The University of Chicago Oriental Institute Seminars Number 2
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oi.uchicago.edu i THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ORIENTAL INSTITUTE SEMINARS NUMBER 2 Series Editors Leslie Schramer and Thomas G. Urban oi.uchicago.edu ii oi.uchicago.edu iii MARGINS OF WRITING, ORIGINS OF CULTURES edited by SETH L. SANDERS with contributions by Seth L. Sanders, John Kelly, Gonzalo Rubio, Jacco Dieleman, Jerrold Cooper, Christopher Woods, Annick Payne, William Schniedewind, Michael Silverstein, Piotr Michalowski, Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Theo van den Hout, Paul Zimansky, Sheldon Pollock, and Peter Machinist THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO ORIENTAL INSTITUTE SEMINARS • NUMBER 2 CHICAGO • ILLINOIS oi.uchicago.edu iv Library of Congress Control Number: 2005938897 ISBN: 1-885923-39-2 ©2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published 2006. Printed in the United States of America. The Oriental Institute, Chicago Co-managing Editors Thomas A. Holland and Thomas G. Urban Series Editors’ Acknowledgments The assistance of Katie L. Johnson is acknowledged in the production of this volume. Front Cover Illustration A teacher holding class in a village on the Island of Argo, Sudan. January 1907. Photograph by James Henry Breasted. Oriental Institute photograph P B924 Printed by McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, Michigan The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Infor- mation Services — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. oi.uchicago.edu v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................................. vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................................. ix LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................ xi INTRODUCTION 1. Margins of Writing, Origins of Cultures .................................................................................... 3 Seth L. Sanders, University of Chicago FIRST PANEL: INSTITUTIONS 2. Writing and the State: China, India, and General Definitions .................................................... 15 John Kelly, University of Chicago 3. Writing in Another Tongue: Alloglottography in the Ancient Near East .................................. 33 Gonzalo Rubio, Pennsylvania State University 4. Abundance in the Margins: Multiplicity of Script in the Demotic Magical Papyri ................... 67 Jacco Dieleman, University of California, Los Angeles 5. Response for the First Session: Origins, Functions, Adaptation, Survival ................................ 83 Jerrold Cooper, Johns Hopkins University SECOND PANEL: PUBLICS 6. Bilingualism, Scribal Learning, and the Death of Sumerian ...................................................... 91 Christopher Woods, University of Chicago 7. Multilingual Inscriptions and Their Audiences: Cilicia and Lydia ............................................ 121 Annick Payne, University of Würzburg 8. Aramaic, the Death of Written Hebrew, and Language Shift in the Persian Period .................. 137 William Schniedewind, University of California, Los Angeles 9. Response for the Second Session: Writing at the Chronotopic Margins of Empires ................. 149 Michael Silverstein, University of Chicago SUPPLEMENT 10. The Lives of the Sumerian Language ......................................................................................... 159 Piotr Michalowski, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor THIRD PANEL: COSMOPOLITAN AND VERNACULAR 11. Official and Vernacular Languages: The Shifting Sands of Imperial and Cultural Identities in First-millennium B.C. Mesopotamia .................................................................. 187 Paul-Alain Beaulieu, University of Notre Dame 12. Institutions, Vernaculars, Publics: The Case of Second-millennium Anatolia .......................... 217 Theo van den Hout, University of Chicago 13. Writing, Writers, and Reading in the Kingdom of Van ............................................................. 257 Paul Zimansky, Boston University 14. Response for Third Session: Power and Culture Beyond Ideology and Identity ....................... 277 Sheldon Pollock, Columbia University FINAL ROUNDTABLE 15. Final Response: On the Study of the Ancients, Language, Writing, and the State .................... 