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

世界上第一个有据可查的长途贸易企业是在伊拉克北方的亚述商人和公元前世纪土耳其中部的富丽堂皇的国家之间。商人们的文件提供了一个非同寻常的例子，说明了国家行政部门和知识精英之外的人在前现代时期的大众识字。这个项目将调查他们留下的文件的材料方面，从文件分类到个人笔迹。他们的习惯将被比作公元前21世纪世纪新苏美尔王朝的职业官僚。特征集能在多大程度上区分个体，它们传达了作者的身份？在外行人看来，大多数刻有楔形文字的泥板看起来都差不多。传统上，楔形文字专家也同样将泥板视为匿名抄写员的同质产品。工作方法产生了大量抽象的文本，研究人员然后依赖于出处或作者的明确声明。这些往往是不存在的。最近的研究提供了一些直觉或孤立的例子，说明药片中表达的个性。本研究旨在通过精心挑选的案例研究矩阵，对个性及其意义进行全面、详细、循证、多方面的研究。土耳其中部的库尔泰佩（Kultepe）出土了公元前世纪来自伊拉克北方的亚述商人的惊人个人档案，还有一些是从他们那里学到楔形文字的安纳托利亚当地人写的。这两个群体都不属于传统上与古代世界的写作有关的社会背景。他们的文档具有独特的特征，例如当泥板上的空间用完时，会有额外的小块粘土，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严格的训练，为大型宫殿和寺庙机构制作了大量标准化的文件。他们的大部分工作可以追溯到公元前世纪的大约50年内。这项研究通过研究乌尔三世和旧亚述时期精心挑选的文本语料库来调查楔形文字中的个性和身份，并开发方法来绘制沿着时间，地理和社会轴线的差异，使用基于以下方法的方法：-作为文本载体的平板电脑：粘土类型、制造技术、片剂大小和形状。在楔形文字的研究中，这种方法仍处于起步阶段，在古亚述人或新苏美尔人的语料库中还没有尝试过。作为人工制品的铭文：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，与楔形文字世界的其他地区相比，古亚述人的泥板具有特殊的特征。研究问题：-在多大程度上可以在楔形文字中发现个性？抄写员有什么自由来表达变化？商人的实践素养与职业文士的制度素养有何不同？variation是什么意思它告诉我们什么关于文士的不同教育？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？

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?