Scribe

, a European author and scribe at work]] A scribe is a person who writes books or documents by hand as a profession and helps the city keep track of its records. The profession, previously found in all literate cultures in some form, lost most of its importance and status with the advent of printing. The work could involve copying books, including sacred texts, or secretarial and administrative duties such as taking of dictation and the keeping of business, judicial and historical records for kings, nobility, temples and cities. Later the profession developed into public servants, journalists, accountants, typists, and lawyers. In societies with low literacy rates, such as India, street corner letter-writers (and readers) may still be found providing a service.

Ancient Egypt

scroll]] The Ancient Egyptian scribe, or sesh, was a person educated in the arts of writing (using both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, and from the second half of the first millennium BCE the demotic script was used as well) and dena (arithmetics). Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school and, upon entering the civil service, inherited their fathers' positions.

Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision, administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and tales from the mouths of Egypt's lower classes or from foreign lands survive thanks to scribes putting them in writing.

Scribes were also considered part of the royal court and did not have to pay tax or join the military. The scribal profession had companion professions, the painters and artisans who decorated and other relics with pictures and hieroglyphic text. A scribe was exempt from the heavy manual labor required of the lower classes.

Mesopotamia

of monthly barley rations issued to adults (30 or 40 pints) and children (20 pints) written in cuneiform script on a clay tablet. Written in year 4 of King Urukagina (circa 2350 BCE). From Girsu, Iraq. British Museum, London.]] The Mesopotamian scribe, or dubsar, received his or her early education in the "tablet house," or é-dubba. As in Egypt, he was generally male Apart from administration and accountancy, Mesopotamian scribes observed the sky and wrote literary works as well as the famous myth The Epic of Gilgamesh. They wrote on papyrus paper as well as clay tablets. They also wrote and kept records. Scribe's writing tools were made of reeds and were called a stylus.

Babylonian scribes concentrated their schooling on learning how to write both Akkadian and Sumerian, in cuneiform, for the purposes of accountancy and contract dealings, in addition to interpersonal discourse and mathematical documentations. In the other Sumerian disputes, in the 'dispute between Summer and Winter' , summer wins. The other disputes are: cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, Silver and Copper, the pickax and the plough, and millstone and the gul-gul stone.

Ancient Israel

Scribes in Ancient Israel, as in most of the ancient world, were distinguished professionals who could exercise functions we would associate with lawyers, government ministers, judges, or even financiers. Some scribes copied documents, but this was not necessarily part of their job.

The Jewish scribes used the following process for creating copies of the Torah and eventually other books in the Tanakh.

# They could only use clean animal skins, both to write on, and even to bind manuscripts. # Each column of writing could have no less than forty-eight, and no more than sixty lines. # The ink must be black, and of a special recipe. # They must verbalize each word aloud while they were writing. # They must wipe the pen and wash their entire bodies before writing the most Holy Name of God, YHVH every time they wrote it. # There must be a review within thirty days, and if as many as three pages required corrections, the entire manuscript had to be redone. # The letters, words, and paragraphs had to be counted, and the document became invalid if two letters touched each other. The middle paragraph, word and letter must correspond to those of the original document. # The documents could be stored only in sacred places (synagogues, etc.). # As no document containing God's Word could be destroyed, they were stored, or buried, in a genizah.

Sofer

A Sofer () are among the few scribes that still ply their trade by hand. Renowned calligraphers, they produce the Hebrew Torah scrolls and other holy texts by hand to this day. They write on parchment.

Sofer accuracy

Until 1948, the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible dated back to 895 A.D. In 1947, a shepherd boy discovered some scrolls inside a cave West of the Dead Sea. These manuscripts dated between 100 B.C. and 100 A.D. Over the next decade, more scrolls were found in caves and the discovery became known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Every book in the Hebrew Bible was represented in this discovery except Esther. Numerous copies of each book were discovered, such as the 25 copies of Deuteronomy that were found.

While there are other items found among the Dead Sea Scrolls not currently in the Hebrew Bible, the texts on the whole testify to the accuracy of the scribes copying down through the ages, though many variations and errors occurred. The Dead Sea Scrolls are currently the best route of comparison to the accuracy and consistency of translation for the Hebrew Bible, due to their date of origin being the oldest out of any Biblical text currently known.

See also

Copying

List of ancient Egyptian scribes

Scrivener

Scriptorium

The Seated Scribe

Transcription (linguistics)

Transliteration

Uncial

Worshipful Company of Scriveners

Notable scribes

Ahmes

Amat-Mamu

Baruch

Dubhaltach MacFhirbhisigh

Máel Muire mac Céilechair

Sidney Rigdon

Sin-liqe-unninni

Notes

References

Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Routledge 2006, ISBN 0-415-23549-9, pp. 166ff.

Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, University of Chicago Press 1995, ISBN 0-226-50836-6

David McLain Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, Oxford University Press collyn anderson2005, ISBN 0-19-517297-3

External links

Some Old Egyptian Librarians, Ernest Gushing Richardson, Charles Sribners, 1911

Catholic Encyclopedia

Category:Writing occupations *|Scribe Category:Defunct occupations Category:Ancient Egyptian culture Category:Historical legal occupations