The Refuge of Scribalism in Iron I Palestine

Ryan Byrne
Department of Religious Studies Rhodes College 2000 North Parkway Memphis, TN 38112 byrner@rhodes.edu
The standardization of scribal products often admits of institutional patronage. Scribal variegation, on the other hand, sometimes suggests the decentralization of sponsorship or commission. As both a craft and a technology, writing had restricted cultural functions in the ancient Near East. These cultural particulars speak to the agency of political programs to foster renement and systemic customization. Where and how did scribes in Canaan ply their trade in the political interregnum between the ebb of cuneiform and the rise of the Iron II states? A survey of the early linear alphabetic corpus suggests that this medium largely appealed to prestige interests before the Iron II states harnessed its potential and instrumentalized its professionals. Elite posturing offered refuge to scribes on the periphery of the Iron I political economy. Scribal curricula may hold clues touching on the relationships between institutions and technological renement, between the cognitive potential of technology and its cultural application, and between the respective scribal intelligentsias of cuneiform and the linear alphabet.

introduction
t is an axiom of bureaucracy that institutions are easier to destroy than institutional cultures. The cuneiform and linear alphabetic writing systems coexisted in Palestine during the Late Bronze Age. While cuneiform probably did not survive as a dominant medium in the region past the 12th century b.c.e., linear alphabetic continued its development apace from the early second millennium through its Phoenician renement and customized variegation via derivative, so-called nationalized scripts. The Old Canaanite alphabet was just coming into its own in the Iron I Levant while cuneiform was eclipsing there. We have little way of knowing for certain whether or how the institutional culture of cuneiform writing, i.e., the scribal culture, relates to its counterpart culture of alphabetic writing. It is easy but dangerous to presume that all intelligentsias are kindred, a consideration that hamstrings any claim that the Iron I practitioners of linear alphabetic were the direct heirs of Canaans cuneiform scribal culture; the alphabet had

its own Late Bronze tradents. This paper intends to explore (1) how evidence for variant curricula may inform the impact of institutionalism on script standardization, (2) whether curricular patterns in the extant cuneiform and alphabetic corpora bear significance for the relationship between their respective scribal cultures, (3) the distinction between the possible and applied uses of writing as a technology (i.e., writings social location), and (4) how the scribal trade survived at the margins of the decentralized political economy of Iron I Palestine. Adding yet another peg to a base and baseless tautology, we might regard the southern Levant during Iron Age I as a kind of historical black hole.1 The claim is base, because it pays obeisance to historical archaeologies that privilege texts over artifacts, which
1 Miller (2005: xiii) toys with the term Dark Ages as a subtle jab at the scholarly hurry to transition the Israelites from nomadism to monarchy (see Finkelstein and Naaman 1994), while his larger thesis treats with the Iron I material as protable data afforded the cultural historian.

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are tacitly deemed meaningless when no meaning arises that is appreciable to modern symbolic orders.2 The claim is baseless, because scholarship is awash in archaeological data and published databases that ow only to the limits set by those historians asking the questions.3 It is fair to note, however, that the epigraphic corpus from Iron I to Iron IIA Palestine is dramatically smaller and less informative than the regional corpora of Bronze Age cuneiform and the Iron IIB Old Hebrew inscriptions.4 A writing system is a technology that accrues cultural merit as practical and creative applications appear to accommodate its potential. There is typically a cooperative relationship between the proliferation or development of a writing system and the political institutions that act as apparatus both for its systemic cultivation and chances to survive in the archaeological record as representative rather than anomalous examples of practice. Seth Sanders (2004) has recently made such an argument for the renement and maturation of the Ugaritic writing system as a state-sponsored technology, for example, and he extends this model to synthesize the intertwined rise of Levantine petty states and so-called national scripts. One incumbent charge of the nascent state is the indoctrination of its subjects into a political community with sentiments of singular identity. The states reied penumbraon the ground and in the mind is largely a product of the propaganda embedded in the political landscape (Smith 2003) and exploitation of language (Anderson 1991). The control of information through scribal implements epitomizes the

states many means to impose a rhetorical semblance of unity over a hierarchy of rights, viz. the authority to expropriate from others. In the case of Moab, Routledge (2004: 14061) understands the Mesha Inscription (KAI 181) as one of the states primary media of self-substantiation. Segmented communities become Moab by tautology. To a largely nonliterate community, writing may also serve as an instrument of intimidation. William Schniedewind (2004) has recently characterized writing in ancient Israel as a projection of state power. We cannot ascertain the subaltern effects of the weird, unfathomable devices of manipulative elites, but the intent to condition a response is clear in the lapidary medium and other epigraphic affectations of status.5

the iron i scribes raison de tre

The decentralized political economy of the Iron Age IIIA stands in sharp contrast to that of its bookend archaeological periods. The Late Bronze Age witnesses a vibrant era of internationalism with respect both to material culture and the intangible elements of cultural exchange. Maritime and overland trade, imperial expansionism, vassalage, and epigraphic diplomacy manifest in abundant archaeological remains, which in turn illustrate the physical scope of the rich intellectual, political, and religious discourses of cross-cultural contact. The Iron Age IIB absorbs the unmistakable archaeological imprint of self-conscious, self-evident petty states with logistical sophistication domestically and commercial exposure abroad. These two archaeological periods also share in common the deposition of epigraphic corpora quite unlike the nds from the Iron IIIA interregnum. Epigraphy can speak of Late Bronze and Iron II scribal cultures, respectively cuneiform and alphabetic, with some self-assuredness. Between these institutional cultures, however, lies a chasm through
I emphasize elite intent in acknowledgment of the inscrutable factors of circumlocution and negative feedback. Political propaganda need not nd purchase exactly as intended. Unlike Schniedewind, epigraphers should distinguish between the elite characterization of writing as numinous and the auditors deference to this characterization. Writing is not inherently mantic, nor can we assume a primitivist worldview in which some mantic descriptors from the Near East confer upon all ancient audiences an uncritical submission to preternatural claims made on behalf of text. As Lvi-Strauss cautions (1973: 29697), even the newly literate may understand the subtleties of textual farce.
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2 See Moreland 2001 on the traditional dominance of logocentrism in the dialectic between archaeology and historiography. 3 See the synthetic studies of Bloch-Smith and Nakhai 1999; and Miller 2005. Raw survey data of immense import appear in Finkelstein and Lederman 1997; Zertal 2004; and now Millers (2002) comprehensive inventory of highland Iron I sites. Survey data alone do not provide consistently reliable pictures of settlement, however. Because they entail controlled excavation, salvage expeditions provide better data for large-scale distributive models (Faust and Safrai 2005). 4 For a comprehensive review of the second-millennium cuneiform corpus, see the recent treatments of Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002; 2006. This inventory includes a full list of tablets, tentative identication by genre, and a generous bibliography of editios princeps and secondary studies. Supplement with Wilhelm 1983; and Black 1992 (cf. von Dassows fuller geographic perspective [2004: 643, n. 4]). The volumes edited by DobbsAllsopp et al. (2005) and Davies (1991; 2004) represent the most recent efforts to compile a comprehensive corpus of Iron Age epigraphs in Old Hebrew.

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which echo two questions about the scribal profession. What functions does an Iron I scribe perform? Who is the Iron I scribes clientele? The best evidence for a supraregional political economy is Megiddos Stratum VI trade in Nile perch and possibly ints.6 These industries could indicate far-reaching exchange, but the evidence is equivocal. By virtue of its geographic location, however, Megiddo parades a disproportionately cosmopolitan material culture in nearly every archaeological period.7 The lowland, arterial sites (i.e., those in coastal plains and inland-reaching valley depressions) traditionally benet from easier topographic access, and so it does not surprise us to nd relative afuence at an Iron I site like Tel Hadar (Kochavi 1993) on the eastern bend of the Beth-Shean corridor.8 Petrographic analysis indicates that some collared-rim jars traveled a distance, which Ilan (1999: 19599) takes for trade in fungible contents.9 In any case, this period exhibits a steep decline in exchange relationships beyond balkanized regions. Millers yeoman narrative (2005: 4563) of Iron I highland imports and endogamous exchange exposes what the evidence for agro-pastoral subsistence (Hopkins 1985; Rosen 1994) has already implied: most imports do not come from far aeld, nor do Egyptian trinkets necessarily denote internationalism in a setting with nearby Egyptian (or Egypto-Canaanite) lowland materials attested as late

as the 1130s.10 The comparative poverty and isolation of this political economy places the centrality of the Iron I scribes relevance in doubt. If scribal culture indeed operated at the periphery of the dominant modes of consumption and exchange, then it is necessary to consider whether accounts, ledgers, contracts, and letters represented the primary applications of the scribal craft. The economic landscape suggests that Iron I elite culture declined in stature on the basis of the conventional archaeological indicators (status goods and symbols, imported wares, residential structures, and public works). To what extent did the services of scribes become a luxury to the few who could afford to employ them? In other words, how does the trade of scribalism survive and reproduce itself in an environment that pushes its utility further to the margins of relevance? This returns the discussion to the matter of clientele. Unlike the Late Bronze and Iron II epigraphic corpora, which reect the dimensions of state interests, the Iron I evidence suggests a culture of scribalism that survived largely through circumstantial appeal to elite patronage. In order to esh out the vicissitudes in scribal culture from the Middle Bronze Age to the Iron Age IIB, the discussion now turns to the empirical evidence for the trajectory toward standardization.

script standardization, pedagogy, and curricula

Christopher Rollston (1999; forthcoming) has completed a comprehensive quantitative palaeographic study of the corpus of stratied Old Hebrew inscriptions from the eighth to sixth century b.c.e. The major results of this undertaking include an empirical database that favors the development of a standardized, interregional Hebrew script over the nal two centuries of the Iron Age II. Specically, the data inict enormous damage on critiques of palaeography that deride the specialty as insensitive to the natural variations in handwriting that characterize even most modern handwritten scripts. More generally, they provide epigraphers with more information with which to investigate the possible curricula that Iron Age scribes used to learn reading and writing.

The abundant ints from Area K might suggest production for exchange beyond the immediate vicinity; see Gersht 2006. The Nile perch nds from Stratum VI are ambiguous. Lernau (2000: 47576) infers from the distribution that the sh may have thrived in the Levants coastal rivers. Halpern (2000: 55152), on the other hand, interprets the perch as long-distance trade markers. In a subsequent publication, however, Lernau (2006: 493) concedes that the perch must have been imported from the Nile Valley. 7 Instrumental neutron activation analysis of selected Stratum VI ceramics points to a Cypriot vector of origin, further underscoring Megiddos fortune to benet from the social and cultural interaction that transpired between the nascent polities emerging in the political vacuum of the 11th century b.c.e. (Harrison and Hancock 2005: 719). The wherewithal of Megiddos Stratum VI elites, moreover, pales next to the international assets of Stratum VII or the regional integration of Strata VAIVB to IVA. 8 Hadar is not strictly a valley corridor site, but it abuts the natural topographic vector of inland-penetrating trafc, whether material or intellectual. The Iron IIA extension of this topographic pattern is visible in the relative afuence at Kinneret (Fritz and Mnger 2002) and Bethsaida (Arav and Bernett 2000). 9 Others (Esse 1992; Halpern 2000: 554; Faust in press) suggest the jars were conveyed in patrilocal dowries. There may be substance to this interpretation in light of myriad Babylonian marriage contracts that specify ceramics as dowered items.

Viz., the site of Megiddo, where a Ramses VI cartouche (ca. 1140 b.c.e.) appeared beneath the sealed destruction layer of Stratum VIIA; see Weinstein 1992; Ussishkin 1995; Harrison 2004: 9.

