The monastic genealogy of Hoḫʷärwa monastery – a unique witness of Betä Ǝsraʾel historiography

During the course of a study of the manuscript tradition of the Betä Ǝsraʾel (Ethiopian Jews), the manuscript Jerusalem, National Library, Ms. Or. 87 came to light. This codex is a unique manuscript with several important elements that contribute to our knowledge of the history of the Betä Ǝsraʾel. Its by far most important feature are two short additional notes that I have come to call the Hoḫwärwa genealogy. This genealogy is the second piece of original pre-twentieth century Betä Ǝsraʾel historiography ever discovered, next to the text published by Leslau in 1946-47 as ‘A Falasha Religious Dispute.’ Taking the manuscript as a starting point, this article aims to cover topics such as the Betä Ǝsraʾel scribal tradition and aspects of their literature, their monasticism, the history of Hoḫwärwa monastery, and the history of the manuscript itself.

The Postdeterminativeki in the Hittite Cuneiform Corpus

Among almost 20,000 attestations of place names in Hittite cuneiform texts, only ca. 120 feature the geographic postdeterminative ki (“place”). This present paper explores possible reasons for such a modest number, analysing the data according to various criteria, including the geographical dispersal of toponyms determined by ki, the dating of the texts, their language and their cultural provenance. It is argued that the use of ki in the Hittite corpus is not random and should be viewed in the context of early Hittite scribal tradition. A catalogue of all attestations of the postdeterminative ki is included.

The role of roofing

This paper presents evidence in support of the claim that Latin played a significant role as a ‘roof language’ in the languages of western Europe. It focuses on the role that Latin played at three stages of the development of the perfects in western Europe: first, as a conduit of the ‘sacral stamp of Greek’ in bible translation and as influential in other ecclesiastical contexts; secondly, through the influence of scribal tradition and the establishment of the ‘Charlemagne Sprachbund’; and, finally, as a model for classicized syntactic style of the Late Middle and Early Modern period, as exemplified by the patterns of perfect use by the translators of Boethius, especially Chaucer and Elizabeth I. Several larger generalizations also emerge from this investigation: evidence is provided for the stratified nature of Latin syntactic influence across time and space, and the effect of this recurrent replication on the temporal-aspectual systems of the western European languages. Above all, this analysis underlines the essential role of calquing in superstrate-induced change, the structural patterns that are most frequently affected, and the social motivations that foster this type of innovation.

On preserved and lost Ancient Maya books

One of the greatest achievements of the Ancient Maya was a logo-syllabic writing system. The Maya left many glyphic inscriptions carved, incised or painted on different media. Unfortunately, from that rich scribal tradition only four manuscripts, known as codices, survived. They are painted on bark paper and contain, above all, almanacs with auguries. However, by looking at reports prepared by chroniclers during Colonial times, and documents transcribed in Mayan languages using the Latin alphabet, one can see that a variety of subjects could have been raised in lost codices.

Manuscript in the House of Print

In his classic account of seventeenth-century scribal publication, Harold Love points briefly to three authors—Swift, Richardson, Sterne—whose careers indicate the ongoing vitality of manuscript culture in later generations. Taking a cue from Love, this chapter explores Richardson’s self-consciousness as a novelist about manuscript production and transmission, his real-world cultivation of epistolary sociability, and the ways in which his published output was shaped by practices arising from scribal tradition. For all his centrality in the history of print, Richardson was also at the centre of a thriving culture of manuscript exchange that bypassed or transcended print and also informed its products at every stage from creation to reception. There emerges a story of enduring interaction between coexisting media systems, not simple supersession of one by another, with creative consequences as much for the novel as for the lyric, epistolary, and other forms most often associated with manuscript exchange.

A Hittite Scribal Tradition Predating the Tablet Collections of Ḫattuša?

This article discusses the origins of a group of four Hittite OS tablets, which share some unique and peculiar features with respect to their shape, spelling conventions and palaeography. It argues that these four tablets are the oldest documents of the Hittite corpus, and that they were not created in Ḫattuša, but have been imported from elsewhere. Originally, they belonged to an older writing tradition, predating the establishment of Ḫattuša as the Hittite capital. This implies that the royal tablet collections in Ḫattuša do not reflect the very first beginnings of Hittite cuneiform, but only the start of a royal administration there. The typical Hittite ductus was already created in the 18th century BCE – in Kuššara, Nēša or elsewhere in Anatolia.

Advanced Education

Advanced education was the most flexible part of the scribal curriculum. It could be tailored to the particular specialty of the scribe: the palace, the temple, commerce, military, etc. The advanced curriculum was often taken from other spheres, such as temple hymns or rituals, and used for scribal study (much like the Gettysburg Address or the “Star-Spangled Banner” might be reused as part of a school curriculum). There is evidence of cuneiform literature including Gilgamesh, Adapa, and law codes like Hammurabi that have been excavated in the southern Levant dating to the second millennium BCE. This provides a tangible vector of transmission for these traditions into the early alphabetic scribal tradition.

Replicating Writing: Moulding and Stamping Hieroglyphs on Classic Maya Ceramics

A fundamental distinction is made in craft production between custom or bespoke creation and mechanical reproduction that generates multiple iterations of the same form. In Mesoamerica, technologies of reproduction are attested by around the sixth century bc in the form of moulding and stamping, and they become increasingly common in ceramic production in the Maya and neighbouring regions in the third or fourth century. Beginning in the Late Classic period (c. 600–830 ad), Maya artisans applied them to the hieroglyphic script as well, generating a corpus of texts that are at once fundamentally distinct from and intimately linked to the broader scribal tradition dominated by hand-written texts. This article examines Classic Maya texts moulded and stamped on ceramics in the context of scribal practice and the social and cultural role of the script. I argue that these artefacts manifest changes not only in hieroglyphic production, but also in writing's role in user communities. Consequentially, they invite reconsideration of scribal practice's relationship to other crafting traditions, as well as the diversity of modes of engaging in Classic Maya scribal tradition.

Hittite heterographic writings and their interpretation

All attested texts in the Hittite language along with the phonetic writings of Hittite lexemes make broad use of Sumerian and Akkadian morphemes, words and word combinations conveying the meaning of corresponding Hittite elements. This article questions the common assumption that all foreign elements were read and dictated in proper Hittite and presents evidence suggesting that in some cases word combinations underlying Sumerian and Akkadian writings cannot be interpreted as grammatical Hittite strings because of their different syntactic properties. The phenomena discussed in the article are most likely due to the features of the scribal jargon heavily influenced by the Sumero-Akkadian scribal tradition.