1 Textual traditions

Gillen, Todd (ed.), (Re)productive traditions in ancient Egypt: proceedings of the conference held at the University of Liège, 6th-8th February 2013, 95-126. Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2017

When it comes to literature, tradition is often expressed in terms of a binary system comprised of those who are exclusively authors or exclusively copyists, or, to put it in the terms of this volume, those who practice either dynamic productivity or static re-productivity. In the world of Egyptologists this binary vision posits unfathomable writers versus a multitude of sloppy school pupils. This paper is about the material and human processes of textual transmission in the New Kingdom, from a vantage point as close as possible to that of the writing hand. I develop the hypothesis that ‘variation’, which straddles the boundary between the two benchmarks ‘reproduction’ and ‘production’, is a central and defining aspect of Egyptian textual practices.

J. Baines, J. Bennet, S. Houston (Hg.), The Disappearance of Writing Systems, London, 157–181, 2008

For the study of the end of Egyptian writing systems demotic is of special relevance because Egyptian texts continued to be notated in demotic long after other Egyptian scripts were abandoned. Demotic underwent dramatic changes from being originally an everyday script to one that became perfectly acceptable for religious texts. However, the case of hieroglyphic and its demise is also revealing and should be compared to the end of demotic. After summarizing the models that Egyptologists have proposed for interpreting the disappearance of Egyptian scripts and culture, the ups and downs of Egyptian writing competence throughout Egyptian history is sketched. Do the available sources and data allow us to draw definite conclusions? The impact of increasing complexity in hieroglyphic temple inscriptions in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods is discussed in the wider context of the development of intellectual trends in that epoch. It is argued that demotic seemingly followed the same trajectory to its demise as hieroglyphic when it applied so-called un-etymological or phonetic writings, which turned demotic into a script of restricted knowledge. However, all must remain hypothetical because of the high number of yet unpublished demotic texts.

It is commonly agreed that the earliest Ethiopic texts known so far are translations from Greek, while later works are much indebted to the Christian Arabic literary tradition, particularly to the Copto-Arabic one. There is evidence for the emergence of a rich local written production only later in the course of time. One would expect that the complexity of this literary history is fully reflected in the changes in grammar, lexicon and stylistic means of the Ethiopic language, even though in-depth analyses have been attempted only rarely and no systematic correlation has been established between lexical, morphological, and stylistic features. On the one hand, the first step in approaching this delicate question is a systematic mapping of texts and works attributed on some grounds to a precise period. Particularly crucial in this regard is listing all texts that can be attributed to the earlier period of the Ethiopic literary production. On the other hand, a more pronounced awareness of the role played by the material text carriers in the transmission of knowledge has introduced new factors, that also can and must be taken into account.

De Gruyter eBooks, 2020

Introductory remarks by the chapter editor, Elisabet Göransson Textual criticism and the study of the transmission of texts is by and large dependent on writing and written sources. The development of literacy, from the oral transmission of texts to the development of written records, was a long process indeed, and it took place in various parts of the world. The earliest stages of writing were pictograms, used by the Sumerians, Egyptians, and Chinese, from which ideographic or logographic writing, which expressed abstractions, was developed. Phonetic writing, in which symbols, phonograms, represent sounds rather than concepts, was then developed into syllabic and later into alphabetic writing. Early Sumerian literature and Egyptian literature, both extant from the late fourth millennium BC onwards, constitute the oldest literatures we know of. A wide range of literary textsletters, hymns, and poems, but also autobiographical texts-were written in Egyptian hieroglyphs. A narrative Egyptian literature became common from the twentyfirst century BC onwards (during the Middle Kingdom). The cursive shorthand known as the hieratic script gradually became more widely used, both for recordkeeping and for correspondence. Later on, the demotic script was developed from the late Egyptian hieratic script for the same day-today uses, and finally the Egyptians settled on a revised form of the Greek alphabet, the Coptic alphabet, which simplified writing most decidedly. Similarly, cuneiform literature from the ancient Near East, preserved on mostly fragmentary clay tablets, consists of a large corpus of narrative and laudatory poetry, hymns, laments and prayers, fables, didactic and debate poems, proverbs, and songs (T. L. Holm 2005). Even though writing and literature thus existed for a long time before classical Antiquity, for the study of textual criticism and stemmatology-i.e. the relations between the textual witnesses of a textual tradition-approaches to studying the transmission of Greek and Latin texts have been the main points of departure. The basic concepts, methodology, and terminology used by scholars within the field of stemmatology draw exclusively on the literary development and the copying of texts in ancient Greek and Latin. Hence, the perspective in this book and in this introductory chapter is based on the background of the ancient Graeco-Roman world. An overview of other types of literary cultures, specific textual traditions, and editorial approaches used for manuscript traditions in other parts of the world can be found in chapter 7 of the present book (on early Ethiopian, Hebrew, and Chinese literary cultures). For more case studies of oriental manuscript traditions, the reader is referred to the Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies handbook (Bausi et al. 2015, 363-462). The textual traditions and transmission of the literary texts we study and analyse depend on many different circumstances. The nature of the preserved manuscripts, their material transmission, authorship, genre, the complexity of the textual tradition, and so on constitute specific challenges for the editor when deciding upon Open Access.