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Even the observation of a standardized script cutting across regions and centuries does not satisfy questions about the existence of institutional schools or guilds of scribes.11 Variability in ancient and modern hands has produced an impasse between the doubters and true believers of palaeography.12 Modern writers are sensitive to their own inconsistencies in penmanship and so naturally suspect the precision of typological analysis. It is always an uphill endeavor, however, to analogize with modern anecdotalism. Ancient scribes were professional writers with the skill to produce commissioned texts methodically as well as the luxury to employ a coarser cursive when opportune. The rising dependence on word processors and the decline in required penmanship courses in grammar schools have together savaged the aesthetics of student handwriting (to say nothing of vernacular orthographys debt to the spellcheck function) in what was never a community of uniform professional hands even before the personal computers sudden affordability in the late 1980s. The closest approximate modern parallels to early alphabetic scribal instruction are draftsmanship curricula prior to the commercial introduction of CAD software.13 This is also an imperfect comparison, but the curricula exhibit kindred graphic austerity, reproduction exercises within registers, and a methodological distinction between professional and informal hands. Apprentice draftsmen rst learned to reproduce the alphabet within a register template. The mastery of this skill permitted the draftsman to afx a script with uniform size and spacing to handdrawn architectural blueprints. The critical point is that a draftsmans professional hand may differ substantially from his cursive or informal hand, but never should the latter characterize a professional document. Handwritten blueprint text ultimately reects

the pedagogical austerity of alphabetic transcription exercises. We might also consider the use of the grid system among Egyptian artisans in the initial illustration of tomb and monumental paintings. Most relevant here perhaps is the employment of grid templates to facilitate proper proportion of both human gures and hieroglyphic accompaniment. The glyphs typically adhere to axial registers or baselines. Gay Robins (1994) offers a comprehensive review of the grid system as an instrument of artisan organizations from the Middle Kingdom onward. In numerous examples, one sees instances where the standardization of a graphic product through the use of registers is the result of coordinated methods of instruction and duplication. This does not necessarily validate Iversens notion (1975) of a canon of proportions, however. Robins (1994: 56) counters with an observation of individualism: Plainly Egyptian artists were not working within a rigid, unchangeable system from which only bad practitioners deviated.14 One rather witnesses the practiced hand of a master artisan who still respects the professionalism of the baseline. Rollston (2003: 16062, 178) observes that in instances with a samek-pe sequence in a provenanced Iron IIBC Hebrew inscription, there is a consistent pattern with respect to vertical placement.15 The samek always ascends to a height above the registers ceiling line, while the pe nestles snuggly below the left edge of the sameks lowest crossbar. This is an important detail. While palaeographic analysis often considers ductus relative to the baseline, less frequently does it ruminate on placement patterns of characters relative to each other. There are meaningful patterns in this domain that perhaps speak to curricular instruction. There are no deviations from the samek-pe sequence in any individual scribes hand in Hebrew during the eighth to sixth centuries regard-

11 There is still little consensus on the formalization of Iron Age schooling; see surveys of evidence and varying scholarly views in the works of Rollston (2006), Crenshaw (1998), Lemaire (1981; 1984), Davies (1995), Puech (1988), Haran (1988), Whybray (1990) and Jamieson-Drake (1991). 12 Respectively representative views nd expression in Kaufman 1986 and Cross 2003: 34450. 13 Recall specically the gradual proliferation of CalComp workstations in the 1970s and AutoCAD software in the early 1980s. These and kindred advances essentially destroyed handdrawn architectural drafting and concomitant training with alphabetic registers.

14 Compare the comments of Schfer (1974: 32634), who allows for the artisans deviation from a canon of proportions only for objects other than humans and animals. 15 This pattern overlaps mediathe samek-pe sequence occurs on both ostraca and the Royal Steward Inscription (Rollston 2003: 178)a fact that testies to the progressive cursives inuence on the lapidary medium. While the restrictive space of stamp seal registers understandably curtails this pattern within the medium, there is nevertheless a specimen from Megiddo (Avigad and Sass 1997: no. 85); see Rollston 2003: 161, n. 63.

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less of region.16 This graphic relationship, moreover, does not appear (to my knowledge) in the Phoenician, Aramaic, or Transjordanian scripts.17 I argue that this juxtaposed letter placement is a memory reex of alphabetic transcription. In other words, one imagines a Hebrew abecedary in common use with a samek-pe template that consistently locates the pe beneath the sameks crossbars. The abecedary ostensibly functions as a curricular guide for the duplication of the alphabet (Puech 1988).18 Epigraphers envision scribal students writing and rewriting the alphabet as an exercise to gain familiarity and prociency with the characters, their relative size, and their relative placement. This parallels the use of lexical lists from the Sumero-Akkadian curriculum in which duplication is the primary mechanism of familiarizing the students with the relevant inventory of signs (Tinney 1998; Veldhuis 1998; 2004). The popularity of such an abecedary or curricular primer would account for the uniformity of the samek-pe relationship over the course of the eighth to sixth centuries. It would further substantiate the existence of a pe-ayin Hebrew abecedary in prevalent (if not dominant) use until (or later than) the close of the Iron Age. This does not necessarily conrm the existence of scribal schools as institutions, but it does serve as potent evidence in favor of traditional pedagogical aids.

While the pe-ayin sequence appears at Izbet Sartah (Demsky 1977), Kuntillet Ajrud,19 and in the biblical acrostics,20 the Lachish abecedary (Lemaire 1976) bears an ayin-pe sequence in a remedial hand with little control over the baseline. The quality of this scribal hand should not be taken outright to suggest a poorly learned pe-ayin convention, however. This nd may index a genuine pedagogical variation. Haran (1988) has agued that the abecedary itself need not signify a scribal school, especially in the light of the nd-spots of many such specimens. Harans skepticism is confessedly a reaction to the sanguine treatment of Lemaire (1981), who does not hesitate to surmise the existence of a formal school at a given archaeological site with the sparsest of epigraphic evidence.21 Their impasse seems to concern the recovery of schools by syllogism. This syllogism takes scribal training for scribal schools, thus further taking the abecedary as evidence for the latter. This leap is unnecessary. The survival of epigraphic material indicates an act of qualied literacy, however culturally restricted, which assumes scribal training res ipsa loquitur. This need not import the anachronism of the school. The presumption among some West Semitic epigraphers of formal schooling in a dedicated building evidently derives from Kramers (1949) once-inuential Mesopotamian model and Sjbergs (1976)

16 Two incriminating exceptions to the ascendant samek are the Moussaeff ostraca (Bourdreuil, Israel, and Pardee 1996) and the Jehoash Inscription, both of which are unprovenanced (hence suspect a priori) and unmistakable forgeries on countless other grounds; see Rollstons damning palaeographic analysis (2003). 17 Overarching sameks are rare in general outside of Hebrew, regardless of the adjacent letter. Note that, with some exceptions, writes Rollston (2003: 178), samek in Phoenician and Aramaic does not tower over other letters in the same way as in Old Hebrew. 18 Abecedary inscriptions themselves may also represent scribal exercises and occasionally doodling, as one perhaps sees in Kuntillet Ajruds Pithos B (Hadley 1987). The abecedary is a cross-cultural idiom, appearing in Latin, Greek, and Etruscan in addition to West Semitic. Coogan (1974) has argued that the Latin term elementa derives indirectly from the l-m-n sequence in the alphabets second exercise register; this is a romantic notion, but one should like better documentation for Greek intermediation. Coogan (1990) furthermore interprets the West Semitic root lp to reect the abecedarians exercise in verbal form, i.e., to transcribe the alphabet, perhaps in parallel to the Greek verb poinikzen, make Phoenician [letters]. But see the caveats of Haran (1988), who disputes the assumption that the abecedary necessarily indexes school duplication exercises.

We may further infer from Kuntillet Ajruds Pithos B that a pe-ayin abecedary enjoyed use in the north. The pithos bears both the samek-pe reex and the name Amaryaw with the characteristic northern elision of the theophor (Davies 1991: 81, nos. 8.0198.021). This ascription is circumstantial, however, as it depends on the scribes dialect rather than that of Amaryaw himself. See further Hadley 1987. 20 See Lam 24; Ps 910; and (in LXX) Prov 31. 21 Lemaire (1981; 1984) makes the most impassioned case by far for organized schools in the Iron Age Levant, while Puech (1988) and Davies (1995) offer more restrained inferences from the epigraphic data. Whybray (1990) and Crenshaw (1998) represent more moderate positions on the modesty of private scribal education, while Haran (1988) trends even more skeptically with respect to the interpretation of school materials. JamiesonDrakes oft-cited manifesto (1991) rejects nearly any notion of scribal culture at all until the very late Iron Age II on the equation of monumental architecture with literate haute couture. While I indeed envision state patronage as a cultivator of scribal renement and apparatus for professional organization, Jamieson-Drakes work strikes me as fatally reductionist in its appropriation of pass political taxonomies from structuralist anthropology.

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dissection of edubba pedagogy.22 This model has since evolved with closer scrutiny of the tablets nd-spots. Recent work on cuneiform scribal education now militates against the concepts of a dedicated edice and a uniform employment of instructional aids.23 Even the Old Babylonian curricular literature and its order varied according to the individual predilections of private instructors, notwithstanding the legendary orthodox canon of scribal pedagogy. Robsons (2001) investigation of the Nippur schools shows 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 to personal taste or pedagogical preference.24 The circulation of variant West Semitic abecedaries may reect specic pedagogical choices of, or access to, primers made within individual learning environments which do not detract from the trajectory toward the standardized templates suggested by Rollstons work. Indeed, not until the Iron II emergence of state interests in
The elephantine cache of secondary literature on cuneiform scribal culture and education permits only an abridged set of citations. Studies of scribal history and culture include Pearce 1995; Visicato 2000; Wilcke 2000; and Sasson 2002. For sympathetic views of the edubba literature, see Kramer 1949; Sjberg 1976; and now Volk 2000. Seminal lexicographic studies beyond MSL are Civil 1976; 1995. Important treatments of the cuneiform curriculum include Veldhuis 1997; 1998; 2000; 2004; Robson 2001; Tinney 1998; 1999; Charpin 1990; George 2005; Gesche 2001; Civil 2000; Nemet-Nejat 1988; 1995; Landsberger 1960; Oppenheim 1965; and Vanstiphout 1979. For selected work on peripheral cuneiform education in the second millennium, see Artzi 1990; Beckman 1983; Civil 1989; Demsky 1990; Izreel 1997; van Soldt 1995; van der Toorn 2000; Wilcke 1992; and Edzard 1985. 23 See most recently Veldhuis 2004: 5866; Robson 2001; Tinney 1998; and George 2005: 131 for the Old Babylonian period. Sjbergs famous depiction (1976) of a monolithic school has left an indelible but anachronistic mark on scholarly approaches to edubba particulars. There are qualied elements of the older school building approach in a recent article by George (2005: 13334), who carefully restricts this possibility to subsidies of Ur III micromanagement. One indeed infers from Ur III epigraphic effects a causal state interest in regulation (Michalowski 1991; Visicato 2000: 7, n. 24), but the edubba vignettes (Kramer 1949; Volk 2000) are still likely stylized proles (Robson 2001: 39). We cannot make much architectural sense out of Shulgis abstruse references to the -gstug-dnissaba-mul or the ki-munwhich some take as formal academieswhen even city gates boast metonymic or ideological designations. Nor do autobiographical hymns that praise Shulgi as the best student among his peers rise above the opacity of propaganda. Shulgi no doubt received the private instruction betting an absolute monarch, albeit with a master scribe who had every occasion to compliment his royal pupil on his progress vis--vis that of lesser tutees. 24 See further Tinney 1999.
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scribal discourse did the necessary cultural apparatus appear to coax the renement of this professional technology. Even so, the pe-ayin alphabetic order did not give way to the ayin-pe standard of post-exilic Hebrew until quite late. The later concretization of ayin-pe in the light of preponderant Iron Age abecedaries of another order suggests the arbitrariness of the selection. Arbitrary selections tend to index institutional codication, which may likewise bear on late Iron II palaeographic development under chancery aegis. In other words, the pe-ayin alphabet was a standard of the Iron II state, while the ayin-pe alphabet became the standard of priestly Yehud and subsequent Judaism. The Iron IIB homogenization of the Hebrew script speaks of scribal deference to an emerging ideal hand which served a political program. The early Iron Age tells a different story, in which variant primers circulated in an environment with more circumstantial patronage of writing.

caveats on curricular variation from cuneiform

The standardization of the Hebrew curriculum is attributable to elite encouragement during the Iron Age IIB.25 Before this juncture, it seems that diversied, decentralized scribal instruction employed variant pedagogical aids. Conventional wisdom has moved away from the schoolhouse model that Kramer (1949) popularized in his edition of the Sumerian Schooldays text. Scribal instruction mainly occurred in private homes with a handful of students at most (Charpin 1990; Robson 2001). The notable departure is the Ur III states attempt to coordinate instruction in order to facilitate the needs of a growing bureaucracy (if not stimulate sycophancy with curricular hagiography)an exception supporting the rule.26 It falls to the state to unfurl standards.
25 We must distinguish between palaeographic evidence for Iron IIBC script standardization (with, what I infer therefrom, a concomitantly dominant pe-ayin abecedary) and the postIron II conversion to an ayin-pe abecedary. These conventions are both products of elite patronage, but they represent distinct phenomena of different eras. If the Lamentations acrostic assumes a date after 587 b.c.e., then we see the persistence of the pe-ayin order well into the sixth century (if not later). 26 As Michalowski explains (1991: 5153), the micromanagement of the dub-sars formative textualization under Shulgis self-aggrandized regime may have produced only a marginally more literate scribal class; any attempts to unify the curricula served baser political instincts than the pursuit of pure knowledge (to squeeze blood from another academys malapropian stone).

