Theory and Practice of Knowledge Transfer: Studies in School Education in the Ancient Near East and Beyond.

• Author: Dassow, Eva Von
• Position: Book review

Theory and Practice of Knowledge Transfer: Studies in School Education in the Ancient Near East and Beyond. Edited by W. S. VAN EGMOND and W. H. VAN SOLDT. Publications de l'lnstitut historique-archeologique neerlandais de Stamboul, vol. 121. Leiden: NEDERLANDS INSTITUUT VOOR HET NABIJE OOSTEN, 2012. Pp. 111 + 152. [euro]36.04 (paper).

This slim volume is full of informative essays that are a pleasure to read. Its contents are eleven of the papers presented at a 2008 symposium in Leiden, plus an introduction by the editors. It must be noted at the outset that the entire endeavor operates with an extremely narrow concept of "knowledge," to wit, knowledge of writing and knowledge that is preserved and transmitted in writing; so also education. The editors address this delimitation without however acknowledging what lies beyond its confines: knowledge of how to cook, how to make pottery, who makes the best beer in Babylon, why she married him, the way to Kanesh, how to run an assembly, how to shoot... In short, most of the kinds of knowledge that actually matter in people's lives, and that make up a society and its culture, are outside the restricted scope of this work. That said, the essays illuminate the ways writing is used to structure domains of knowledge in particular places, periods, and contexts, and thus offer comparative perspectives on each other's themes.

In their introduction, Wolfert van Egmond and Wilfred van Soldt call attention both to the modern habit of equating knowledge with what is written, and to the abnormality of this idea, inasmuch as writing has not existed or not been essential in most cultures, most of the time. They discuss theories claiming that writing and literacy transform cognition and thus society from primitive to civilized, and that alphabetic writing precipitates a further transformation to (Western) rationality and modernity; they then turn to critiques of such theories, describing the types of evidence and inquiry brought to bear on testing the proposition that there is a causal relation between writing and reasoning, or between alphabetic writing and modern civilization. They make no comment on the prejudices that motivate positing an inverse relationship between alphabetic literacy and savagery. But, they ask, if writing and literacy cannot be accorded the transformative role they play in such teleological grand narratives, why study these phenomena? The question practically answers itself, given the authors' starting point: writing is so fundamental to modern life that we take its value and functions for granted--to the point that most people, literate and educated as they may be, never consider what writing is and does, nor can they even distinguish it from language, though they use both all the time. This more than justifies inquiring how this tool we depend on works, in our minds and in the world. Hence the symposium, and the essays, which the editors proceed to summarize.

Eight contributions from cuneiformists are complemented by three from specialists in other fields, Marco Mostert and Wolfert van Egmond on medieval Europe and Jan Jansen on present-day Mali. Van Egmond's essay, "Informal Schooling and Textual Communities: A Medievalist's Ruminations on Schooling in the Ancient Near East," is explicitly comparative. He describes evidence for informal education in letters during the late medieval period, points out what differences this makes to the work writing does in society, and inquires where such informal education might be found in the ancient Near East. He notes that the Old Assyrian merchant archives and the Deir el-Medina ostraca supply evidence for writing being done by non-professionals; other examples could be found in other corpora. This approach offers a salutary challenge to cuneiformists, who have tended to fixate on the notion of schools, as institutionalized training regimens if not actual institutions. Yet even a complicated script can be taught and learned by informal or ad hoc means, with different results than training through formalized curricula (as Piotr Michalowski describes, pp. 42-43)--and for different reasons, too. Questions of purpose and result animate van Egmond's inquiry: what was the intended outcome of training people to read and write--was it to produce scribes? literati? orators?--and what were the motivations for learning? The practice of education would have been shaped by its objectives; meanwhile, tools developed for one purpose could be deployed for another. Van Egmond adduces the concept of "textual community" to describe how, in societies where things were done without writing most of the time, learning to produce and reproduce texts served to shape its practitioners into communities apart, with ramifications for the kinds of texts they wrote. These very texts are our only legible evidence for their societies, which we thus study on the basis of evidence that is fundamentally atypical and non-representative of them.

Following this line of analysis, van Egmond observes further that, when the norm was to handle knowledge orally, so that even training in writing operated largely without depending on writing, texts are in a sense "by-products" of the activity of scribes whose "trade was far less about actually writing than at first sight it would seem to have been" (p. 80). Not only was writing inessential for storage and transfer of knowledge, it was--to...