Dissertation Project Louisa Grill

Scribal Culture at Aššur. Conceptualisations and Transmissions of Knowledge in the Lexical Traditions of the Late Bronze Age

Subject: Ancient History
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Karen Radner (LMU)

The dissertation deals with the scribal culture at Aššur during the Middle Assyrian period (c. 1500–1000 BCE), with an emphasis on conceptualisations and transmissions of knowledge at the site in general and concerning its relation to and interaction with contemporary Late Bronze Age (LBA) lexical traditions in particular. While Mesopotamian scribal cultures and lexical texts have been studied extensively, the focus usually lies on the well-attested Old Babylonian period (Veldhuis 1998; Delnero 2012; Crisostomo 2019) and to a lesser degree on the Sargonic (Kraus 2020), Kassite (Bartelmus 2016), Neo-Babylonian (Gesche 2001), and more recently the Neo-Assyrian period (Maul/Manasterska 2023). The dissemination of cuneiform writing all across Western Asia and the advancement of Akkadian to lingua franca during the LBA have also drawn scholarly attention towards questions of form, function, and transmission of lexical material from sites such as Ḫattuša in Anatolia (Scheucher 2012; Boddy 2021), Emar in modern-day Syria (Gantzert 2008), and Ugarit in the Levant (Huehnergard 1987; van Soldt 2011; ibid. 2019). However, despite the Middle Assyrian kingdom’s role as a formidable power in the LBA and its attested interaction with other sites, the scribal culture at its capital Aššur has only played a minor part in research so far and Aššur’s lexical texts have only recently been edited (Weiershäuser/Hrůša 2018; ibid. 2020, ibid. 2023). In light of this, more in-depth studies are in order. Thus, the aim of this dissertation is twofold: (1) It seeks to investigate Aššur’s scribal culture by analysing not only aspects such as organisational principles, language use, and intertextuality and variation, but also the archaeological and archival contexts and the matter of scribal identities. It is the goal to thereby also approach ancient conceptualisations of knowledge, its representations and mediations. (2) At the same time, the prior studies on transmissional processes in the Western Asiatic North-West allow to incorporate the Aššur material more firmly and ascertain degrees of mutual influence between the lexical material from Aššur, Ḫattuša, Emar, Ugarit, and Babylonia, thus further illuminating processes of knowledge transmission from Mesopotamia to the West and vice versa.