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This is the axiomatic essence of Adam Smiths (2003) charge that the state substantiates itself with a mental map of a political landscape.27 The administrative renement of writing may yield both internal (organizational) and external (representational) dividends when a government elects to transform a script into an emblem or a literature into an ideology.28 Beyond the short-lived Ur III experiment, the variable of individualism left its mark in the selective use of primer materials from the so-called Mesopotamian canon.29 The derivative curricula that facilitated the use and abuses of second-millennium Peripheral Akkadian in parts west and north exhibit more extreme variability in the evidence for (or choice of ) pedagogical texts. Artzi (1990) has inventoried the extant lexical materials from Akhetaten, where cuneiform scribes had access to the Silbenalphabet, Sa Syllabary, An-Anum, and Diri. Notable texts of the socalled standard curriculum are absent often due to the accident of discovery, but perhaps there are also cases of selective or restricted access to the wider inventory of instructional aids. Alalakh has so far produced only specimens from the Ur5-ra = hubullu series,30 while Ugarit boasts nearly the entire repertoire save Erimhus and Kagal (van Soldt 1995). Only Ugarit and Boghazky apparently featured Proto-Lu and grammatical texts in their curricula; only these
27 Smith is admittedly uncomfortable with the anthropological reication of the state, but that illusory taxon is nevertheless the referent political archetype of the built environment as he envisions the operations of self-authentication. To paraphrase Smiths own paraphrase of Solzhenitsyn, the state is the conceptually contiguous archipelago from which archaeology cannot escape, because the states cultural valence is equal parts emic and etic. I insist on a phenomenological recognition of the actual essentializing act endemic both to statecraft and the scholarship of statecraft (Byrne forthcoming). 28 See Messick 1993 for a parade example from Yemen, where polity and calligraphy claim coextensive existence in public discourse. 29 Note that Wilcke (2000) sees in variability a need to diversify and enlarge the traditional understanding of elite cuneiform literati. Wilckes conclusions are not altogether convincing, but his important work on scribal diversity (1992; 2000) demonstrates the need for better theoretical discourse on literacy. 30 The archaeological distribution of evidence warrants tentative analytical inference; see Artzi 1990: 153, n. 43. For half a century, essentially three lexicographic texts have framed the pedagogical picture at Alalakh (Wiseman 1953: 113, nos. 44547, although I surmise that texts 45253 also assume curricular substrates). In 2003, however, Chicago excavators discovered an Ur5-ra XVIII fragment in Tell Atchanas topsoil (Lauinger 2005). The tablets supercial stratication speaks truth to caution.

two cities and Emar boast the Sa Vocabulary among the Peripheral Akkadian corpora. Are what Artzi (1990: 140) calls Akhetatens surprising gaps accidental or intentional? Faivre (1995) cautions that cuneiform texts were regularly recycled, and Civil (1995: 2307) notes that this practice was especially true of school texts. Many exercise tablets were never red, and thus these survive mainly in conagration detritus or secondary usage (viz., ll material for walls). Beckman (1983) and Artzi (1990) convincingly attribute the parallelism between the chancery curricula at Akhetaten and Boghazky to a Hittite edubba tradition established in Egypt in an anterior period. There are clear parallels in ductus and canon, viz. the literary legends of the kings of Akkade, which appear both in Hatti and EA 359.31 It is noteworthy that the city-state of Ugarit exhibits the most diverse collection of pedagogical aids among all the Peripheral Akkadian corpora, including that of Hatti. Part of the incongruity admits of complex scribal intermediation; Ugarits lexicographic series derived from a Hurrian tradition, while Boghazkys did not (Beckman 1983: 103).32 In view of the selective use of pedagogical aids in the Old Babylonian Nippur curricula (Robins 2001), then, it is probably wisest to concede (at least tentatively) a variegated pattern of text distribution in the peripheral cuneiform cultures stemming from the independence of individual teachers or chanceries.33 This pattern may indicate pedagogical discrimination, circumstances of intermediation, and/or accident of discovery. Wilcke
31 Viz., the King of Battle epic (sar tamhri); see the discussions of Beckman (1983: 11213) and Westenholz (1997: 4 5, 10231). EA 359s Egypto-Hittite ductus suggests an Egyptian copy of a Hittite import to Izreel (1997: 71), while the Hittite orthography (which Izreel also notes) suggests an Anatolian original to others (Westenholz 1997: 105). The tablet unfortunately has not undergone petrographic sourcing (Goren, Finkelstein, and Naaman 2004: 87). 32 Beckman (1983: 1012) credits Assyrian and Babylonian sources for Boghazkys lexical inventory; this Empire-era transmission parallels (and complements) Hurrian intermediation, the fruits of which included Boghazkys introduction to the Gilgamesh and Kumarbi literature. 33 Curricular vectors of origin may also play a formative role in the ultimate prole of a derivative curriculum. This is certainly the case with Hittite inuence on the Egyptian curriculum, although the latter includes one literary text, the Adapa myth (EA 356), which originated in Babylonia on petrographic grounds (Goren, Finkelstein, and Naaman 2004: 8283; but see Izreel 2001: 5559). Izreel (1997: 46; 2001: 5152) broached this possibility for the Adapa text (or its Urtext) on the basis of its afnities with Middle Babylonian ductus. The ductus is similar in the

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(1992) sees in Emars orthography, palaeography, phraseology, and grammar at least two distinct scribal schools in operation. Such a distinction may imply something about eclectic learning syllabary at the site, but it also curbs expectations of standardization in Peripheral Akkadian more generally. Prescriptivist characterizations of Peripheral Akkadian as barbarized unfortunately tend to deemphasize the fact that, in cases where Akkadian was not the dominant spoken language (Mitanni, Hatti, Ugarit, Canaan), the language instead functioned as a technological instrument.34 The appropriation of Akkadian was an adaptive technical act, while Akkadians functions (diplomatic, epistolary, etc.) were culturally ad hoc. Like scribes in Nippur and Emar, the cuneiformists in Palestine perhaps enjoyed the opportunity to choose primers for apprentices from an assortment of materials.35 Izreel (2001: 52) identies the Adapa recension from Akhetaten as a school text with the observation (among others) that it privileges Akkadian syllabic spelling over the frequent use of logograms. If this orthographic criterion indeed suggests a pedagogical character, then it is worth noting that the Gilgamesh fragment from Megiddo follows suit. In 19 lines of fragmentary cuneiform, there are only three logograms; those logograms all present the same name, Igim-mas, who is none other than Gilgamesh (Goetze and Levy 1959: 12123). In other words, the logographic spelling is incidental, almost formulaic, in its exception to the otherwise exclusive
Nergal and Ereshkigal text (EA 357), but in this case the inclusions denote an Egyptian provenance (Goren, Finkelstein and Naaman 2004: 83). One sees a hodgepodge in the conuence of a Hittite-inuenced edubba (in turn partially derived from Hurrian cuneiform and its idiosyncrasies; see Beckman 1983: 102 3), imported Babylonian canonical texts, and native Egyptian copies characterized by emulated Babylonian ductus with Peripheral Akkadian spelling (Izreel 2001: 53). Still more peculiar is the adaptation of the Egyptian red-point system, ordinarily used to demarcate Egyptian syntagms, in order to indicate prosodic units in the Akkadian literary texts EA 356, 357, and 372 (Izreel 2001: 8190). 34 Moran (1992: xxi) freely designates some Amarna Akkadian as extremely barbarized; Mrquez Rowe (1998: 63) uses barbarised for Hurro-Akkadian in an equivocal way; Rainey (1996b: 1) refreshingly rejects the term barbaric as a charge that can no longer be sustained. In von Dassows view (2004), the alloglottographic character of Amarna Akkadian complicates its very designation as a language. 35 For a general conjecture of scribal education in CanaaniteAkkadian, see Demskys digest (1990).

syllabic orthography.36 The Gilgamesh tablet, then, was probably a literary text assigned in the advanced stages of scribal education at Megiddo.37 This discovery complements the larger inventory of curricular texts discovered in Bronze Age Palestine.38 The larger Canaanite inventory may have included still other literary compositions and lexica. Miguel Civil (1995: 2307) argues that the quality of instruction in Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform differed noticeably in peripheral sites such as Emar, Ugarit, and Boghazky from that of Mesopotamia proper. Thus, he attributes the inferiority of the Peripheral Akkadian product to its status as a second language, but he also sees the consequence of an inferior education with alien primers. Lexical lists of early second-millennium Sumerian canals or marsh sh, he argues (1995: 2307), would prove entirely meaningless to late second-millennium West Semitic scribes. The esoteric nature of these lexica might indeed have
After all, Igim-mas is persona sine qua non. Demsky (1990: 16465) has intimated as much. The advanced stages of literary transcription are amply documented (Veldhuis 2004), notably including the Gilgamesh and Huwawa text within the Sumerian Decad at Old Babylonian Nippur (Tinney 1999). The fact that the Gilgamesh epic was a core component of the scribal intelligentsia of Late Bronze Canaan partly obviates the need to reconstruct a relationship of transmission between the cross-cultural ood narratives of Mesopotamia and Judah. While there may exist other Babylonian signatures in the Primeval History that hint at exilic-era inuences, there is no compelling reason to exclude the possibility that, by the early Iron Age, highland Judaean lore understood the ancestral iterations of the deluge as an autochthonous mythos. I demur from Lamberts view (1967: 127), on grounds too numerous to digest here, that early postKassite Babylon itself had no knowledge of the ood story except by late conversation with Sippar conservators. In view of the popularity of Sargonic legends among peripheral cuneiform curricula (Beckman 1983), perhaps the Sargon Birth Legend (Westenholz 1997: 3649) found its way into peripheral hands just as the King of Battle epic came to Egypt. The latter appears in recensional form at Akhetaten as EA 359 (see Westenholz 1997: 10231). Sargonic staples of the Canaanite curriculum could help historical critics to digest the elliptically aboriginal Moses infancy topos (Exod 2:110) in Iron Age Judaean folklore. 38 These include lexical texts from Hazor (Tadmor 1977), Tel Aphek (Rainey 1975; 1976), and Ashkelon (Huehnergard and van Soldt 1999); liver model fragments from Hazor (Landsberger and Tadmor 1964); and a mathematical fragment from Hazor (Horowitz 1997). For the use of omina in scribal education, see Koch-Westenholz 2000: 15; van Soldt (1995: 17677) suggests the curricular employment of omina at Ugarit. For cuneiform mathematical primers, see Robson 1999; and Nemet-Nejat 1988; 1995. Extensive bibliographies on these and noncurricular texts appear in Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002; 2006.
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undermined their pedagogical efcacy to some degree in peripheral cuneiform cultures, but the work of Niek Veldhuis introduces caveats about the pedagogical function of content in the so-called Listenwissenschaft. He (Veldhuis 1997; 2004) argues that Sumerian lists of leather products, wooden objects, birds, and the like served the primary function of modeling cuneiform signs and words for the purpose of graphic duplication exercises. The reproduction of Sumerian words placed emphasis on the training in Sumerian reading, writing, and culture (Veldhuis 2004: 65). Civils characterization would prove more resonant had West Semitic scribes needed to mention Sumerian canals in their professional compositions; as it was, they did not.39 In peripheral curricula, the Sumerian words themselves did not always need to be understood in order to facilitate the graphic objectives. The Hittite tradition was barely conversant in Sumerian (Beckman 1983), although Sumerian lexica are attested at Boghazky. In Mesopotamia, even Old and Middle Babylonian scribes would have approached the lexica in Sumerian, by their eras a dead language, with some cultural distance. In any case, the West Semitic column in the Ur5-ra fragment from Ashkelon (Huehnergard and van Soldt 1999) implies the attempt, however successful, of Amarnaperiod scribes to interact with the lexical content of these alien materials. And while the trilingual prism from Aphek (Rainey 1976) does not conform to any known Mesopotamian curriculum, it too suggests Canaanite interest in polyglot lexicography.40 There are several dimensions of the Amarna correspondence that might prove pertinent to the question of sundry curricula. The dialectal diversity of Peripheral Akkadian, which is conventionally divided into northern (variously called Syro-Anatolian, Reichsakkadisch, Hurro-Akkadian, and the regrettably ambiguous Assyrian) and southern (CanaaniteAkkadian) branches, is a testament to regional variation in practice. Notable is the fact that the Late

