Individuality and identity in cuneiform: personalising economic documentation from the 21st and 20th centuries BCE

楔形文字中的个性和身份：公元前 21 世纪和 20 世纪的个性化经济文献

• 批准号: 1789677
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: School of Oriental and African Studies
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2016
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2016 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-1789677
• 关键词: Individuality; identity; cuneiform; personalising; economic

The world's first well-documented long-distance trade enterprise is that between Assyrian traders of northern Iraq and the palatial states of 20th century BC central Turkey. The traders' documents provide an extraordinary example of pre-modern mass literacy by people outside both state administration and the intellectual elite. This project will investigate the material aspects of the documentation they left behind, from document-taxonomy to personal handwriting. Their habits will be compared to those of the professional bureaucrats of the 21st century BC Neo-Sumerian dynasty. How far can feature sets distinguish individuals, and what do they convey about the authors' identity?To the non-expert eye, most clay tablets inscribed with cuneiform text look more or less the same. Traditionally, cuneiform experts have likewise seen and presented tablets as the homogeneous products of anonymous scribes. Working methods have produced heavily abstracted renderings of the text, on which the researcher then relied for explicit statements of provenance or authorship. Often these are absent. Recent studies have offered intuitions or isolated examples of individuality expressed in tablets. This study seeks to provide a thorough, detailed, evidence-based, multi-faceted study of individuality and its significance, through a matrix of carefully selected case studies. Kultepe in central Turkey has yielded astonishing personal archives of 20th century BC Assyrian merchants from northern Iraq, as well as some written by native Anatolians who had learnt cuneiform from them. Neither group belonged to social contexts conventionally associated with writing in the ancient world. Their documents are marked by unique features such as small extra pieces of clay when space on the tablet ran out, or word dividers within the text. By contrast, the scribes of the Neo-Sumerian empire (Iraq) were professional bureaucrats par excellence. Said to have been trained en masse in new academies, they produced vast quantities of standardised documentation for large palace and temple institutions. Most of their work dates to within a period of about 50 years during the 21st century BC.The research investigates individuality and identity in cuneiform through study of carefully selected text corpora from the Ur III and Old Assyrian periods, and develops methodologies to draw out differences along temporal, geographical and social axes, using approaches based around:-The tablet as text carrier: clay type, manufacturing techniques, tablet size and shape. This approach to tablets is still in its infancy in cuneiform studies, and has yet to be attempted in the Old Assyrian or Neo-Sumerian corpora.-The inscription as artefact: text layout, spelling, character forms, stroke order within characters, and non-textual features. Advances made by Taylor in cuneiform handwriting analysis have suggested idiosyncratic features among the Old Assyrian tablets in comparison with the rest of the cuneiform world.Research questions:-To what extent is it possible to detect individuality in cuneiform? What freedom did scribes have to express variations?-How did the practical literacy of merchants differ from the institutional literacy of professional scribes?-What does variation mean? What does it tell us about the differing education of scribes? How did their choices reflect their identity, whether as members of a group or as individuals within groups?

世界上第一个有充分记录的长途贸易企业是伊拉克北部的亚述商人和公元前20世纪土耳其中部的宫廷国家之间的贸易企业。这些交易员的文件提供了一个非同寻常的例子，展示了国家行政部门以外的人和知识分子精英在前现代社会中的大众素养。这个项目将调查他们留下的文件的物质方面，从文件分类到个人笔迹。他们的习惯将与公元前21世纪新苏美尔王朝的专业官僚进行比较。特征集能在多大程度上区分个人，以及它们传达了作者身份的什么？对于非专业人士来说，大多数刻有楔形文字的泥板看起来大同小异。传统上，楔形文字专家同样将平板电脑视为匿名抄写者的同质产品。工作方法产生了文本的高度抽象的呈现，研究人员随后依靠这些呈现来明确地陈述出处或作者。通常情况下，这些都不存在。最近的研究提供了在平板电脑上表达个性的直觉或孤立的例子。这项研究试图通过精心挑选的案例研究矩阵，提供对个性及其意义的彻底、详细、循证的、多方面的研究。土耳其中部的库尔特佩发现了令人震惊的公元前20世纪伊拉克北部亚述商人的个人档案，以及一些由向他们学习楔形文的当地安纳托利亚人所写的档案。这两个群体都不属于古代与写作有关的社会背景。他们的文档有独特的特征，比如平板电脑上的空间用完时，额外的小块粘土，或者文本中的单词分隔符。相比之下，新苏美尔人帝国(伊拉克)的抄写员是非常优秀的职业官僚。据说，他们在新的学院里接受了集体培训，为大型宫殿和寺庙机构制作了大量标准化文件。他们的大部分工作可以追溯到公元前21世纪的大约50年内。这项研究通过对乌尔三世和旧亚述时期精心挑选的文本语料库的研究，调查了楔形文字的个性和身份，并开发了沿着时间、地理和社会轴线绘制差异的方法，使用的方法基于以下几个方面：-石碑作为文字载体：粘土类型、制造技术、石碑大小和形状。这种方法在楔形文字研究中仍处于初级阶段，还没有在旧亚述语料库或新苏美尔语语料库中尝试过。-铭文作为艺术品：文本布局、拼写、字符形式、字符内的笔画顺序和非文本特征。泰勒在楔形文字笔迹分析方面取得的进展表明，与其他楔形文字世界相比，古亚述石碑具有独特的特征。研究问题：-在多大程度上可以检测楔形文字的个性？抄写员有什么自由来表达变化？-商人的实践素养与专业抄写员的制度素养有什么不同？-变化意味着什么？关于抄写员的不同教育，它告诉了我们什么？他们的选择如何反映他们的身份，无论是作为一个群体的成员还是作为群体中的个人？