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

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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?