Bronze scribes from Egypt and Jerusalem employed a form of Akkadian more consistent with the northern branch, notwithstanding the regional geographic buffer of what one might call an isogloss bifurcating Peripheral Akkadians northern and southern branches. These noncontiguous pockets of dialectal afnity may speak to kindred curricular traditions within a larger pluralism of scribal attitudes. With respect to the Jerusalem scribe, Moran (2003: 24974) is keen to note not only lexical breaks from Canaanite-Akkadian, but also departures in palaeography, orthography, and syllabary.41 These latter features of cuneiform writing are profoundly indebted in execution to the specic pedagogical primers employed in scribal training; the inventory, appearance, and combination of signs are the hallmarks of the duplication exercise. We run amiss to neglect the enormous impact of local languages on Akkadian writing in its peripheral incarnationsthe Mitannian examples are legion, especially the reverberant effects of phonology on orthography (Mrquez Rowe 1998)but we do well also to note that consistency of departure from the Mesopotamian norm might imply something about tools as well as method in peripheral education. Consider the use of logograms, for example, which constituted not an insignicant portion of the edubba lexical exercises. Rainey (1996a: 34 35) attributes variant usage by Canaanite scribes to a poorly learned logogram. This is a reasonable enough conclusion,42 but there are perhaps pedagogical circumstances that might illuminate the origin of some variants. As Huehnergard and van Soldt (1999: 191) reconstruct the Ashkelon Ur5-ra fragment, it corresponds exactly to that of the Emar cognate.43 As Civil (1989: 9) notes, however, Most lexical tablets from the Northwest teem with scribal mistakes. These mistakes are plentiful in Emars

Canaanite scribes nevertheless made plentiful use of logograms (livestock, professions, etc.) in culturally appropriate contexts. Many of these are elementary signs (they occur in the Sa literature, which is attested at Ugarit but not in Canaan), and they often appear reproduced correctly; but see Rainey 1996a: 2636 for evidence of variants. 40 Another lexical fragment from Aphek (Rainey 1975: 125 28) may also have contained polyglot entries; see Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002: 755 (Aphek 1); 2006: 2931.

39

41 Moran (2003: 27274) prefers to classify the Jerusalem corpus as a philological admixture with northern inuence (from an ethnolinguistic junction on the Syrian Canaanite-Akkadian/ Reichsakkadisch isogloss), while Rainey (1996b: 2426) prefers the term Assyrianism. Whether Assyrianisms per se pervade the corpus is open to interpretation, however (Moran 2003: 266, n. 58; Rainey 1996b: 26). 42 West Semitic morphosyntax better explains sharp departures in verbal forms than it does nominal logograms (excepting deviant phonetic complements with western signatures). 43 The Ur5-ra I tablet from Emar (Arnaud 1987: 3846) preserves almost the complete Sumerian text.

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lexical aids, especially the Sa Vocabulary.44 Variation in content and order not only depart from Assur and Boghazky standards, cautions Civil, but also internally within the broader Emar lexical corpus. It is difcult to hazard whether incongruities existed between the complete Ashkelon and Emar lexica or whether such variants might have inuenced vocabulary in scribal practice. One does imagine, on the other hand, that lexical errors in primers would have contributed to some of the poorly learned logograms that Rainey infers from Amarna variants. If one furthermore holds with von Dassow that Canaanite-Akkadian, replete with Glossenkeile, represented an intelligible Akkadographic writing system intended as much for readers as writers, then it is logical to posit the incorporation of the substrate peculiarities into formal training. She writes (2003: 21516):
. . . let us consider the Canaanite glosses, that is, Canaanite words spelled out syllabically following either a logogram or a syllabically spelled Akkadian word, and signaled by a gloss mark. Such glosses are usually taken to indicate the language of the writer of the text. But in actual practice they were surely meant for the reader: the purpose of writing a gloss would have been to aid the reader in understanding the glossed word. In the case of the Canaanite Amarna letters, then, the practice of occasionally glossing logograms and Akkadian words with Canaanite words would have been premised on the assumption that the reader might require some assistance, by means of a Canaanite translation, in order to comprehend those logograms and Akkadian words. In other words, the reader was expected to understand the text in Canaanite!

Von Dassow characterizes the Canaanite gloss system as an Akkadographic code between correspondents, rather than the representation of a living, spoken dialect.45 Were this code to function effectively, i.e., achieve the results for which it was ostensibly innovated, then one expects to nd the codes incorporation into the scribal curriculum. Without more Canaanite syllabaries and lexica, however, we cannot vet this theory. If this code arose to assist the reader as much as (if not more than) the author, as von Dassow maintains, then one further supposes curricular familiarity with the code among scribal recipients. In other words, the Akkadographic code had better render Canaanite letters more intelligible to Egyptian readers in order to justify its invention.46 On the other hand, the road to perdition is paved with circumlocutions: shorthand and glosses can obfuscate as much as clarify a documents meaning. Moran (1992: xxii) and Rainey (1996b: 32) also freely characterize the Amarna language as a code; so too does Pardee (1999: 313), but he sees randomness in its execution:
The Akkadian of these texts was a learned language, a lingua francanone of the scribes of these texts was a native speaker of Akkadian as spoken in Mesopotamia. It had already been in use in Canaan long enough to develop into a sort of code understood only by the scribal class who used it: for speakers of Canaanite it was incomprehensible because it was basically Akkadian, while the extent to which it reected Canaanite, particularly the morphology and morphosyntax of the verbal system, would have made it nearly as incomprehensible for a speaker of Akkadian. The code, however, was never systematized: it is clear from the examination of variants

44 As van Soldt (1995: 17274) reconstructs the elementary Ugaritic curriculum in syllabic cuneiform, students copied the Sa Vocabulary fairly early. This lexicon of simple signs represents one of the students rst polyglot texts. Errors in his Sa Vocabulary could reverberate throughout a scribes career. If the Emar lexica bore any broader similarities with the Ashkelon lexica, then it becomes easier (though not any safer) to account for any number of variant logograms in the Canaanite corpora. On the other hand, Artzi (1990: 14851) considers the Sa Syllabary (the Sa Vocabularys immediate precursor in van Soldts curricular sequence) a more advanced stage of the transcription education. Veldhuiss work (1998) on transcription sequences, however, counters Artzis characterization. What Artzi considers advanced work in fact precedes the students initial exposure to polyvalence and compound signs (as in Ur5-ra), abstract polyvalence (as in Ea and Diri), and Sumerian/Akkadian incongruities (as in the acrographics), to say nothing of work with model contracts, letters, proverbs, or literary texts.

See von Dassows (2004 [2006]) further characterization of Amarna Akkadian as an alloglottographic system, which deserves fuller consideration than my paper offers. Publication delays at the American Oriental Society did not permit me access to this article until the nal editorial stage of the present manuscript. Von Dassows study is linguistically more circumspect than that of Gianto, who vaguely settles on the interlanguage designation to describe the development of a linguistic system in its own right (1999: 131). 46 See Izreel 1995; Gianto 1999; and von Dassow 2004, who draw important attention to the reading of glosses by recipients. The Taanach letters indicate that Canaanite principalities also wrote to each other in Akkadian. This suggests that Canaanite scribes may have originally developed a gloss code for Levantine correspondence rather than for an Egyptian readership. The codes embeddedness nevertheless accounts for its attestation in letters to nonWest Semitic recipients.

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of given forms that the scribes vacillated between their native language and their imperfectly learned Akkadian.

Such variants are beyond dispute, as Moran and Rainey have exhaustively detailed. Pardee does not specify whether he has in mind variants between geographic corpora (Gezer, Byblos, Amurru, etc.) or variants within a given geographic corpus. The limits of my expertise do not permit me to infer the pattern of distribution to which he alludes, but it stands to reason that variants between city-states may yet speak to emic curricular aids of idiosyncratic character (whether rife with errors as in the Emar lexica or irregular in Nuzi and Alalakh orthography). What we call variants may in some instances owe their forms to a kind of instructional systemization that Pardee sees lacking in application. This does not deny the idiosyncratic nature of Canaanite-Akkadian; Pardees remonstrations are charitable. But the students incompetence in Akkadian and the systematic method of instruction are not mutually exclusive elements of scribal education, as any overwhelmed graduate student might confess. Raineys poorly learned logogram may have also been a sometimes perfectly copied logogram. The cuneiform of the scribe is only as good as the cuneiform of his syllabary.47 A comprehensive study of variant distribution by toponym or petrographic origin could produce patterns that conrm or quash the possibility of regionally disparate primers with internally consistent orthographies.48

Compare Morans (2003: 266, n. 58) preference to interpret the apparent Assyrianism as ignorance of proper Babylonian. At some point, explanations for serial (and even singular) aberrations should factor in the apparatus of scribal instruction at least to exclude its possible inuence. 48 EA 285 illustrates a problematic case in point. This tablet belongs to the Jerusalem corpus on the basis of its sender, AbdiHeba. Moran (2003: 24974) uses philological particulars of the Akkadian to illustrate his point that the Jerusalem corpus bears a geographically isolated afnity with the hallmarks of Syrian Peripheral Akkadian. The fabric of the tablet, however, does not exhibit the Moza or Amminadav petrographic signatures typical of the hill country anticline (Goren, Finkelstein, and Naaman 2004: 26869). The inclusions instead suggest an origin in the BethShean vicinity, whither Goren et al. speculate Abdi-Heba might have traveled before dictating the letter to the pharaoh. We must concede the tablets sender to be Abdi-Heba and therefore presume either (1) that his scribe accompanied him to the river valley where tablets with local inclusions were accessible, or (2) that Abdi-Heba dispatched his scribe there with a wax draft. We must also presume a local tablet kiln at Beth-Shean, then, as well as a

47

A nal piece of evidence is relevant to the question of pedagogical isoglosses for want of a more precise sociolinguistic term for regional curricula. While the northern branch of Late Bronze Peripheral Akkadian (including Emar, Ugarit, Egypt, Alashiya, etc.) employs a Middle Babylonian system with marked Assyrian inuence, it is Raineys contention (1996a; 1996b) that several linguistic features of Canaanite-Akkadian derive from an archaic Old Babylonian writing system (in contradistinction to the northern branchs Middle Babylonian system with Middle Assyrian overlay). If Rainey is correct, then this relationship must likewise speak specically to vestigial curriculum (isolated by choice or circumstance). The phonological evidence in particular recommends a serious consideration of Raineys argument. Canaanite conservatisms include the retention of Old Babylonian initial and intervocalic w (cf. Middle Babylonian w > m), avoidance of Middle Babylonian nasalization of geminated dentals, common rejection of predental s > l shifts, afnities with Old Babylonian orthographic representation of sibilants, and other examples (Rainey 1996a: 3746). He further cites Canaanites 2c dual pronoun that otherwise boasts only Old Babylonian and Old Akkadian attestations (1996a: 8183), as well as the 3ms pronoun sut (1996a: 6263). Rainey admits that the latter pronoun, common to Old and Middle Assyrian, may have entered the Canaanite repertoire through contemporary vectors, but he prefers to understand this form as concomitant with other distinguishing evidence for Old Babylonian vestiges. Van Soldt (1998: 596) nds this appeal to Old Babylonian farfetched, however, in view of the inuence from local languages on Peripheral Akkadian elsewhere; his lectio facilior for sut therefore favors the Assyrianism. Huehnergard (1998: 61, 63) and von Dassow (2003: 197), on the other hand, seem to treat Raineys Old Babylonian inheritance with reticent approval. However much peripheral cuneiform scribes contaminated their Akkadian with pidgin codes, one cannot easily isolate variegated Babylonian dialect
cooperative local scribe. The unlikely alternative requires a reexamination of Morans use of EA 285 as evidence for the peculiarity of Jerusalems scribe, since Abdi-Heba must then have commissioned this tablet (with its concomitant grammar, seminal syllabary, etc.) downslope from a lowland scribe on hand. The resultant philological afnities between the Beth-Shean and Jerusalem corpora would thus complicate Morans presumptive isogloss circumambulating Abdi-Hebas scribe. It is wiser to side with the wax writing board.