2009

Reviewed by kristinE stEnzEl, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro The writing revolution: Cuneiform to the internet is an extremely readable and informative book about the history of written language. Gnanadesikan's presentation of the world's major writing systems is informed by solid linguistic training, but this is not a book that only linguists will understand. On the contrary, anyone interested in the development of writing, even without a background in linguistics, will find the book accessible, while linguists will appreciate the well chosen technical information that is included in the description of each individual system. The reader will find useful illustrations of different systems throughout the text and an appendix with reference maps. There is also a section with further reading references for each of the writing systems explored, and a thorough index. In the introductory pages, the author states that "[w]riting is one of the most important inventions of all time," (2) and indeed, throughout the book, the reader is repeatedly reminded not only of the utility of writing as a particularly powerful means of communication, but also of the incredible diversity and beauty of different scripts. The author also highlights the extra-linguistic nature of writing, the role written language has played in changing political and historical scenarios, and the motives behind the rise, fall, and mutation of scripts over time. Writing today permeates the daily lives of much of the world's population, and speakers of the world's dominant languages are surrounded by written material. But Gnanadesikan is careful to point out that writing is not language itself, nor is it necessary to language, which is in its essence oral. Indeed, a great number of the minority languages spoken in the world today have no writing systems, and for those of us who work with speakers of these languages, endeavoring with them to strengthen their oral traditions, as well as, in many cases, to develop working orthographies for their languages, this book is a reminder that writing is both a technical and symbolic act. More than just the representation of concepts, syllables, or phonemes, writing reflects history, culture, and identities. Following the introductory chapter, there are four chapters dedicated to the logographic writing systems developed by ancient Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Chinese, and Mayan civilizations. Writing came into use in the ancient world as a pragmatic response to the administrative and accounting needs of expanding civilizations, and the systematic use of written symbols to record information related to commerce constituted, in the author's words, the first "information technology revolution."(14). Chapter 2 tells the story of the world's oldest writing system: Mesopotamian cuneiform, which came into being around 3400-3300 bc. Early cuneiform was comprised of some eight hundred logographic signs, of which nearly ten percent were numerical representations of different types of quantified entities. The rest were largely iconic symbols semantically related to commodities and trade. Early cuneiform efficiently represented information from this restricted semantic sphere, but it did not represent the grammati

Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions, 2015

With a continuous tradition spanning more than two millennia, funerary texts from ancient Egypt offer an excellent data set for studying how compositions were composed and passed on in the ancient Near East. Clear evidence demonstrates the importance and mechanics of scribal copying in the transmission process. What remain less clear are the methods by which new compositions were created. In some cases, the accretion of scholia, commentary, and exegesis produced new versions of old texts. This is well illustrated by the continuum between Coffin Text (CT) spell 335 and Book of the Dead (BD) spell 17. In other cases, however, large collections appear in writing for the first time showing few hints at the earlier stages of their production. This is true for the Pyramid Texts (PT), whose pre-written forms can only be hypothesized. Fortunately, fragmentary steps from conception to textualization are partially preserved for a relatively little studied corpus from Roman Period Egypt, sometimes known by the title the Demotic Book of Breathing. Despite clearly representing the final stage in the PT-CT-BD tradition, scribes did not create this composition by copying from its predecessors. Instead, a new composition was crafted without direct parallel. In addition, the new text was never fixed, as fifty separate exemplars attest to a core set of formulae that could be added to, subtracted from, or rearranged at will. The variance in this corpus reflects a growing trend toward multiplicity in similar funerary manuscripts from Greco-Roman Egypt. A portion of this variance can be demonstrated to derive from an active oral tradition and it is this oral tradition, I will argue, that provided the raw material for new compositions such as the Demotic Book of Breathing. This paper will therefore address how textual traditions began by looking at the very end of funerary literature in ancient Egypt.

Préhistoire de l'écriture-Prehistories of Writing, 2015

The main aim of the present paper is to open a debate of the multiple features related to the origin of writing in Egypt. Although some questions arose in the past, overall referred to the original place where emerged the Egyptian writing, there are still many other questions waiting for discussion: why was the writing invented? How was the writing constructed? Which was the origin of some of the earliest signs? These are just some of several questions that arise when we approach to the subject. In the present article, some ideas will be exposed together with an historic and cultural contextualization of the period in which writing emerged in Egypt.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2017