The scribal system was the primary vehicle for transmitting and preserving knowledge in
Mesopotamia in the first millennium BCE. Writing and copying literary and scientific compositions
was part of elementary education in Mesopotamian schools. The entire career of a scholar, from his
apprenticeship to becoming an “experienced scribe, who neglects nothing,” can be traced thanks to
the colophons that he appended at the bottom of his works throughout his lifetime. Although they
called themselves “scribes”, they were in fact scholars and scientists, the keepers of scribal lore,
tradition and historical records. Many were affiliated to temples and royal courts, but others practised
privately.
LB 2544: reverse with colophon.
Their colophons contain a wealth of information on the transfer of knowledge. Firstly, by giving
us the name of the scribe, his master, and the tablet’s owner, they shed light on the genealogies
(whether real or imagined) of scholars and on the networks of patronage in which they worked.
Secondly, by giving the date and place of a tablet’s production, they enable us to trace the
transmission of knowledge through space and time. There are ca. 1300 colophons we know of come
from all major Babylonian cities and range in time from the beginning of the Assyrian domination of
Mesopotamia (ca. 900 BCE) until writing in cuneiform ceased in the first century BCE.
Colophons present the potential for ground-breaking research into the social contexts of one of
mankind’s longest-living traditions of learning.
Project “Colophons and Scholars” suggests a digital
database of colophons to establish an infrastructure for future research. The project is funded by
Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant
agreement No 797758.
The AWOL Index: The bibliographic data presented herein has been programmatically extracted from the content of AWOL - The Ancient World Online (ISSN 2156-2253) and formatted in accordance with a structured data model.
AWOL is a project of Charles E. Jones, Tombros Librarian for Classics and Humanities at the Pattee Library, Penn State University
AWOL began with a series of entries under the heading AWOL on the Ancient World Bloggers Group Blog. I moved it to its own space here beginning in 2009.
The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available.
The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period.
AWOL is the successor to Abzu, a guide to networked open access data relevant to the study and public presentation of the Ancient Near East and the Ancient Mediterranean world, founded at the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago in 1994. Together they represent the longest sustained effort to map the development of open digital scholarship in any discipline.
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