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geography from the underlying variegated curricula. Variation in instruction begets variation in execution.

applications of scribal technology

There are attestations of nearly every traditional category of cuneiform writing in Canaan among Middle and Late Bronze Age nds. Administrative texts, letters, lexica, a literary text, a lawsuit, and omina round out a nice sampling of applied cuneiform.51 One hesitates to speak too loosely of ample genres mainly in acknowledgment that several textslexica, Gilgamesh, omina, perhaps the Hazor mathematical tabletall seem to represent curricular staples. The notable text type to go underrepresented in Palestine is the contract. As Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders (2002; 2006) typologize the texts from the Canaanite corpus, there are no unequivocal contracts prior to the Neo-Assyrian period. There may be a smattering of Bronze Age contracts among the extant corpus (many of these texts are fragmentary or otherwise unintelligible), but their elusiveness is conspicuous (g. 1). The paucity of contracts should arrest our attention. Does form follow function? In most cuneiform cultures, excluding Ugarit, contracts represent the vast majority of retrieved documents. Is there signicance to the discordant ratio in Palestine? Accident of discovery might account for disproportionate representation. The discovery of the Amarna corpus on foreign soil provides a powerful caveat concerning secondary context, but one may only appeal to discard patterns for so long. The Amarna, Aphek, Taanach, Tell el-Hesi, Gezer, Shechem, and Hazor letters were elite objects by commission. In cuneiform cultures, contracts dominate in part because they are well distributed in private homes and archives. Chance discoveries of elite archives at Taanach and Nuzi tend to skew the distribution patterns with respect to raw numbers,52 but the prevalence of con51 See Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002; 2006. For general overviews of the Canaanite corpus, see the treatments of Edzard (1985) and van der Toorn (2000), both of whom see minimal cultural information surrendered in extant texts. The socioeconomic Sitz im Leben of the epigraphs indeed privileges their narrow content against the holistic, but this is little different from cuneiform corpora elsewhere. Our texts favor us with good data on the social location of writing and writers in the Bronze Age Levant; that variety of cultural computus is difcult to overvalue. 52 Chance discoveries can also obfuscate cultural practice or idiom. At Nuzi, there is only one attested land sale document with the operative term simu price (JEN 159). Nuzis convention of

epistemic limits of alphabetic cuneiform

The scribal admixture of Ugaritic, Hurrian, and Akkadian at Ugarit is well known and amply documented (Nougayrol et al. 1968). In many ways, Ugarits geopolitical and maritime position imbued the city with a cosmopolitan character unlike many other polities within the Peripheral Akkadian ambit. This accounts for Ugarits impressive collection of curricular lexica (van Soldt 1995). The presence farther south of Canaanite scribes conversant with alphabetic cuneiform is a more peculiar fact. The Beth Shemesh abecedary, the Taanach tablet, and the Tabor knife blade might all testify to the presence of either Ugaritian scribes abroad or functional knowledge of Ugaritic among Canaanite scribes.49 Both possibilities might presume, moreover, the anterior mobility of palace scribes in order to facilitate rst contact with the Ugaritic writing system. The problem with these extrapolations, however, is the discord in palaeography and abecedary between traditional Ugaritic writing and the southern counterparts (Sanders forthcoming). There are variations of a writing system in wide geographic usage, but there is no standard to which these subtraditions cleave. Taken together, these inscriptions testify to the regional prestige of alphabetic cuneiform, but more importantly, they document manifold curricula in scribal circles as far south as the lower Galilee, northern central highlands, and Shephelah. If Canaanite scribes learned Ugaritic in order to conduct diplomatic or commercial correspondence with a single city-state, then it is tting to acknowledge this acquisition of extremely specialized knowledge for expressly commissioned purposes.50 What survive in the archaeological record, however, are three epigraphs without an unambiguous cultural horizon to illuminate. Given the variations in the Canaanite specimens, it is difcult to see any regional scribal integration beyond local prestige or the ad hoc.
One may consult secondary literature under the headings Bet Shemesh 1, Taanach 15, and Tabor 1 in Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002: 756, 761; 2006: 15766. 50 Note that the Taanach tablet ostensibly deals with remittance.
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Fig. 1. The cerebral potential for scribal technologies may differ markedly from their cultural or circumstantial application in practice. Courtesy of The New Yorker.

tract nds is largely attributable to their appearance in socially stratied archaeological contexts. In Palestine, we have good, large-scale exposures of numerous Late Bronze sitesmany with discrete destruction layers, i.e., the optimum conditions for preservation of nonperishable epigraphs, especially tabletsand still the contracts have not appeared in numbers sufcient to draw a parallel with the representation we see in Mesopotamia.53 In other words,
marutu, ctive kinship by adoption, permitted predatory creditors to acquire real property from borrowers. The borrower adopts the creditor, who gives his ctive father a qistu (ng-ba) gift in exchange for a zittu (ha-la), i.e., inheritance rights (probably inalienable) to the property. The procedure may be normative for land sales, or the chance discoveries of creditor archives may prejudice the documentary evidence in favor of exchanges made under duress. It is possible that this legal device circumvents the sudutu proclamations, but we cannot even be sure that the sudutu intended to secure rights of land redemption.

53 Southern Levantine sites with varying degrees of excavated LB II strata include Tell Arka, Tell Kazel, Tell Ashtarah, Tell Simiriyan, Tell Ashari, Kamid el-Loz, Tell Ghassil, Tell Sakka, Tell el-Jalul, Sahab, Irbid, Umm ed-Dananir, Tell Abila, Amman Airport, Tell el-Umeiri, Dahr el-Medineh, Jarash, Tell Deir Alla, Tell Abu Kharaz, Tell es-Saidiyeh, Pella, Tell el-Mazar, Byblos, Beirut, Sarepta, Tyre, Tripoli, Khlade, Arde, Tell Nebi Mend, Tel Qiri, Yoqneam, Beer Tivon, Tel Qashish, Tel Bira, Nahariya, Kabri, Khirbet el-Aiyadiya, Tel Akko, Kefar Rosh ha-Niqra, Givat Yesef, Qiryat Ata, Tell Abu Hawam, Tell Keisan, Tel Par, Horvat Menorim, Khirbet Beit Jann, ed-Delhemiyeh, Tel Yinam, Tel Qishyon, Horvat Halukim, Tel Mor, South of Ashdod Yam, Tel Ashdod, Ashkelon, Netiv Ha-Asara, Gezer, Tel Malot, Tel Hamid, Bene Beraq, Tel Michal, Tel Gerisa, Jaffa, Mesubbim Junction, Yehud, Azor, Yavneh Yam, Lod, Tel Aphek, Tel Hadid, Tel Batash, Tel Erani, Tel Zippor, Yarmut, Beth Shemesh, Tel Miqne, Tell Zakariya, Tel Harasim, Tell e-Sa, Tel Zeror, Tel Nami, Tell Sitt Leila, Tel Hefer, Tel Megadim, Tel Dor, Tel Mevorakh, Tel Mikhmoret, Tel Shiqmona, Tel Poleg, Horvat Migdar, Tel Soreg, Tel Qarnei Hittin, Tel Dan, Tell el-Oreimeh, Tel Naama, Tel Anafa, Hazor, Qiryat Shemona South, Tel Qedesh, Tel Nagila, Tell Hesi, Tel Maaravim, Tel Sera, Tel Halif, Tell Beit Mirsim, Lachish, Afula,

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appeals to accident of discovery have certain limitations.54 A dening characteristic of the contract as a retrievable epigraph is its ubiquity. Again we ask whether the patterns of genre representation within the cuneiform corpus from Palestine are meaningful. The question itself is meaningful, in any case, because it speaks directly to the relative cultural functions and applications of writing. Scribal activity appears to be restricted to a small set of applications. In Palestine, scribes appear as royal or elite retainers, and perhaps exclusively so. The Shechem deed with witnesses may represent an exception, but this text is poorly understood.55 It is important to distinguish between the potential applications of a technology and the cultural application in practice. Consider the fact that cuneiform as a technologyfrom its incipient stages at late fourthmillennium Uruk to the Early Dynastic periods serviced contracts, receipts, onomastica, some literature, and the occasional marker of possession. The epistolary application for this technology goes unattested until the 24th century b.c.e. at the earliest.56 As Michalowski (1993: 23) notes, however, the early etiologies for writing from the 18th century b.c.e. in fact mistakenly invert the chronological order of application. Six centuries of use permitted scribes and poets to take the epistolary idiom for granted.57 In the Enmerkar myth, for example, the etiology for writing imagines that the cuneiform tabMidrakh Oz, Tell Jenin, Tel Kedesh, Taanach, Tel Jezreel, Tell Dothan, Megiddo, Khirbet Belameh, Tel Rehov, Beth-Shean, Tell el-Hammah, Tel Iztabba, Beitin, Shechem, Khirbet el-Marjama, Tell el-Farah North, Shiloh, Horvat Seifan, Ein Sippori, Kfar Yehoshua, Beth-Zur, Jerusalem, Jericho, Moza, Emeq Refaim, Hebron, Tell el-Ajjul, Tell el-Farah South, Tel Haror, Tell Jemmeh, Gaza, and Qubur el-Walaydah. See the pertinent LB II bibliography in Goren, Finkelstein, and Naaman 2004: 33355, which also lists surveyed sites with contemporaneous sherds. The surveys are inconsequential for assessing the accidents of epigraphic discovery, however. Only excavated sites are statistically meaningful if one places emphasis on breadth of site exposure; see Faust and Safrai 2005. 54 Note the fascinating exchange between Civil (1980) and Hallo (1990) on the epistemological contours of documentary evidence. 55 See Horowitz, Oshima, and Sanders 2002: 760; 2006: 123 25 for relevant bibliography. 56 The basic corpus of third-millennium letters appears in the treatments of Kienast and Volk (1995) and Michalowski (1993). A few more Old Akkadian letters have since appeared in print, but the dates and content do not alter the chronological pattern of distribution. 57 In the case of the Enmerkar cycle, however, the 18th-century tablets probably reect copies of a tradition from the IsinLarsa or Ur III period. This would shorten the centuries between

let was invented specically for sending a letter. After numerous exchanges by courier with the lord of Aratta, Enmerkar chooses not to entrust his weighty message to his messengers memory. Before that day, there had been no putting words on clay (Vanstiphout 2003: 85), so he invents cuneiform to ensure the verbatim transmission of his message. The historical inversion makes the epistolary etiology unintentionally ironic, but the lord of Arattas response is consistent with the common misgivings that new technologies occasion.
The lord of Aratta took from the messenger The tablet (and held it) next to a brazier. The lord of Aratta inspected the tablet. The spoken words were mere wedgeshis brow darkened. The lord of Aratta kept looking at the tablet (in the light of ) the brazier. (Vanstiphout 2003: 87)

The epic portrays the lord of Arattas hesitation at the use of wedges to convey words as confused philistinism.58 It is not enough for him to suspect the new medium, but he must also gape at it in astonishment. The narratives joke is practically Aristotelian in its contrived epistemological distance between logos and barbarian. No less than the lay reader defers to the Sumerologist to decipher the epic in good faith did illiterate kings have to concede to the scribe his representation of a tablets content as read aloud.59 The professionalization of interpretation always introduces an awkward power dynamic in which trust and mistrust cohabit. As Van De Mieroop (1999: 94 95) notes, few of the approximately 20,000 Old Assyrian tabletsmany of which are letters exchanged between family membersactually make use of the epistolary medium to convey personal feelings or inquire after loved ones beyond the formulaic. There are notable (often idiosyncratic) exceptions, but most
the rst cuneiform letters and the Enmerkar etiology for cuneiform, but one doubts that the chronological result enlightened the epics scribes one whit as to the letters true origins. 58 Vanstiphout (2003: 96) defends the translation of gag as wedge against the critique that gag is not the technical Sumerian term: But that is just the point. How is the lord of Aratta supposed to have known this? 59 To say nothing of the fact that diplomatic Akkadian often served as intermediary between the language in which the communiqu was composed (either orally or written) and the language into which it was translated for reception. Van der Toorn (2000: 100105) sees tremendous political power vested in scribal autonomy.

