Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Although the first alphabet occurred at Ugarit, it was restricted mainly to north Syria and a few Palestinian sites. After the twelfth century BC, it died out and the future lay with descendants of the proto-Canaanite language. This alphabet took time to stabilise, with the letters facing either way, and the writing often taking the boustrophedon form.³ However, shortly before 1000 BC, proto-Canaanite did become stabilised into what is generally referred to as the Phoenician alphabet (the earliest inscriptions occur at Byblos – now Jublai, north of Beirut in Lebanon – many on bronze arrow heads, saying who the head belonged to). By this time the number of letters was reduced to twenty-two and all the signs had become linear, with no traces of pictographs. The direction of writing had also stabilised, consistently horizontal from right to left. By common tradition, it was the Phoenician alphabet which was imported into classical Greece.

In both Mesopotamia and Egypt literacy was held in high esteem. Shulgi, a Sumerian king around 2100 BC, boasted that

As a youth, I studied the scribal art in the Tablet-House, from the tablets of Sumer and Akkad;

No one of noble birth could write a tablet as I could.⁵³

Scribes were trained in Ur since at least the second quarter of the third millennium.⁵⁴ When they signed documents, they often added the names and positions of their fathers, which confirms that they were usually the sons of city governors, temple administrators, army officers, or priests: literacy was confined to scribes and administrators. Anyone in authority probably received some sort of scribal education and it has even been suggested that the Sumerian term dub.sar, literally ‘scribe’, was the equivalent of Esquire, or BA, applied to any educated man.⁵⁵

Two schools, perhaps the first in the world, were founded by King Shulgi at Nippur and at Ur in the last century of the third millennium BC, but he referred to them without any elaboration, so they may have been established well before this. The Babylonian term for school or scribal academy was edubba, literally ‘Tablet-House’. The headmaster was called ‘Father of the Tablet-House’, and in one inscription a pupil says this: ‘You have opened my eyes as though I were a puppy; you have formed humanity within me.’⁵⁶ There were specialist masters for language, mathematics (‘scribe of counting’) and surveying (‘scribe of the field’) but day-to-day teaching was conducted by someone called, literally, ‘Big Brother’, who was probably a senior pupil.

Cuneiform extracts have been found in several cities which show that there were already ‘standard texts’ used in instruction. For example, there are tablets with the same text written out in different hands, others with literary texts on one side, maths exercises on the reverse, still others with the teacher’s text on one side, the pupil’s on the other, together with corrections. On one tablet, a pupil describes his workload:

This is the monthly scheme of my school attendance:

My free days are three each month;

My religious holidays are three each month;

For twenty-four days each month

I must be in school. How long they are!⁵⁷

Scribes had to learn their own trade, too – they needed to know how to prepare clay for writing and how to bake the texts that were to be preserved in libraries. Limestone could be added to make the surface of the clay smoother, and the wedges clearer.⁵⁸ Besides clay, boards of wood or ivory were often coated with wax, sometimes hinged in several leaves. The wax could be wiped clean and the boards reused.⁵⁹

The scribal tradition spread far beyond Mesopotamia, and as it did so it expanded.⁶⁰ The Egyptians were the first to write with reed brushes on pieces of old pottery; next they introduced slabs of sycamore which were coated with gypsum plaster, which could be rubbed off to allow re-use.⁶¹ Papyrus was the most expensive writing material of all and was available only to the most accomplished, and therefore least wasteful, scribes. Scribal training could take as long as for a modern PhD.

Not all writing had to do with business. The early, more literary texts of Sumer, naturally enough perhaps, include the first religious literature, hymns in particular. In Uruk there was a popular account of the king’s love affair with the goddess Inanna (Ishtar in Babylon, Astarte in Greece). Other texts included a father’s instructions to his son on how to lead a useful and rewarding life, accounts of battles and conquests, records of building activity, cosmogonies, and a vast corpus to do with magic. By the time Ashur flourished, roughly 1900–1200 BC, there were many private archives, in addition to the public ones, some of which contained as many as 4,000 texts. By now, the most prestigious form of learning was astronomy/astrology, omen literature, and magic. These helped establish Ashur’s reputation as al nemeqi, ‘City of Wisdom’.⁶²