![]() ![]() It took a few years for women to show up in records as scribes. ![]() Of course, writing didn’t include women as soon as it was invented. You can read more about what these tablet houses were like here and here. ![]() The son, in the meantime, had to climb up a hierarchy within an e-dubba. Aside from what I am going to take the liberty of calling tuition, a future scribe’s father also had to factor in the expense of keeping his son’s schoolmaster happy, who expected to be wined and dined in order to go a little easy on a pupil. That schooling was no cakewalk for the student, nor was it for his parents. When they graduated, they became dubsars, tablet writers. ( Source)īoys were sent to an e-dubba, a tablet house where they would spend years learning to read and write the cuneiform script and the subjects they would write about. The reason for this is because cuneiform, a script used to record more than one language, was a phonetic one-one syllable could make up any number of words, with any number of definitions, depending on whether you were writing in Sumerian or some other Mesopotamian language. In other words, scribes had to know the context of what they were reading in order to read it, pretty much on a jargon level. A scribe had to learn business, math, science, and literature in order for his/her basic literacy skills to even matter. “The scribe did not so much read a line of text as translate it,” wrote Jerald Starr on his website. It’s important to keep in mind that cuneiform was very difficult, even for those who used it practically. ( Source)Īlong with money, becoming a scribe took time and hard work. An illustration of boys studying to be scribes, the future elite of society. (It is only appropriate, since Sumerians credited the goddess Nisaba with the invention of writing!) Even more socially progressive, it eventually became that the daughter of a king, had as much chance of becoming a scribe as her male counterpart. The son of a merchant had as much a chance at becoming a scribe as the son of a king. This isn’t to say status was the requirement to become a scribe, but rather the usual source of the requirement: money. In fact, some 70% of the scribes we know by name were the sons of society’s elite, including royalty. If you could read and write in ancient Mesopotamia, you had a good life, and chances were pretty high you were born into that good life. Along with reading and writing cuneiform, scribes eventually evolved to have chops in math or science or business or literature. In 2000 B.C., scribes were some of the most educated people in the world. ( Source)Īnd so writing was born, bringing with it the demand for those who could do it. Cuneiform went through a series of innovations that turned it into cool-looking, abstract symbols. decided there was a better way to keep records, one that was quicker, more convenient, and undoubtedly one that was easier to file than a bunch of clay balls! Pictographs. The owner of the token-stuffed bulla (Latin for “bubble”) would’ve made impressions of the tokens on the outside before baking them in, of course, but, you know, that made the tokens even more pointless. Before writing, Sumerians had a system to record their business transactions it involved tokens made out of clay and a clay bubble to hold the tokens, which they baked into the bubble, rendering the tokens, well, completely pointless. ( Source)Īround 3500 B.C., just before the birth of writing, Sumerians had already been maintaining a civilization for thousands of years, complete with farming, temples, and all kinds of commerce, all of which required record keeping.īut how do you keep records without writing? Well, not very practically. Some houses, where particularly large numbers of school tablets were unearthed, have been interpreted by archaeologists as "school houses" or homes in which scribal education almost certainly took place.Scribes. School tablets have been found in private residences in many sites across Mesopotamia. If he happens to misbehave during classes, he's caned by his teacher. Not unlike students these days, a pupil of ancient Sumer was also afraid to be late for school and feared the punishment. There are some striking similarities between the students of the ancient period and those of modern times. There is evidence of young girls being educated as scribes, but the majority of students were young boys. Unfortunately, only wealthy or elite families had the means to send their children to school. Eduba which translates as "tablet house" were scribal schools that played an important role in the education of children as well as adults during the late third or early second millennium B.C. Learning how to write and read was an important process in ancient Mesopotamia. ![]()
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