literacy in the ancient world

I intended for this blog post to concentrate on literacy and its function in Assurbanipal’s Assyria. Unfortunately, an article that looked very interesting is taking its time making its way to me through the channels of document delivery. As I’ve noted previously, most of the useful information on Assurbanipal’s library is only available in academic books and articles, and these are not very accessible. The article I am trying to source comes from a journal that appears from my Libraries Australia investigations to be held at three libraries in Australia, and the particular issue that I’m trying to track down may or may not be held somewhere in Queensland. So I would say that while academic libraries can usually track things down eventually, not everything is just the touch of a button away in the world of web 2.0, particularly not rather obscure journal articles from the 1980s and beyond. A good proportion of the useful information on Assurbanipal’s library has been around for a while – while research is certainly still ongoing, and new information does lead to scholarly opinions having to be changed, there is plenty that has not dated. Note that one of the references listed at the end of this post is over 100 years old. Apart from dipping into the websites already listed under links, most of my research has come from books and journal articles, which I’ve found by performing searches on Swinburne and Monash Uni catalogues or by chasing up references from books and articles I had already found.

I will refer to the article that’s still on its way later on if it turns out to be as good as it looks, and if it turns up at all. This post will instead be a little broader, looking at some general observations on writing in the context of ancient societies in general. A particularly interesting article that I was able to photocopy in Monash Uni Library’s Reserve collection comes from a book concentrating on literacy and power in the ancient world. Most of this book’s articles concentrate on Classical Greece and Rome, but the editors’ introduction looks more broadly at literacy and its uses in the past and juxtaposes them against modern western perceptions (Bowman & Woolf 1994).

The first point to make is that in our own society, we tend to assume that with literacy comes the ability to achieve one’s potential, and that illiteracy is a sign of disadvantage. It may well be so that this is also the case for a society such as ancient Assyria, but we shouldn’t leap to that assumption. Literacy, according to Bowman and Woolf, is ‘not a single phenomenon but a highly variable package of skills in using texts’.

Law codes are a category of text represented in Assurbanipal’s library and also in other collections, but what is their purpose in a society where not everyone could actually read them? For example, modern Christians and Jews don’t tend to follow the laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to the letter even though these are still in the Bible. What was the case in ancient Assyria? In the absence of anything but the texts themselves, we can not know. We don’t know if adultery was always punished by an unpleasant death even though this was the legal punishment. It is quite possible that the people adhered to other laws as well, which were not written down, or which were written but have not been discovered.

Often, only a restricted, probably ‘elite’ portion of society will have access to written texts, sometimes so that only they are in a position to use them to legitimise the position that they occupy; also in order to prevent others from suggesting alternative interpretations of contentious texts, or for other reasons. Scribes in ancient societies often came from designated social strata, in order to preserve this status quo, and because they were more likely to have the requisite level of education as well. It is interesting to note that while most scribes were men, particularly during Assurbanipal’s rule, but that female scribes did exist in Assyria – so that the power associated with literacy was not restricted to males even though this was certainly a patriarchal society.

Assurbanipal’s official seals indicate that tablets were deposited in his library for the benefit of his subjects, but another source quotes a scribe-librarian saying of the library that ‘I shall place in it whatever is agreeable to the king; what is not agreeable to the king, I shall remove from it.’ So censorship did exist in Assurbanipal’s library, mostly of divination texts, which related to how the running of the Assyrian state depended on complex interpretations various types signs and omens that the general populace were not allowed access to.

Another point made is that modern understandings of ancient societies are heavily dependent on the texts that survive from those times. It should be noted that only a very small proportion of texts ever written have survived. This means that we should be very careful about what we base our assumptions about how these texts were originally produced, read and understood on. Historical-type texts, or ‘annals’ have been used to create what some modern scholars have described as ‘the skeleton of history’, but this is just about all it is, objectively. Inscriptions describing a king’s military or temple-building achievements, often part of a monumental construction but also reproduced for Assurbanipal’s library will almost always begin with a dedication to a deity, and this is because it is addressed to the deity for the purpose of aggrandising the king to the deity. He would not permit anything other than a boast to appear here, regardless of how glorious his conduct in fact was. Comparisons between inscriptions purporting to describe the same event bear this out. Texts of this kind are invaluable for what they tell us about the societies that produced them, and also because close reading and comparison with other contemporary texts can also be informative on the events that they depict. But the more we know about them, the more we can tell we have yet to learn…

References:

Bowman, AK & Woolf, G 1994, ‘Literacy and power in the ancient world’, in Literacy and power in the modern world, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Johns, CHW 1904, Babylonian and Assyrian laws, contracts and letters, T & T Clark, Edinburgh.

Smith, CC 1969, ‘Some observations on the Assyrians and history’, Encounter, no. 30, pp. 340-353.

Thompson, J 1977, A history of the principles of librarianship, C. Bingley, London.