that a common adjudicatory procedure during the Neo-Babylonian period generated a “‘tablet trail’ left behind when cases were brought to justice in the Neo-Baby-lonian period.” His method then involves “studying the contents of the various text-types pertaining to court litigation” in order to characterize the different legal functions that these texts served” (Holtz 2009: 18). The different legal functions of the “tablet trail” can then be stitched back together into a comprehensive description of adjudicatory procedure (though cf. the remarks of Van De Mieroop 1997 discussed below).

Content and Context

As Michalowski (2011: 47) has recently remarked, “[a] few decades ago, a statement such as ‘all Sumerian literature was school literature’ would have been greeted with some skepticism”; yet, as Michalowski points out, thanks to scholarship of Vanstiphout (1978, 1979), Veldhuis (1997, 2004), Tinney (1998, 1999), Robson (1999, 2001), Delnero (2012), and others, it is now clear that the vast majority of Sumerian literature written during the Old Babylonian period (in other words, the vast majority of the Sumerian literature extant)was produced by scribal apprentices during the course of their studies. This conclusion is the result of what Veldhuis (2004: 43) terms a “social-functional approach” to literary texts:

The social-functional approach, finally, attempts to understand Sumerian literature in the social and institutional context in which it was used. In a way, we are back where we began: with history.Literary texts tell us about history, not so much the history contained in their narratives, but the history of the people and institutions that wrote and used these compositions. Where the documentary approach focuses mainly on contents (history) and the poetic approach on form (style and poetic devices), the social-functional approach looks at form and content from the perspective of the institutional context in which literary texts were produced and consumed.

Rather than moving from context to content or from content to context, the social-functional approach jibes and tacks between the two. Vanstiphout’s (1978) edition of the hymn Lipit-Eštar B points the way. He observes that the content of the text emphasizes scribal education in a syntax that is straightforward yet varied. The context of text must also be pedagogic since the majority of extant manuscripts are school extracts. Accordingly, Vanstiphout (1978: 51) concludes that “the hymn was composed in and primarily for the Edubba, to be used there as a beginner’s text.” Building upon this work and that of earlier scholars on tablet typologies (e.g., Civil 1995: 2038), Veldhuis (1997: 40–63) reconstructs the sequence of lexical lists and other exercises that made up the first phase of the scribal curriculum by contextualizing when compositions appear on the obverse or reverse of school tablets, in order to determine the compositions that they preceded or followed in the curriculum. Tinney (1999) follows a similar methodology in studying the literary texts the comprised the second phase of the curriculum. He identifies a first group of four texts that formed the initial core of this phase (“the Tetrad”)and a second group of ten texts that represented a more advanced stage (“the Decad”; on the evidence of the so-called literary catalogues, see now Delnero 2010). Finally, Robson (2001) contextualizes the scribal curriculum archaeologically in her study of House F, a single private dwelling at Old Babylonian Nippur that served as the site of scribal education. Robson’s (2001: 62) study demonstrates that “there was by no means a standard curriculum across the city, but rather a common fund of shared compositions upon which individual teachers drew according t...