Agency in Ancient Writing

7. Contingency and Innovation in Native Transcriptions of Encrypted Cuneiform (UD.GAL.NUN)

165 [I]t is no longer enough simply to invoke human actors and pay homage to Bourdieu and Giddens. DOBRES ANd ROBB (2000, 10) The comingling of the material sign and its seemingly limitless (possible ) entextualizations has functioned as a master trope in so many disciplines and in so many ways that we must be particularly vigilant in any discussion of notational systems (epigraphy) and the constraints under which their practitioners operate (agency). We must, first of all, deny here the relevance of (or at least try to abstain from) metaphorical extensions that describe “culture as text that can be read—or of a culture as a Geertzian (Geertz 1973, 453) ensemble of texts” (Silverstein and Urban 1996, 1; see Olsen 2003, 90, and Preucel 2006, 138–42, for brief overviews of the “culture as text” metaphor). We are concerned here with the actual inscription of real text-artifacts and, in particular, the manifold and densely imbricated array of contingencies (material, notational, linguistic, and social) that any would-be scribal innovator (or even an orthodox tradent) must overcome to achieve, as it were, an ongoing sequence of coherent recontextualizations (viz. reinscription of the “same” text on numerous occasions). As text-artifact, an archaeologically recovered S e v e n Contingency and Innovation in Native Transcriptions of Encrypted Cuneiform (UD.GAL.NUN) J. Cale Johnson and Adam Johnson DOI: 10.5876/9781607321996.c07 166 J. Cale Johnson and Adam Johnson object must be dealt with as it would be in any other branch of materials analysis : procedures for the construction and demarcation of writing surface must be reconstructed and the design principles underlying the operation of the notational system must be identified. This will be described below in terms of what Cancik-Kirschbaum and Mahr (2005) have called the “aesthetic profile” of cuneiform as a notational system, but we first situate this notion of aesthetic profile within recent literature on network theory, particularly as instantiated in the work of Bruno Latour. The goal of this first section is to define those aspects of scribal practice that are largely below the radar of individual practitioners: a set of embodied practices that correspond to Bourdieu’s habitus, practices that are carried out more or less automatically and involve little or no real agency. Only once this inculcated scribal habitus is in place do we turn to the distinctively textual aspects of the text-artifact, drawing on philological tradition as well as notions of entextualization and recontextualization as defined within linguistic anthropology (Mertz 2007, 345–46; Preucel 2006, 138–42, 254–58; Silverstein and Urban 1996, 1–17).1 This second half of the chapter focuses on how an individual scribe, embedded within hierarchies of status and knowledge in a particular scribal school in Abu Salabikh (present-day Iraq), ca. 2600 BCE, sought to overcome the contingencies and gaps he faced in transcribing an encrypted mythological text (in a code known as UD.GAL.NUN) from nearby Fara (ancient Shuruppak; for background, see Krebernik 1998; Krebernik and Postgate 2009; Visicato 2000, 46–52 and references therein). Even though as little as one or two generations probably separate the source text (from Fara) and its ancient transcription (from Abu Salabikh), the scribal habitus behind the Fara source text is quite different from that of the later transcription. The tradent is forced to resolve problems as he works through the text and even to improvise at times, moments of contingency that illuminate the nature of scribal agency within this particular micro-historical milieu. THE NEW MAtERiAliSm If we are to describe how the artifactual (rather than textual) properties of a text-artifact are produced—namely, the procedures or mechanisms that result in the material remains that latter-day epigraphers study—the best place to start is undoubtedly the newly emergent materialism, in which agency can be attributed to inanimate as well as animate entities, cognizant or otherwise (see the essays in Knappett and Malafouris 2008; Mills and Walker 2008; and Nanoglou and Meskell 2009 for overview and exemplification, as well as Anderson’s discussion of Gosden in this volume). This new materialism finds its proximate point of origin—at least within the archaeological literature—in Olsen (2003), in which the author attempts to move beyond the “(material) culture as text” metaphor by attributing agency to various nonhuman and transhuman agents. 167 Contingency and Innovation in Native Transcriptions of Encrypted Cuneiform In doing so, he...