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texts are proverbially all business. As for Mesopotamian letters more generally, Stol (1995: 499) quashes the prospects of familial sentimentality with all the tenderness of a Thomas Hardy novel: No one wrote a love letter.60 In the case of Bronze Age Palestine, where contractual tablets are rare, we may invoke the distinction between the possible application of writing in theory and the cultural application in practice. Van der Toorn is decidedly positivistic about the cultural signicance of the Syro-Palestinian scribal tradition. Syllabic cuneiform was used for Akkadian, he writes (2000: 108), and Akkadian was the language of diplomacy and international politics. It was not used to record legal transactions or for purposes of intellectual exploration.61 The model contracts appear in the latter stages of the Babylonian curriculum, but there is no certainty that some Canaanite curriculum followed suit.62 Perhaps orality still functioned as the dominant cultural medium for contractual agreements in the southern Levant.63 One cannot be sure, but binding oral conventions of oaths and witnesses indeed surface widely in biblical literature. It is moreover possible to see in the written tablets witness list a vestigial protocol of oral antecedents. The witnesses bear memorial testimony to facts beyond the manipulation of interested parties; the written text usurps that function, relegating to human witnesses the lesser task of certifying
Many Old Assyrian letters employed a simplied syllabary of approximately 150 cuneiform signs (Larsen 1987: 21920, esp. n. 50), a fact that many have taken as evidence for more easily achieved literacy (especially for private letters). This may be true, but one also notes that the Old Assyrian documents typically feature formulaic nancial reports and requests pertaining to rm trade in ores and textiles. Although many letters involve unique subjects and learned scribes, much of the basic trade Akkadian deals with a limited set of topics or conceptual templates to which a limited syllabary could cater in an ad hoc curriculum. 61 Van der Toorn overlooks the lawsuit tablet from Hazor (Hallo and Tadmor 1977), as well as the legal texts in Akkadian from Ugarit unless he means to exclude the citys corpus from his Syro-Palestinian (his term) sample; note the Ugaritica V cache of Akkadian textes juridiques (Nougayrol et al. 1968: 17287). If by legal transactions, however, van der Toorn simply means contracts, then he may well be correct. 62 See Bodine 2001 for summary literature on the model contract as a text type. The absence of Canaanite specimens does not necessarily proscribe their xture in the curriculum, however. The Amarna and Taanach letters almost certainly rely on the curricular use of model letters, notwithstanding the latters absence in the material record; see Civils case study (2000) on the epistolary exercise and relevant bibliography. 63 Even within the written contract tradition, one sees variegation of Babylonian practice with respect to loan types, interest, repayment, and pledges (Skaist 1994).
60

only that the document itself materialized in good faith. The millennial gap between the earliest protocuneiform ideographs and the epistolary application revisits the characterization of writing as a technology (Goody 2000; Ong 2002). Houston and Stuart (1992: 590) dispute the technological metaphor as it tends to situate script apart from other ways of communicating meaning. Their objection sensibly reacts to the efforts of Goody and Watt (1963), Ong (2002), and Havelock (1986) to infer psychodynamic patterns of human behavior from the structures and shifts of writing systems. The construction of grand sociolinguistic theory from the semiotic isolation of the cuneiform or linear alphabetic scripts falls far outside our present interests (and credulity).64 While the technological metaphor is suspect, however, perhaps it is still salvageable.65 Applied writing affords political economy certain operative services, notwithstanding its interdependence with other media in cultural discourse. We need not reduce the totality of that discourse to the epigraph in order to appreciate what the epigraph may usefully occasion. The determinant for practical technologies is the identication of practical applications and success in execution.66 The mythological imperatives of

64 One laments this impulse to parlay the absence of modern epigraphic genres into intellectual critiques. Von Soden (1936) saw in the curricular lexica an epigraphic testimony to Mesopotamian cultures intellectual decits; but see the sobering epistemological critique of Veldhuis 2004: 8186. The ambiguity of the designation Listenwissenschaft has facilitated the misrepresentation of the curricular lexica as a boorish philosophical or scientic literature. Larsens (1987) misguided dependence on Goody (1977) and Ong (2002) perpetuates an insecure subculture of Assyriology that continues to reify the ctitious Greek miracle at the expense of the Near Easts savage mind. The fact that cuneiform scribal culture did not employ its technology to construct philosophical excurses and dialogues in the fourth-century Athenian tradition does not lead to the presumption that Mesopotamians were incapable of abstract speculation. We must distinguish between a technologys synchronic possibilities and functional applications. Philosophy remains a luxury of the academy to this day (if trends in universities general distribution requirements suggest anything about cultural valuation). The utilities of cuneiform in practice do not inform something as subjectively imperious as an intellectual prole, whether profound or vapid, philosophical or incurious. 65 Note that elsewhere Houston (2004) uses the term technology with only the slightest hint of self-consciousness, viz., with the occasional application of quotation marks. 66 Note that my characterization of writing as a technology differs markedly from Goodys (2000: 13251) most recent attempt to popularize the notion of technologies of the intellect.

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cuneiform in Enmerkar require the victory of romantic rhetoric over the banality of accounting. Alan Millard (1998; 1999) has written at length describing the perishable media available to scribes of Palestinetablets, wax boards, papyri, leather and he envisions a culture of scribalism that made use of these media to the greatest extent possible or imaginable. He (1999: 321) optimistically reconstructs systemic elite emulation in which Canaanite kinglets adopted every conceivable device and application for writing that one may nd depicted on an Egyptian tomb. In other words, he exports the full range of Egyptian media and application to Canaanite elites. This best-case scenario raises an important methodological question. How do we balance a plausible argument from silence with the need to confront the patterns that the empirical corpus presents? The empirical corpus for late second-millennium Palestine does not suggest an applied scribal craft beyond the realm of elite commission.67 There is the addiEven in Old Babylonian Mesopotamia, where scribes performed myriad functions in administrative, entrepreneurial, ritual, and magical capacities, there is evidence of some specialists who owed their livelihood to elite patronage. While many scribes enjoyed hereditary introduction to the trade, still others apprenticed themselves at the encouragement of benefactors. Letters 150152 from Tell al-Rimah (Dalley, Walker, and Hawkins 1976: 12223) involve a case in which a scribe pleads to his benefactress after she evidently cuts him off from the palace, impairing his ability to work. Toward the end, he even characterizes scribal patronage with a patrimonial simile. I enclose the editors translation of Letter 150 with my emendations. Speak to my lady: thus Yasitna-abum your servant. May Shamash and Marduk grant that my lady live forever for the sake of a ghosts son, myself. I am well; but news about the health of my lady has never arrived, and my heart is not alive. In Andariq, you encouraged me not to catch birds (?), saying: Learn the art of scribes! I shall make you into a household of gentlemen. You made me trust in this business, and you made me forfeit water and broth. You have decided that I, a ghosts son, shall wander around aimlessly in the midst of my own family. You no longer remember that once you gave me condence and you strove for me, and you did not have towards me the mercy (expected) of womankind. Do you not know that a ghosts son, even more than a corpse, is deserving of mercy? Now, for the love of Shamash, show everlasting kindness to a ghosts son. Because I have nothing, I cannot serve in the palace. And what more can I write to tell you? Am I any better acquainted with the matter than you? Do you not realize that a ruler whose (palace) ofcials are not trustworthy is dishonored in his own palace, and he himself is despised? Do you simply not realize, although I keep writing to you? Just as a father does not reject his own sons, so may my lady uphold me, the son of a ghost. Just as men trust in their fathers and brother, so did I trust in my lady. May my lady not neglect me.
67

tional consideration of the size of Palestines scribal culture, which hardly suggests the high visibility of writing within this agrarian society. The Amarna corpus contains letters from perhaps a minimum of 18 distinct cities within the traditional ambit of Canaan (Millard 1999: 318). That might index a minimum of 18 Canaanite scribes procient in cuneiform, although palaeographic, syntactic, and now petrographic observations suggest the possibility that some city-states shared scribes; sharing implies a lower number of scribes active in the region, and a higher value placed on these specialized retainers. Millard (1999: 318) himself has conceded the possibility of scribes shared among principalities,68 while Zaccagnini (1983) has offered extensive evidence of professionals (including specialist scribes) gifted, lent, borrowed, and withdrawn among foreign palaces both for their expertise and prestige value. Then there is the factor of scribes with extrinsic philological afnities, as in the case of Jerusalem, which admits further of possible mobility. Were one optimistic enough to double the minimum number of scribes to 36 cuneiformists, however, 14th-century Canaan still presents a considerably restricted culture of literacy as measured strictly by the number of active professionals. To this picture, add Millards caveat (1999: 318) that the Amarna letters were products of the ruling circles in Canaanite towns and the scribes who wrote them were, probably, palace scribes. If they worked for a larger circle of clients, no trace remains. Whenever we meet cuneiform scribes in Syria-Palestine, adds van der Toorn (2000: 108), it is in connexion with the palace. I take van
68 His full sentiment is more optimistic, however. Although some local princes may have shared the services of a single scribe, Millard (1999: 318) concedes, there is no reason to suppose that was normal. Millard discerns normalcy and exigency with a clarity that the data do not afford; cf. the petrography of EA 285 (Goren, Finkelstein, and Naaman 2004: 26869). We can surmise, on the other hand, that any practice of lending and borrowing scribes in fact conformed with accepted conventions. The very transmission of cuneiform throughout the Peripheral Akkadian cultures speaks to elite exchange of scribal professionals, not unlike the circulation of artisans (Mora 1992). Kings may lend or bestow peers (or their lessers) with skilled laborers under a rubric of gift-giving that sculpts power dynamics through indebtedness. Negri-Scafa (1992: 240) takes archival prosopography from Arrapha to suggest that scribes sometimes worked itinerantly, traveling to patrons with waiting commissions. Les scribes exclusivement locaux, rattachs une seule ville, de prfrence priphrique, she writes, sont relativement peu nombreaux. . . . En gnral le rapport scribe/propritaire darchive semble tre plus signicatif que le rapport scribe/ville.

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der Toorn to refer to Amarna communiqus, since the nd-spots of most Bronze Age tablets in Canaan lack demonstrable connections to any palace. The larger point remains, however, that a scribal commission in Bronze Age Canaan is an elite act; the Iron I commissions were no doubt elite still. In fact, the extant evidence for alphabetic writing during the Iron Age I paints an unambiguous picture of decline in scribal activity relative to the Late Bronze Age, when cuneiform was preponderant. This downturn suggests even more restricted access to writing (now predominantly alphabetic) outside of elite circles during the 12th to 10th centuries b.c.e.

range of forms, most of which did not survive into the next. . . . A second consequence of the new history of the alphabet is to link forms of writing with political programs. Alone among the early alphabets, the only one that can be consistently read is the variety of alphabetic cuneiform that was standardized and produced in mass quantities at Ugarit. This is a direct result of the activity of the Ugaritic state. West Semitic-speaking intellectuals conducted their rst major cultural project with an alphabet for the purpose of creating a native Ugaritic literature.

linear alphabetic inscriptions from the late second to early first millennium b.c.e.
The West Semitic grafti in Egypts Wadi el-Hol bear palaeographic signatures that suggest a date of ca. 2000 b.c.e. for the earliest alphabet. Although the inscriptions themselves date ca. 1800 b.c.e., they nevertheless demonstrate vestigial graphic afnities with both hieroglyphic and hieratic from an earlier era (Darnell 2005). This permits a triangulation of palaeographic points of contact and departure. Like the earliest cuneiform texts relative to the late recognition of epistolary application, the origins of the alphabet (now dated earlier than before) further chronologically distance its invention from its eventual sophistication. Unlike Ugaritic, which likely rened its own alphabet with inspiration from Akkadian cuneiform, the Old Canaanite alphabet resisted standardization during the second millennium despite its proximity to both cuneiform and hieroglyphs. The absence of an intentional political program safeguarded the randomness of Old Canaanite writing as well as its common unintelligibility to epigraphers. In the light of Wadi el-Hol, Sanders (2004: 33) contrasts the ambiguously understood Old Canaanite alphabet with the programmatic cultivation of its Ugaritic counterpart.
This new knowledge of the alphabets history has at least two cultural consequences: rst, it destroys the image of the alphabets inevitability. For the rst half millennium or so of its history, the main attested use of the alphabet was for marginal peopleforeign soldiers and laborersto write grafti in desolate, out-of-the-way places. In the second half of this millennium the alphabet blossomed into a wide

Here Sanders emphasizes the circumstantially specic applications of the early alphabet(s),69 a point of intrigue which intersects with our present interest in the cultural utility of inscriptions and inscribing in Iron I Palestine. In order to clarify the socioeconomic dimensions of scribal culture during the late second and early rst millennia b.c.e. (during and after the eclipse of regionally preponderant cuneiform), discussion will proceed to an inventory of the relevant alphabetic texts in order to clarify patterns of usage prior to the states emergence. The bibliography for this corpus is too vast for full citation, and the dates of several texts are now disputed in the light of the Low Chronology (Sass 2005), which I abjure for the present. I will restrict focus largely to evidence for scribal commission and function with the belief that any pending chronological corrections will not undermine the cultural conclusions drawn from the corpus.70 Lachish Fosse Inscriptions The Late Bronze Fosse Temple supplied two inscriptions of note in linear alphabetic script. From a ceramic assemblage chronologically straddling Structures II and III comes a bowl with characters brush-painted in white lime (Diringer 1958: 129). The legible portion of the inscription (which precedes an indecipherable ending) reads bslst, In/by three . . . , which likely indicates a quantication of the dedications particulars (its dated occasion,

69 See further the important observations of Millard (1991) on the uses of the early alphabets. 70 See Sass 1988: 53105 for a fuller inventory of linear alphabetic inscriptions from this time period. I have omitted from my list epigraphs that are unintelligible or uninformative with respect to their function.

