All texts have authors and all texts have reasons for being written and for being read. In considering this question of who wrote the text in question and why, we encounter issues such as the spread and extent of the ability to write and read within specific societies, the role, social status, and training of scribes, and the situation of written texts at the intersection of a range of social components with potentially differing angles of engagement with specific texts. The extent and spread of writing within ancient Near Eastern societies was highly variable through time and space (Figure 1). At its origins in the late 4th millennium bc world of Uruk Mesopotamia, writing was an instrument of centralised control developed in order to facilitate temple administration of labour and agricultural production (Algaze 2008; Englund 1998; Liverani 2006). The world’s earliest writing, in the so-called proto-cuneiform tradition, was produced exclusively by and for bureaucrats working on behalf of large centralised institutions at the very origins of the state. Echoes of this role for writing are attested in outposts of Uruk control along major trade routes reaching out from Mesopotamia, as for example at Godin Tepe in central-west Iran where a small collection of clay tablets, some with seal impressions, indicate the presence of a cadre of Uruk, or Uruk-influenced, bureaucrats exercising their newly developed administrative technology in order to control local agricultural activity and production (Matthews 2013). The quantities and range of commodities attested in the Godin Tepe texts, such as small quantities of domestic animals and dairy produce, are so limited that one wonders whether their administration through written texts was not so much a bureaucratic necessity as a means of demonstrating the power of those who could write over those who could not. As Algaze points out (2008: 138), from its earliest manifestation the written text appears to align with Lévi-Strauss’ dictum that “the primary function of writing, as a means of communication, is to facilitate the enslavement of other human beings” (1964: 292).
In later times cuneiform culture expanded to incorporate a broader remit of social and economic engagement (Figure 2). Writing, increasingly regularised in its execution and with a much- reduced sign repertoire, was used both in a wider array of roles — for letters, contracts, lists, treaties, prayers and annals — and also to express a diverse wealth of largely unrelated languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), Hurrian, Hittite, Elamite, Ugaritic, and others distributed across the ancient Near East (Zimansky 2005). The extent of the ability to write and read needs investigation in each individual case through time and space. Charpin (2010: 7–24) has questioned the conventional assumption that reading and writing in Mesopotamia were solely “the business of specialists”, arguing that differing levels of competence in writing, and reading, the cuneiform script are attested by texts from a range of archaeological contexts. In the early 2nd millennium bc there is good evidence that Assyrian merchants were capable of writing and reading by themselves, without input from specialist scribes, employing a limited syllabary of fewer than 70 signs (Charpin 2010: 19). Lion (2011) has stressed that in the same period in Assyria and Babylonia significant numbers of women as well as men could read and write.
Veldhuis (2011) has explored the versatility inherent in the cuneiform writing system, which enabled several types and degrees of literacy to co-exist. Not everyone had to be a top-level scholar, with years of expert training behind them, in order to participate in the cuneiform system. Veldhuis identifies three broad categories of cuneiform literacy – functional, technical, and scholarly. Functional literacy could be attained by a wide range of citizens of the Mesopotamian city-states, in particular during the huge expansion of the uses of writing during the early 2nd millennium bc, the Old Babylonian period, while technical literacy relates to expertise in specialist areas of cuneiform practice, such as divination and mathematical texts. The most accomplished scribes can be described as ‘scholarly literate’, defined by Veldhuis as exhibiting “the pride of the scribes in their craft, emphasizing and even increasing complexity and demonstrating the joy of discovering rare and unusual features of the system” (Veldhuis 2011: 74). It would make an interesting exercise to track the shifting proportions of these three types of literacy through the 3000-year history of the cuneiform world and to consider their variability in the light of changing political and social regimes.
A related issue concerns societies which choose not to write. In a rare study of this question Lamberg-Karlovsky (2003) surveys through time the interaction of literate societies with non- literate societies across the ancient Near East, detecting only one example (the short-lived Proto- Elamite phenomenon) of a non-literate society adopting the practice of writing through contact with a literate society. His interpretation is that indigenous societies deliberately rejected writing because of its association with forms of externally-imposed control and with specific religious and social contexts that were alien, indeed hostile and exploitative, to non-literate societies.
How were textual traditions maintained and sustained through time and space? The transmission and control of written knowledge in the ancient Near East was materialised through two intersecting networks, forming a chrono-spatial framework. A horizontal network in space involved largely elite and merchant elements of states and empires, operating across the geographic span of specific states by means of movement of letters, contracts, and archives as well as of the writing skills and capabilities, in the form of scribes, (the website Knowledge and Power in the Neo- Assyrian Empire provides excellent coverage of these and related issues: oracc.museum. upenn.edu/saao/knpp/). But there was also a network of vertical transmission, and indeed control, of knowledge through time which was sustained and enriched by the very materiality of cuneiform culture, through not just decades or centuries but over millennia.
Archives of clay tablets appear from the very start of the cuneiform tradition and last until its end (Pedersén 1998). They served as a major means of the vertical transmission of knowledge through the curation of archives and libraries within the context of palaces and temples in imperial core cities, as attested at Nineveh and many other cities. Assurbanipal’s 7th-century BC library of c.28,000 clay tablets (plus an unknown number of wooden texts that have not survived) constitutes vivid evidence that the king could take a personal and learned interest in the reception, definition, and transmission of knowledge through time (Frame and George 2005). At a deeper level, we can also see a role for the materiality of texts in the persistence of templates of social power, of cultic belief and practice, of knowledge control and transmission through the entire epoch of cuneiform culture.
Why do people stop writing texts? While much study has been invested in the origins of scripts and writing traditions, less attention has been devoted to what has been called “script obsolescence” (Houston et al. 2003; for numerous case-studies of the rise and demise of languages and their texts see also Baines et al. 2008; Ostler 2005). The only answer can be that people stop writing, at all or in specific ways, when the social context of their writing disappears or is transformed beyond sustainability. An illustrative example is the steady disappearance of skills in Arabic calligraphy in contemporary Lebanon, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, due to the rise of computer-generated calligraphy. Here a technological shift, embedded in social change, is transforming classical calligraphy into “a visual art rather than a useful tool” (http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/20...30/160088.html).