291 Peter Machinist, Harvard University v oi.uchicago.edu vi oi.uchicago.edu vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is the second in a series of annual interdisciplinary seminar volumes that testify to the progressive vision of Gil Stein, the Oriental Institute’s Director. Nothing would have been possible without the optimism, competence, and overtime of Olivia Boyd, the Assistant to the Director, and the gracious work of Assistant Organizer Eliza Riffe. Steve Camp, Associate Director for Finance and Administration, planned how the seminar would actually happen and be paid for. Professors Stephen Harvey, Nicholas Kouchoukos, and Seth Richardson helped set the theoretical and philological directions at the beginning. I am deeply grateful to them all. Seth L. Sanders Postdoctoral Scholar vii oi.uchicago.edu viii oi.uchicago.edu ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Other abbreviations occur at the end of some individual contributions and are taken from the Chicago Assyr- ian Dictionary, the Chicago Hittite Dictionary, and the Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary. cm centimeter(s) diss. dissertation e.g. exempli gratia, for example fig(s). figure(s) ha hectare(s) ibid. ibidem, in the same place i.e. id est, that is km kilometer(s) lit. literally m meter(s) n(n). note(s) n.d. no date no(s). number(s) p(p). page(s) pers. comm. personal communication pl(s). plate(s) r. reverse vs. versus ix oi.uchicago.edu x oi.uchicago.edu xi LIST OF FIGURES 8.1. Development of letters in Hebrew and Aramaic ........................................................................ 140 13.1. Approximate area controlled by Biainili in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. ..................... 270 13.2. The first Urartian royal inscription, written in Akkadian in the name of Sarduri I, ca. 830 B.C., beside the Van citadel ............................................................................ 270 13.3. Typical building inscription, now in the Van Museum. Minua records the construction of the “gates of Haldi” ............................................................................................ 271 13.4. Dedicatory inscription of Minua in a garden south of Van, containing the only feminine name (Tariria, daughter of Minua) in the Urartian corpus .................................. 271 13.5. Sealing of Rusa II on a bulla from Bastam with cuneiform legend above and below figures ........................................................................................................................ 272 13.6. Seventh-century clay tablet from Bastam listing sheep and personal names .............................. 272 13.7. Concluding portion of a date, inscribed on a bulla from Bastam. The beginning of the description of events that took place in this year is on the edges of the bulla .................. 272 13.8. A demonstration of how little later people knew of Uraritan. The top part of the stela has been re-carved to make a tombstone, but the Urartian curse formula for anyone who damages the stone has been left in place at the bottom. Van Museum ................... 273 xi oi.uchicago.edu xii oi.uchicago.edu 1 INTRODUCTION oi.uchicago.edu 2 oi.uchicago.edu 3 1 MARGINS OF WRITING, ORIGINS OF CULTURES SETH L. SANDERS, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO THE SEMINAR Writing and the state both first began in the ancient Near East. But what did they actually have to do with each other? Most of ancient Near Eastern philology consists of careful examination of the leavings of the state scribes; it has revealed a treasure-house of ancient culture, from haunting poetry to onion archives. But there is a significant blind spot in our perspective on the largest and oldest archive of the ancient world: the relationship between the vast body of official writing and the actual life of language as spoken, understood, and imagined by ancient Near Eastern people. The vital relationships between language and ethnicity, the connections between languages of empire and local identity, and way languages are born, live, and die in writing has remained the subject of more speculation than rigorous research. If recorded history began in the ancient Near East, we are just beginning to explore the powerful creative relationship between writing and the political identities of the Near East’s cultures. This seminar was the first to bring leading philologists together with anthropologists and social theorists to explore what writing meant to politics in the ancient Near East. The seminar was designed to encourage philologists to talk to theorists about how their material matters. It seems to have worked. The papers and responses give a vivid sense of the stakes and consequences of the oldest written texts in the twenty-first century. Collectively, the articles here provide well-documented challenges to conventional wisdom about what people actually used Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, and Hebrew for. We met over two days, on February 25–26, 2005, at the University of Chicago Oriental Institute’s James Henry Breasted Auditorium. Fourteen participants attended; Piotr Michalowski, our fifteenth, was out of the country on an international research project and