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inventory of items, or volume). By Tufnells stratigraphic reconstruction, the bowl is perhaps a little older than the ewer inscription, although the palaeographic afnities overshadow however little distance in time separated the epigraphs. Excavators discovered the fragmentary ceramic ewer inscription in the Fosse Temples late 13thcentury phase (Diringer 1958: 130). The letters are painted concentrically within a band of serial zoomorphic images (including the common Late Bronze palm-and-ibex motif ). There is a lacuna in the inscriptions center, however, where a fractured sherd was not recovered. While the missing elements are disputed, there are clear characters reading mtn (Mattan [the benefactor] or gift) at the beginning and lt, ( Elat [the goddess]) at the end. Notwithstanding the lacuna, therefore, the common tendency to view the ewer as votive is justied. This is a prestige item (perhaps naming the donor) from a ritual context dedicated to a divine character. Lachish Bowl Fragment This bowl fragment from Lachish bears an incomplete inscription in alphabetic Old Canaanite script from the late 13th century b.c.e. (Cross 2003: 293). Its extant text includes the apparent name of a divine character or venerated ancestor ilib in the rst line, and the phrase by hwsb in the second, where Cross reads in the gallery, he installed (it). Here is a votive offering which species its intended recipient and the attendant piety that (and of whom, the lacuna perhaps attested) the same beneciary might acknowledge in gratitude. Khirbet Raddana Handle The late 13th-century inscription on the jar handle from Khirbet Raddana preserves only three discernible letters before a break, but Cross and Freedman (1971) make a good case for the preservation of a partial personal name or hypocoristicon in the extant letters l. The handle inscription must therefore indicate the owner of the vessel, or its donor were it dedicated to a shrine. Qubur el-Walaydah Bowl Fragment From Qubur el-Walaydah comes a votive bowl, comprised of two major fragments with a clear join, bearing the names of two donors: Simi-paal and Iyya-el. The dextrograde text follows the personal

names with a sin and another character maimed by the bowls right break. Cross (2003: 216) imagines that this sequence could refer to votive u/i (sheep after common Ugaritic attestations) or seqel with the broken character perhaps standing for either a number (s 10) or a nun for n[tn lDN]. He dates the bowl palaeographically to ca. 1200 b.c.e. Beth Shemesh Ostracon The ink-blurred ostracon from Beth Shemesh (Grant 1930) dates a little later palaeographically than the inscriptions from the Lachish Fosse Temple, which places it roughly in the 12th century b.c.e. (Cross 2003: 32425). The reading is disputed, but the reverse clearly indicates two personal names. Cross makes a persuasive argument for additional personal names on the obverse, fronted by a marker of possessionthus (1) lz (2) bkr, et al. Indeed the initial lamed is legible in the upper left-hand corner even in the nal reports scratchy photograph (Grant 1931: pl. 10). Izbet Sartah Ostracon The 12th-century inscribed ostracon from Izbet Sartah (Demsky 1977) features an abecedary that contributes signicant typological data both to the palaeographic development of the linear alphabet and the pedagogical diversity of scribes who reproduced it. The pe-ayin sequence accords with the Lamentations acrostic and the abecedaries from Kuntillet Ajrud against the Lachish abecedary and the conventional order of the biblical Hebrew alphabet (see above). The Izbet Sartah inscription furthermore exhibits a et-zayin sequence that now nds a parallel in the Tel Zayit abecedary. These features testify to pluriform primers, however diversied geographically or cross-communally, during the larger Iron Age continuum of scribal Kulturgeschichte. Revadim Seal The seal discovered on the premises of Kibbutz Revadim bears an inscribed scaraboid image with anthropomorphic gures and a reversed text reading lb, Belonging to Abba (Giveon 1961). Cross (2003: 299302) dates this status piece, carved from hard limestone, to the late 12th century b.c.e. The inscribed scene seems to depict two humans attending a seated man or child. Giveon and Cross differ on the possible interpretations of the latter, but the

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broader attribution of divinity or royalty to the center gure is probably certain enough to safeguard the seals prestige value to its bearer, Abba. Arrowheads from El-Khadr and Parts Unknown Assorted inscribed arrowheads from the antiquities black market have made their way into public and private hands over the past several decades. The total number of unprovenanced objects is fty with one additional specimen retrieved from a disturbed burial cave (there are numerous other uninscribed congeners). These objects bear Northwest Semitic possessive formulae incised into bronze with the object (, arrow) and the owner named. In most instances, the personal name precedes a familial relation (patronym or fratronym), title (retainer, chief, king), or afliation (e.g., Sidonian). The palaeographic diagnostics range from the very late 12th (or very early 11th) through the mid-10th century b.c.e. The principal examples came to light in 1953 putatively in a farmers eld in El-Khadr near Bethlehem (Milik and Cross 1954), whence the farmer or an intermediary dispersed them to different dealers in Jerusalem and Amman. Cross (2003: 217) reckons that 5 inscribed and 21 uninscribed arrowheads from this original cache are now identiable as a coherent corpus. Due to the genres count increasing by a coefcient of 10 since the early 1950s and the typically illicit means of retrieval, the relevant bibliography is extensive. Deutsch and Heltzer (1999: 1319) have collected these items in a single publication, however, which doubtless contains authentic and dubious items alike.71 The consultation of such a publication occasions certain caveats. Rollston (2003; 2004) has now authored the rst systematic discussion of proper protocols for assaying unprovenanced epigraphic materials. He suggests that the absence of provenance feature prominently in published analysis as a measure of credibility. Rollston (2004: 7576) further advises a rating system that indicates the probability of authenticity. The latest trends in forgery detection recommend extreme caution, if not qualied incredulity, toward all recent inscriptions of unknown origin. Each unprovenanced

epigraph is suspect to some degree. The burden of proof rests on the dealers and their black market afliates to prove the authenticity of their wares; it does not fall to the epigrapher to disprove the authenticity of an unprovenanced object which might, under the best of circumstances, be accorded the respect of legitimately stolen goods. There is good reason to note the implausibility of forgery for many arrowheads, especially the early collection from ElKhadr, but we cannot bestow this grace to all such artifacts. As Cross (2003: 200) warns, The appearance of spurious or forged arrowheads on the market is most troubling; procuring old arrowheads is not difcult, and the increased interest and value of such pieces no doubt tempts the modern manufacturer of antiquities, notably professional forgers of seals, to satisfy the demand. Recent advances in forging technology and craft cast a pall over black market items appearing in the past generation. Arrowhead specimens of later discovery therefore carry a graver stigma. Our concern here, however, is largely the recognition of a possessive template with bearing on scribal commissions: Arrow of PN son/retainer of PN. This template cross-pollinates the suspect and less suspect pieces alike as one would surmise for a marketplace of imposture. Elite commission of scribal inscriptions extends also to elite retainers, who name their lieges on the arrowhead. Prestige accrues both to the retainer as man of so-and-so and to the patron with men thus bedecked with status sigla. The affectation of the prestige inscription, therefore, might have provided the Iron I scribe a hook to diversify his commissions (if not his clientele, provided the pretentious patron does not also commission inscriptions for his retainers).72

71 See also the inventory of Cross (2003: 200202), who exercises commendable caution with respect both to the opportunities afforded potential forgers and credulity to spurious specimens published by Deutsch and Heltzer (1995).

The Lokop spear industry in north-central Kenya provides an intriguing, non-epigraphic parallel. Blacksmiths operate on the economic margins of this pastoral society, an exigency that presses the need to develop deliberate survival strategies. The clientele and commissions for weapons from any one kin afliation are infrequent, so the blacksmiths have identied clients with means (and the airs of elitism) across kin groups as a distinct consumer class. In their vaguely dened and peripheral status, blacksmiths can be seen as the brokers of style, Larick writes (1991: 313). On the surface, they make utilitarian weapons. Their real skill shows, however, in their ability to recombine varied traits of size, shape, and decoration into meaningful spear morphology. This customization of spear style carries prestige value among the Lokop warrior cohorts, who effectively collaborate with blacksmiths to set up their own future place as elders (Larick 1991: 327). Blacksmiths survive by marketing their craft to a targeted clientele with status pretenses.

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Byblian Inscriptions Three inscribed objects from Byblos feature an 11th-century Phoenician script with bearing on this inventory. The rst two are clay conical objects, each of which records the owners name: lbdmn and lm/s bbd, respectively. The reading in the second name is disputed (Cross and McCarter 1973; Teixidor 1977; Gibson 1982: 12), but the categorical conclusion remains that these inscriptions indicate possession. The third object of note is the Azarbaal Spatula (KAI 3), which Cross (2003: 22829) dates a little later in the 11th century than the inscribed cones. The small bronze item in the shape of a spatula bears an inscription, possibly a palimpsest, of no little controversy. Dunand (1938) originally claimed that the contents betrayed a commercial transactiona view revived by Gibson (1982: 9), who envisions little more than a banal monetary exchange or request for repayment. Iwry (1961) sees superrational properties supposed for belomantic recourse in legal disputes, while McCarter and Coote read in the text a refusal to bestow a land grant to a subordinate. They write (1973: 19), That a legal disclaimer was involved here accounts for the choice of writing materials. The selection of a metal spatula, even though it was being reused, indicates that the information recorded was meant to be preserved. This suggests awareness of the contingency of further consultation should the dispute be resurrected. Shea (1977) adopts some of McCarter and Cootes philological corrections to construct a hybrid interpretation of a transactional document detailing the conveyance of real property. So long as the content indeed concerns a party equipped to effect the transfer of a nl, patrimonial estate,73 then we may ascribe elite status to at least one of the texts principals. With new high-resolution photographs taken in cooperation with the West Semitic Research Project, Rollston (personal communication) has tentatively entertained the possibility that the spatula inscriptions mention of a nl suggests scribal verse about the patrimonial idiom or ethic.74 The notion that the spatula text could be proverbial or lyrical is intriguing in view of the pedagogical use of proverbs in Akkado-Sumerian curricula (Falkowitz 1980; Veldhuis 2000). Indeed, the biblical book of ProvSo McCarter and Coote 1973; and Shea 1977. See Adele Berlins (1996: 2056) patrimonial interpretation of Psalm 133, which may involve a political lament for a subdivided estate.
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erbs perhaps owes its initial compilation to the use of apprentice duplication exercises. In any case, it is too early to group the poorly understood Byblos spatula with the Gezer Calendar (see below) in a schoolboy mnemonic genre, but that does not forestall the possibilities that this bronze inscription was a prestige object, belonged to a scribal elite, or found use as a functional primer, albeit with assumed airs. Manaat Sherd An Iron I burial cave near Jerusalems satellite village of Manaat revealed a potsherd inscribed after ring (Stager 1969). Stager (1969: 48), who with John Landgraf co-discovered the object, notes that the incised sherd likely constituted part of a complete funerary vessel rather than an ostracon. Landgraf (1971: 93) dissents, however, preferring to envision an already broken sherd inscribed and reemployed as a potters sculpting tool. The text reads lsd, which expectedly indicates the vessels owner, here likely the decedent provisioned with grave goods pertinent to anthropomorphic needs in the hereafter. Stager (1969) and Cross (2003: 229) date the script to the 11th century b.c.e. on the basis of few but helpfully diagnostic letters (especially the lamed and sin). Kefar Veradim Bowl Evidence from Cave 3 at Kefar Veradim suggests a Middle Bronze Age burial site disturbed to accommodate ve later Iron Age burials. An assemblage of Iron II pottery littered the excavation area. The repertoire included various bowls, kraters, jugs, lamps, and Black-on-Red juglets typical of the early Iron Age IIA (Alexandre 2002a). Among the grave goods stands out one uted bronze bowl which mourners interred upside down next to the head of one of the decedents. An inscription incised into the bowls interior reads ks ps bn sm Cup of Ps son of Sema (Alexandre 2002b). The high quality of the bowl and its commissioned engraving unveil the elite status of the interred owner. The script is ostensibly Phoenicianwith a close artifactual parallel in the Tekke bowl (Sznycer 1979)although it also predates the period in which we can condently speak of meaningful palaeographic departures of the so-called national scripts from the Phoenician Mutterschrift. Alexandre (2002b: 68*69*) prefers a 10th-century b.c.e. date, privileging the contextual ceramic assemblage over the inclination of Cross (2003: 227 29) and others to date the Tekke bowl to the 11th

