Ars Scribendi
Martedì 16 maggio alle 9.30 presso l’Aula Toesca – Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia (I piano), si terrà un appuntamento del ciclo di conferenze From Icon to Sign, from Sign to Object, and Back, con la partecipazione di Klaus Wagensonner della Yale University di New York. Tema della giornata sarà il rapporto tra immagini e scrittura nel Vicino Oriente antico, con un particolare sguardo alla fase di formazione e invenzione della scrittura in Mesopotamia.
La conferenza potrà anche essere seguita online: https://uniroma1.zoom.us/j/92061788809?pwd=dTd1eHNUb29paDF6a2JYSVgvc3hYU...(ID riunione: 920 6178 8809; Passcode: 482330)
Ars scribendi – The Origin(s) and Impact of Writing in Mesopotamia
The technology of writing entered the stage roughly in the last third of the fourth milllennium BCE, and was thus contemporary with the earliest examples of writing in Egypt. In contrast to the Nile valley, however, technologies to record the flow of goods in and out of settlements such as the so-called tokens, clay bullae, or the cylinder seal, show a much clearer picture in the southern alluvial plain between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, or the highlands of neighboring Iran. The increasing complexities of society and the greater burden to administer the ever more challenging circumstances of early urban centers eventually led to the creation of a notational system and the earliest stages of what later can be referred to as cuneiform script. Only within a few generations, a system of ideographic signs in tandem with sophisticated ways to note down numbers and metrologies proved to be a successful model to manage an early Mesopotamian urban society. Although the economic records that this system produced number in the thousands, another type of text must not be ignored: roughly at the same time as the first more complex economic records around c. 3300 or 3200 BCE word lists are compiled and, more importantly, standardized and copied. In a nutshell, these word lists offer an inventory of words and signs, many of which were organized according to themes such as professions, birds, fish, types of vessels, etc. Far more than the economic records, these lists had an immense impact on the dissemination of cuneiform script throughout Mesopotamia and beyond in the first half of the third millennium BCE. Although the documentation is silent about the exact mechanics of this dissemination, the standardized contents of the lists render them important vehicles for the technology of writing. Copies, faithful to the originals, were produced over and over again, throughout the third millennium, and even beyond.