Reading and Writing in Babylon
Publisher
:
Presses Universitaires de France
Parution date
:
2008
EAN
:
9782130567400
Description
Reading and writing are known to have begun in Babylon—present-day Al Hillah, Babil Province, Iraq. Dominique Charpin agrees that the Sumer region saw the birth of writing, but questions who was doing it and when. As he shows in Lire et écrire à Babylone, there is evidence that by the beginning of the second millennium B.C.E., writing in cuneiform script on tablets made of clay was not just the domain of scribes and priests, as is commonly believed, but was being taught and practiced in other subsets of society as well. Charpin demonstrates his theory using archaeological evidence to show a great variety of purposes for writing: correspondence between members of the ruling classes; messages from rulers to gods and posterity, inscribed on tombs; ordinary citizens’ family record keeping; and merchants’ tracking inventory and sales. Charpin shows that this writing was even stored in libraries to make knowledge available to others, especially religious figures such as prophets, exorcists, and bards.
Author
Dominique Charpin : Dominique Charpin is a professor at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, Sorbonne). He is the editor of the Revue d'assyriologie. Twenty-five of his published articles are available on the Web site www.digitorient.com. In addition, he published the acclaimed work Hammu-rabi de Babylone (Presses Universitaires de France, 2003).
|