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century. I should prefer a ballpark tenth- to early ninth-century date in view of the Black-on-Red ware;75 the Veradim bowl seems typologically earlier than both the Gezer Calendar and the Old Byblian lapidary inscriptions (neither of which boasts secure stratigraphic credentials). If a diverse range of abecedaries characterized the Iron Age IIIA, which I suspect was the case, then minor palaeographic variants or inconsistencies should occasion neither alarm nor compelling dates. This bowl may represent the rst tenth-century West Semitic inscription discovered in situ; one exemplar does not a palaeographic benchmark make,76 although the Zayit abecedary now helps to esh out matters an iota. Tel Zayit Abecedary The nal week of the 2005 excavation season at Tel Zayit produced a partial abecedary incised on limestone (Tappy et al. 2006). Tappy proposes a tenth-century date on the basis on the inscriptions in situ stratication with a concomitant ceramic assemblage sealed beneath material with later radiocarbon dates. McCarter proposes a mid-10th-century date on the basis of palaeographic features more advanced than the Kefar Veradim bowl and more archaic than the Gezer Calendar (with the exception of the full-headed mem, which signals a more progressive trait). The abecedary is remarkable for the following letter orders: waw-he and et-zayin. Other notable features include a possible pe-ayin sequence, although the stone is too damaged for certainty, and a lamed-kap sequence, which McCarter considers an error (demonstrable by concomitant editorial marks). The waw-he sequence is otherwise unattested in West Semitic abecedaries and consequently a possible marker of scribal individualism. The et-zayin sequence, on the other hand, validates its Izbet Sartah correspondent (see above) as an authentically supraregional convention rather than a local aberration. In short, the Zayit abecedary exemplies the notion of
I am comfortable with the continuation of these ceramic wares into the ninth century (Byrne forthcoming). 76 The Veradim bowls dotted ayin cannot on its own secure an 11th- or even 10th-century date. The features attestation at Fekheriyeh demonstrates the acrophonic principle in aesthetic practice. The fact that the name and meaning of the letter ayin were never forgotten counters the notion that palaeographers must read the scribes graphic addition of the eyes pupil (the dotted ayin) as an archaism. This caveat has negative consequences for the dotted ayins diagnostic relevance for the alphabets transmission to the Greeks.
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viable alternative primers among scribal cultures in the decentralized Iron I political economy.77 Gezer Calendar The inscribed limestone tablet from Gezer (KAI 182) is well known and thoroughly studied.78 It is a good epigraph with which to conclude this survey, in part because of its common description as a scribal exercise or mnemonic. By self-acclamation, Albright (1943: 21) was the rst scholar to characterize the tablet as such when he wrote, Judging from Egyptian and Mesopotamian parallels, the text before us can be only a school exercise. With this agree the size and the material of the plaque, which is just large enough to be held comfortably in the hand of a 12-year-old boy, and which shows the rounded edges and sides resulting from considerable use. Notwithstanding the quaint imagery, Albrights instincts were reasonable; and numerous other epigraphers have since read the tablet as an apprentices homework on more rigorous grounds. Haran (1998: 89) nevertheless assails this interpretation of the Gezer Calendar, which can only doubtfully be considered the exercise of a schoolboy, just because it is hardly conceivable that, with all the poverty and simplicity of living conditions in biblical Israel, students were forced to scratch their homework on stones.79 Haran also cites incisions on ceramics prior to ring as dubious candidates for school activity. These are fair critiques of inscriptions taken for student exercises, but the medium in question does not necessarily rule out

I would hesitate to characterize this particular epigraph as a primer, but rather as a text indirectly derived from knowledge of such a primer. This inscription is evidently a grafto. If McCarter is correct about the erroneous execution of the lamed-kap sequence, then one doubts that this inscription enjoyed use as a model for proper transcription (i.e., proper relative to the local curriculum). 78 The editio princeps is Gray, Lidzbarski, and Pilcher 1909. Nearly a century has passed since the inscriptions publication, with the expected accumulation of unwieldy secondary literature. See the summaries of Cross and Freedman (1952: 4648), Gibson (1971: 14), and Pardee (1997: 400401) for representative analysis and bibliography. 79 Harans critiques are especially pertinent now for the limestone Tel Zayit abecedary if it indeed records an exercise (or even a grafto). There are no prescriptive conventions on the valuation of media, however, even now as the writ contends with the electronic. In view of the mutually alien conventions that separate modern and ancient cultures of literacy, one might leave the question of a mediums tactile or aesthetic viability to its user. Scribes did in fact incise limestone irrespective of their taste for it.

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the possibility that the tablet was rather a primer itselfa template document inscribed on durable material perhaps in anticipation of repeated use. At the end of the day, however, the aura of uncertainty recommends against decisive use of the inscription for argumentative gain. Its cultural import is fatally ambiguous.

the prestigious retainer

The grammarians Strunk and White (1979: 57) disparage the adjective prestigious with the following remarks: Often an adjective of last resort. Its in the dictionary, but that doesnt mean you have to use it. Their objection no doubt concerns the cosmetic surgery that transforms noun into adjectival neologism. Or perhaps prestigious raises hackles because it confers unearned repute upon the nominative bearer. In its ancestral connotations of illusion and imposture (< Lat praestigia deception), prestige is an artice rather than an entitlement. There is considerable history chronicling the prestidigitations of elite culture to radiate status through material acquisition of objects and persons alike for display or intellectual predilection (Helms 1993). Virgil thrived with imperial patronage. Mozart barely survived giving music lessons to girls of aristocratic families. Having resigned his professorship at the Graduate Theological Union, Daniel Matt (2004: xxvii) now translates the Zohar at the behest of the Pritzker family. As for a largely subsistence-based political economy in which alphabetic writing operated on the periphery of socioeconomic necessity, its scribes found refuge in the entourages of Great Men. The Iron I corpus of applied alphabetic writing consists of two basic categories: prestige objects (possessive, martial, votive, funerary) commissioned by elites, and curricular instruments used to preserve the very profession of scribalism during an era in which it existed on the margins of dominant exchange patterns. Epistolary applications of writing are unknown, however possibly camouaged by accident of discovery or perishable media. On the other hand, the political and economic conditions that typically occasion long-distance epistolary contact between elites are not consistent with the political economy (or social location of scribalism) of Iron I Palestine. We do not expect letters, but any that should surface would further establish the senders prestige in an era when such correspondence denoted a luxury. In the extant aggregate, the epigrapher sees a restricted clientele to which scribes needed to ap-

pear relevant in order to remain relevant. Warlordism ranks far below the ideal form of intellectual patronage, but it does afford survival. The scarcity of the craft, moreover, inated the value of the scribal retainer and the prestige that accrued to the sybarite with wherewithal to retain one; lesser elites no doubt had to borrow or share cuneiformists even during the Amarna period. Scribes could convey as status gifts in elite exchange (in both the suzerain/client and peer varieties), which accounts both for the Hittite edubba and Babylonian Adapa tablet in Egypt.80 The import of writing for status is especially visible when an elite culture boasts the retention of prestige objects constructing prestige objects. Surviving Mayan inscriptions exclusively represent elite commission (Schele and Freidel 1990: 55). The elite prerogatives of scribalism surface in a royal conquest stela and murals, which depict the ritualistic mutilation of captured scribes of rival kings (Johnston 2001). Prior to his sacricial execution, the scribe endured a public humiliation in which his ngers were ceremonially broken as a metaphor for his masters silenced propaganda. Although captured scribes were tortured and executed, Johnston writes (2001: 380), what captors chose to emphasize in public documents was not the physical elimination of the scribes through sacrice but the destruction through nger mutilation of their capacity to produce for rivals politically persuasive texts. The political prestige of the mutilation owed its resonance to the prestige of the scribe and the uniqueness of his craft. So too the khipukamayuq retainers manifested and projected the power of their Inka lords, who commissioned these specialists to construct and decipher narrative records on woven khipu strings (Quilter 2002). Before the rise of the university system in medieval Europe, scribes received commissions outside the clerical scriptorium almost exclusively from aristocratic patrons, who welcomed

80 Zaccagnini (1983: 250) documents this phenomenon in detail, writing The sending of specialized workers is well attested in the framework of the diplomatic relations between the great kings and, to a certain extent, between the great and small kings of the late Bronze Age. The skilled workers who were sent from one court to another were viewed as prestige goods, and their transfers are inserted into the dynamics and formal apparatus of the practice of gift-exchange. In EA 49, the king of Ugarit requests from Pharaoh two Africans and a physician, whom Zaccagnini (1983: 251) sees placed on the same level: exotic curiosities to be shown at court among the kings entourage. This was especially true of diviners, i.e., scribes with specialized training in the bartu literature.

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(or contracted) their own family hagiographies (Shopkow 1997). These scribes routinely sought such commissions, moreover, with unsolicited encomia to prospective masters. The unprovenanced Iron I arrowheads indicate that they belonged not only to powerful men, but also to their retainers, whose inscribed equipment in turn enhanced the patrons stature. The uniformed chauffeur or butler mirrors (and brandishes) his employers afuence as a matter of protocol. The survivability of the alphabetic haute couture in the centuries after the ebb of Canaanite cuneiform ironically hinged on its own irrelevance, i.e., in its relevance to those who could afford the luxury. Perhaps this illuminates a peculiar pericope about the primordial monarchy. In each of Davids entourage lists (2 Sam 8:1618; 20:2326), the king boasts a single scribe (Seraiah and Sheva, respectively). Some have taken this to represent a larger bureaucracy (or worse still, an Egyptian derivative), but the text makes more sense at face value. David retains a scribe when scribes are curiosities. The narrative is less interested in the hint of a chancery (certainly an anachronism) than the accentuation of a status retainer fashionable for the time. These scribes were less administrators than hagiographers.

bringing the state back in

The medievalist John Baldwin (1971: 35) axiomatically observed that Schools suffer rst and most severely when law, order and stability break down in society. The perils posed to the scribal trade during periods of political entropy underscore the comforts of institutionalism lost and regained. The movement in political anthropology to reintroduce the states relevance (Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985) partly represents a backlash against structuralist taxonomies and Annales anti-historicism, but it also

reects concern about the wholesale subordination of agency to society in the name of grand cultural theory. The state that Aretxaga (2003: 394) calls a screen for political desire elects to instrumentalize technology in advance of its self-authenticating agenda: mandarin projections of legitimacy, accounting of and for expropriation, etc. The scribal culture of linear alphabetic does not emerge to service the inchoate Iron Age state, nor does it immediately diversify its functions upon the states emergence. The expanding application and renement of the writing system speak to the adaptability of both the political and scribal cultures in their increasingly intimate discourse. As Sanders (2004) reconstructs the picture at Ugarit, systemic cultivation is an introspective, selfconscious operation of the state; so too must the lapidary Old Byblian corpus reect the Phoenician coordination of writing technologies with the objectives of maritime commerce and political prestige. The later Iron II trajectory toward Hebrew script standardization highlights what linear alphabetic is not during the late second and early rst millennia. It is not standardized, nor is it consistently intelligible, precisely because it subsists during this period on elite wherewithal rather than political or economic exigency. The state facilitates the alphabets segue from a curiosity to the sine qua non. The movement toward a uniform Hebrew abecedary attests to institutional cultivation, as the post-exilic consolidation of intellectual authority facilitates an arbitrary choice of one alphabetic order at the expense of epigraphically attested Iron Age also-rans.

acknowledgments
Whereas Anson Rainey, Seth Sanders, and Chris Rollston each made helpful suggestions during the gestation of this manuscript, Byrne is responsible for all gaffes of form and substance.

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