The Power and the Writing: The Early Scribes of Mesopotamia.

• Author: Englung, Robert
• Position: Review

The Power and the Writing: The Early Scribes of Mesopotamia. By GIUSEPE VISICATO. Bethesda, Md.: CDL PRESS, 2000. Pp. xvii + 298. $50.

"Although he [Dub-hul-tar] is mentioned as an agrig only in a dumu-dumu conscription text, he is in fact the ugula in charge of an im-ru of agrig's" (p. 40). The book under review is obviously not meant for a general public, although several sections, including particularly the conclusion (pp. 233-43), represent lucid accounts of what has evidently been a diligent examination of early cuneiform on the part of the author. Unfortunately for the non-specialist, these sections are difficult to find in this extremely dense volume, which must therefore be understood as a work by and for the Assyriologist.

Visicato presents as the object of his study the institution and person of the Mesopotamian scribe, from his first activity in the Late Uruk period ca. 3200 B.C. until the close of the Old Akkadian period ca. 2200 B.C. As is abundantly clear to anyone who has considered the topic, we are blessed-and cursed- with a mountain of evidence from which to draw conclusions concerning this first millennium of cuneiform. Self-evidently, all clay documents are the products of scribes, and the result of scribal training. These documents number approximately six thousand exemplars from Uruk IV-III, four hundred from Early Dynastic I (ca. 2700 B.C.; Visicato, for reasons left unstated, names this period ED II), five hundred from ED IIIa ("Fara period' Ca. 2600 B.C.), two thousand from ED IIIb ("pre-Sargonic Lagash period," ca. 2500-2350 B.C), and several thousand from the Old Akkadian period (ca. 2340-2200 B.C.). One might wonder whether the existence of an unpublished but widely circulated Habilitationsscrift by Hartmut W aetzoldt (Das Schreiberwesen in Mesopotamien nach Texten aus neusumerischer Zeit, Heidelberg 1974) offers sufficient reason for the author's decision not to include the scribal evidence from the Ur III period in his work. This period witnessed far and away the greatest corpus of written evidence for the importance of accountancy in ancient Mesopotamia, and Visicato could have made this Ur III evidence available to an English-speaking public.

The book presents the Babylonian scribal tradition along chronological and geographical guidelines. Following an introduction in which the author describes earlier treatments of this subject and attempts to delineate the terminology applied in antiquity to the scribal...