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Editing the Sumerians, How and Why?

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Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World

Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 69))

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Abstract

The science of pedagogy in Babylonia in the early second millennium BCE was based on a two-part curriculum: students began their study of Sumerian by copying and memorizing lists of signs and words, and then progressed to copying connected texts. All surviving manuscripts (in the form of cuneiform tablets) of Sumerian literary compositions from that time are school copies produced by students following the second part of the curriculum. This contribution examines how the editing of these compositions and the representation of individual text witnesses and their variants have evolved in the eight decades since the first scientific edition of a Sumerian literary composition in 1937, and defines what a reconstructed and edited Sumerian composition actually represents.

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement No. 269804.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the origins of writing in Mesopotamia and Egypt, see the essays in Houston (2004) and Woods (2010). For the history of the Mesopotamia and neighboring regions, see Van de Mieroop (2015) and Liverani (2014).

  2. 2.

    See the description of Sumerian in Michalowski (2008).

  3. 3.

    For the particularities of clay tablets as objects and manuscripts, see Taylor (2011).

  4. 4.

    Rubio (2009), Michalowski (2008: 6–8).

  5. 5.

    Akkadian is the semitic language that by the early second millennium BCE had replaced Sumerian as the vernacular in Babylonia. Its two main dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian (at home to the north of Babylonia), persisted well into the first millennium BCE, eventually being replaced as the vernacular by Aramaic.

  6. 6.

    The case for a possible attempt to write prose in the late fourth millennium BCE is made by Civil (2013). For the late tablets with Greek transliterations, see Houston et al. (2003: 454–456) and Oelsner (2014).

  7. 7.

    For the Babylonian school of the early second millennium BCE, see, e.g., Volk (2000), Robson (2001), Veldhuis (2004: 58–66; 2014: 202–212), George (2005), and Waetzoldt and Cavigneaux (2009: §11).

  8. 8.

    Rubio (2009), Tinney (2011), Vanstiphout (2003b), Veldhuis (2003, 2004) and Black et al. (2004); this last book is a volume of translations from the Sumerian.

  9. 9.

    See the description of the scribal curriculum in Veldhuis (2014: 204–212).

  10. 10.

    Delnero (2010) discusses the function of these manuscript types in the study and copying of Sumerian literature.

  11. 11.

    Based on the table of Delnero (2010: 63).

  12. 12.

    Delnero (2015); Tinney (2011) puts the number at ‘c.a. 175’.

  13. 13.

    In a praise hymn to king Shulgi of Ur, Shulgi boasts that he founded academies at Nippur and Ur where scholars would write songs praising him.

  14. 14.

    Wilcke (2012) has proposed that one of those ‘epics’ was a drama written to celebrate a specific military victory of Ur in the twenty-first century BCE.

  15. 15.

    Delnero (2012a) discusses the role of memorization in the transmission of Sumerian literary texts, certainly of great importance, but not as exclusively as he suggests.

  16. 16.

    For the decidedly non-imperialist origins of American archeology in Iraq, see Cooper (1992). The archeology of Nippur is summarized by Gibson et al. (2001).

  17. 17.

    Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray crystallography was a crucial element leading to the development of Crick and Watson’s double-helix model of DNA. Alice Kober’s work on Linear B was essential to Michael Ventris’s decipherment of that script. Franklin died before the double-helix model was proven and won Crick and Watson their Nobel Prizes; Kober died a few years before Ventris’s publication of his decipherment.

  18. 18.

    The dictionary’s history, though mainly its post-war development, is recounted in Reiner (2002), where Chiera’s role is mentioned on Page xv. The final volume of the dictionary was published in 2010. It is a dictionary of the Akkadian language (see fn. 5), which early on was called Assyrian, because the earliest European excavations in Mesopotamia were at the great Assyrian capitals of the ninth to seventh centuries BCE. For the same reason, the study of ancient Mesopotamia was called--and still is--Assyriology.

  19. 19.

    See Kramer’s account in Kramer (1986: 46–48).

  20. 20.

    For example, Hallo and Van Dijk (1968). However, Wilcke (1976: 89) preferred those authors’ method to the ‘sonst üblichen, auf meist subjektiver Auswahl beruhenden Komposittext’ that Kramer had pioneered, but the real problem was not the ‘subjective’ quality of an editor’s choices, but the inability of a reader to easily see which manuscripts had which readings, a problem solved by the ‘score’ method introduced by Edzard (1974) (see below).

  21. 21.

    Of course, in the very rare cases when all of the early manuscripts for a line or a portion of a composition are broken, but that text portion is preserved in a later manuscript, the later manuscript must serve as the basis for reconstruction, with all due caveats.

  22. 22.

    I no longer remember whether this was all of my own devising or whether, more probably, I had been influenced by unpublished manuscripts of M. Civil, which I had seen (see below). I am certain that part of my motivation was that inserting the diacritics needed for transliteration was so cumbersome in those days.

  23. 23.

    This was, of course, becoming much easier with electronic text production.

  24. 24.

    As Glenn Most explained to me at the Paris conference.

  25. 25.

    The use of Roman I and III derives from Civil’s classification of the manuscripts of lexical texts (e.g. Civil et al. 1979: 5; 1995: 2308); for the problems in the application of Civil’s manuscripts types to literary texts, which only rarely appear on Civil’s Type II and IV tablets, see Veldhuis (1997: 65–66).

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  1. The Johns Hopkins University (emeritus), Berkeley, CA, USA

    Jerrold S. Cooper

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  1. Faculté Sociétés et Humanités / UFR IHSS / Laboratoire SPHère, CNRS - Université Paris Cité, Paris, France

    Agathe Keller

  2. Faculté Sociétés et Humanités / UFR IHSS / Laboratoire SPHère, CNRS - Université Paris Cité, Paris, France

    Karine Chemla

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Cooper, J.S. (2024). Editing the Sumerians, How and Why?. In: Keller, A., Chemla, K. (eds) Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World. Archimedes, vol 69. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49617-2_10

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