Alphabet Scribes in the Land of Cuneiform: Sepiru Professionals in Mesopotamia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods.

• Author: Safford, Jan

Alphabet Scribes in the Land of Cuneiform: Sepiru Professionals in Mesopotamia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods. By YlGAL BLOCH. Gorgias Studies in the Ancient Near East, vol. 11. Piscataway. NJ: GORGIAS PRESS, 2018. Pp. xv + 497. $99.

Writing in cuneiform in Mesopotamia existed for over 1000 years before the development of the alphabet around 2000-1800 BCE. Bloch traces the spread of the West Semitic alphabet from Wadi el-Hol to Mesopotamia, where as early as the sixteenth century BCE some clay tablets have been found to contain short alphabetic inscriptions (epigraphs) on their edges. After discussing bilingualism and the important status of Aramaic in the Assyrian empire, Bloch then focuses primarily on alphabetic scribes (henceforth sepirus) in the Babylonian and Achaemenid empires.

Bloch discusses the disputed view that sepirus were so called "interpreter-scribes" (i.e., scribes who could translate from Aramaic to Akkadian and vice versa). He provides sixteen texts that support the view that "of all the professions attested in the Babylonian society of the sixth-fifth centuries BCE, the profession of sepiru appears to be almost the only one suited for reading and writing in several scripts and languages" (p. 98). One poignant example of this is a court case involving the litigation over ownership of a slave-woman. The slave's arm is inscribed in alphabetic script "to (the goddess) Nanaya." One of the litigants is a cuneiform-scribe in the Eanna temple. The witness list also mentions three other scribes and six judges. However, none of these cuneiform scribes or judges appears to be capable of reading the alphabetic script on her arm, so that a sepiru has to be summoned, and based on his testimony alone the verdict is rendered.

Of particular interest regarding the ability to speak and read multiple languages is a writing exercise in which a student wrote out, in traditional order, the twenty-two letters of the North-West Semitic (NWS) alphabet but in phonetic cuneiform script. This demonstrates that the student and (most certainly) the teacher had a working knowledge of Mesopotamian cuneiform (and presumably the Akkadian language) as well as a NWS language and its alphabet. The alphabetic epigraph on this tablet reads [phrase omitted] mpy ('from/by my mouth'), which suggests that a teacher dictated an exercise orally to a student. All scholars prior to Bloch asserted that the transcribed alphabet here must be Aramaic...