We continue our presentation of the winners of the 2018 IAA Prizes: this time, we publish a report sent by the winner of the Subsidy for Cuneiform Studies.
Last year, the committee members unanimously agreed to award the IAA Subsidy 2018 to J. Caleb Howard, for his project “Variation in the Manuscripts of the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II”, which he has kindly accepted to describe for us.
Thank you, Caleb, and congratulations!
Reading and Documenting the Manuscripts of the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II
At the 2018 Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale in Innsbruck, I was grateful to be awarded the IAA Subsidy for Cuneiform Studies for the project “Variation in the Manuscripts of the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II.” The ultimate aim of this research project is to reconstruct the process of producing the manuscripts of the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II at Kalḫu.
This composition exists in hundreds of copies, most of which are incised into the faces of stone orthostats that originally lined the walls of the Northwest Palace. Through the painstaking work of Janusz Meuszyński, Samuel Paley, and Richard Sobolewski, the original locations of the orthostats in the Northwest Palace are now reliably known. This means that it is now possible to study textual variation between an unprecedented number of copies of the same Mesopotamian composition in a unique environment, on unique media, in precise relation to one another.
On this basis, I hope to advance our understanding of how these texts – and potentially texts like them – were produced and transmitted.
How did the scribes of Kalḫu compose the composition that we refer to as the Standard Inscription? How was the text of the Standard Inscription transmitted to the orthostats in the Northwest Palace? Was it transmitted from one exemplar or from many? What sorts of mistakes were made in the process? What was the role of the scribe? What was the role of the stonemason? Can we distinguish the work of each? Is such a division of labor even feasible? What was the manner of transmission (visual copying, dictation, or memory)?
Orthostat G-11 (Hood Museum of Art, S.856.3.2). From Wikimedia Commons.
To begin answering such questions, one needs direct access, as much as is possible, to the texts on the reliefs, in order to have the best chance of seeing all manner of textual phenomena on the orthostats. My first step, therefore, has been to directly examine and completely collate and photograph every manuscript of the Standard Inscription that I can.
Thanks to the generosity of the IAA, as well as other organizations, I have traveled to thirty museums where these orthostats are held, and read and photographed one hundred forty-two of the orthostats.
In particular, the IAA subsidy enabled me to spend two weeks in New York last autumn, where I read and photographed the manuscripts of the Standard Inscription in the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The results of this labor will be partly represented in the form of a Partitur of the Standard Inscription, which will be located on the Oracc platform. This will make some of the data bearing on my subject available to users.
In addition, I have taken tens of thousands of photographs of textual phenomena on the orthostats for documentation. On this basis, it will be possible to document textual variation between the manuscripts of the Standard Inscription at all levels of textuality. Furthermore, it is possible to document phenomena such as the management of space restrictions by scribes (e.g., variations in script density or methods of abbreviating the composition), the formats of the texts on the orthostats, as well as how the signs were incised.
A synthesis of these data, in the form of a study of the mechanics of production of the manuscripts of the Standard Inscription, will be published in a forthcoming monograph. This work was begun in my 2017 Johns Hopkins dissertation, The Process of Producing the Standard Inscription of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud/Kalḫu. There, I attempted to address each stage of production, from the inception of the composition to its incising on the orthostats in the Northwest Palace.
It is well-known that, at least in the Sargonid period, royal inscriptions were composed by royal scholars (ummânū), especially the chief scribe (rab ṭupšarri), though the king was also involved. The Standard Inscription, which is extant in two recensions, was probably transmitted from at least two master copies.
Orthostat F-3 (BM 124584), Mis-Formed E Sign in Upper Right with Correctly Formed E Sign in Lower Left. © J.C. Howard.
While one recension was being used, another was produced and replaced the first. The monumental task of transmitting the text of the Standard Inscription from the master copies to hundreds of orthostats in the Northwest Palace was probably expedited in some way; a single copyist working alone would have taken longer than multiple copyists working simultaneously. The role of the masons in the process is elucidated by the many incorrectly formed signs, erroneous combinations of wedges which are nonetheless recognizable as attempts at forming a real sign. Such cases even occur for very common signs, such as KI or E. Presumably a literate person would have recognized the error and not produced such combinations of wedges.
Such issues of production and transmission of cuneiform texts may be usefully studied through a systematic examination of a coherent corpus of manuscripts such as those of the Standard Inscription. It is hoped that this research will elucidate yet another aspect of textual production and transmission in Mesopotamia.
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