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Before the Library of Babel: On Some Very Early Philologers

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Shaping the Sciences of the Ancient and Medieval World

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Abstract

Writing began in ancient Mesopotamia more than five and a half thousand years ago. From the beginning, scribes, and teachers, alone and in groups, orally, and in writing, reflected on the texts they copied, composed, memorized, edited, and redacted. These anonymous people should be recognized as the first philologists known to us today. Cuneiform texts from the first millennium BCE preserve the works and names of those who composed, transmitted, reworked, and re-edited a rich textual tradition in at least two languages, Akkadian, and Sumerian, and much of this late Mesopotamian scholarly work has been well studied by modern academics. This paper addresses aspects of less well-known philological endeavours from early third millennium BCE Mesopotamia.

…but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret. (Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel)

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.

    Pollock et al. (2015).

  2. 2.

    See, for example, the works of a family of such scholars described by Finkel (1988). To situate the places mentioned in this chapter, see Annex A.

  3. 3.

    The Sumerian native designation was kengir, Šumeru in Akkadian, which eventually resulted in the English designation Sumer and its similar equivalents in other modern languages.

  4. 4.

    This is a convenient oversimplification; the notions of primary and secondary modelling systems have been the subject of much critique; see, for example, Chang (2003).

  5. 5.

    On the Ur III period, see the detailed survey by Sallaberger (1999); on the unpublished Ur III literary texts, see Rubio (2000).

  6. 6.

    See, most recently, Klein and Sefati (2014: 90–91). The actual reading of the sign combination is unknown at the present time.

  7. 7.

    The bulk of this essay was written before the appearance of Veldhuis (2014b), an authoritative history of the Mesopotamian lexical tradition that deals with all of this in a much more comprehensive manner.

  8. 8.

    On these lexical texts see Krispijn (1992), Englund (1998: 82–110), Wagensonner (2021) and Veldhuis (2014b: 32–59).

  9. 9.

    Sheldon Pollock (2015: 3) laments the fall of philology in modern corporate universities: ‘Indeed, say the students, what is the point of learning to read well when all you need to know is how to count.’ The Assyriologist, sadly in agreement with Pollock, may admire the irony of how writing may have come full circle to its beginnings in numeracy.

  10. 10.

    The Sumerian language was an isolate, that is it has no known relatives. The structurally very different languages of early Mesopotamia and Syria such as Akkadian and Eblaite and related tongues belonged to the East Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.

  11. 11.

    The professions list Ed Lu E, the List of Geographical Names, Animals B and Practical Vocabulary A.

  12. 12.

    The Sumerian word lu (written with the sign lu2) means ‘man, person’.

  13. 13.

    The Nagar exemplar may have to be dated somewhat later than the Ebla archives (Veldhuis 2014b: 63 Note 90).

  14. 14.

    Online edition: http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/Q000038 (last accessed April 20, 2022).

  15. 15.

    The first sign in most lines is nam2, which probably means ‘occupation of/responsibility for’ and became grammaticalized as a derivational prefix creating abstract nouns. However, the same sign was also used for the word umuš, ‘intelligence, understanding, planning’, and this is what a scribe chose here.

  16. 16.

    A record of the signs that were an integral part of the words used in ED Lu A.

  17. 17.

    On this word, see Sjöberg (1973: 121–122).

  18. 18.

    TSŠ is an abbreviation of Tablettes sumériennes de Šuruppak conservées au Musée de Stamboul (Jestin 1937).

  19. 19.

    See the references provided by Robson (2008: 301) and Friberg (2005, 2007: 414–415); note especially Guitel (1963), Høyrup (1982), and Melville (2002).

  20. 20.

    On the translation ‘wages’ or ‘allotments’ paid to workers, rather than ‘rations’ see Prentice (2010: 91–95) and in more detail Steinkeller (2015: 26–30). Flour was rarely used for wages in this period; as noted by Visicato (1995: xxx), most occurrences seem to involve the military. The expression zi3 ba occurs only twice in the Shuruppak documentary record.

  21. 21.

    This time the student wrote the word for ‘flour’ by slightly tilting it to our left (they held tablets differently), in a manner technically designated much later as zi3-tenû.

  22. 22.

    The Sumerian sila3 capacity measure sila3 was equivalent to 0.86 L or 0.91 quarts, conventionally translated as litre here.

  23. 23.

    = 45 × 3600 + 42 × 60 + 51.

  24. 24.

    = 40 × 3600 + 5 × 3600 + 46 × 60.

  25. 25.

    Ortega and Gasset (1959): 2); see Becker (2000: 5).

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  1. Department of Middle East Studies, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Piotr Michalowski

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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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Michalowski, P. (2024). Before the Library of Babel: On Some Very Early Philologers. 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_2

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