Colophons in Sumerian and Akkadian Literary Manuscripts from 3rd and 2nd Millennium BCE Mesopotamia

2026-05-26T22:50:47Z https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/oai2d

oai:fdr.uni-hamburg.de:12531 2024-01-01T00:02:00Z user-uhh user-csmc

true 3.1 UHH.FDR 10.25592/uhhfdm.12531 Sövegjártó, Szilvia Universität Hamburg Colophons in Sumerian and Akkadian Literary Manuscripts from 3rd and 2nd Millennium BCE Mesopotamia Universität Hamburg 2023 CSMC Manuscript Written Artefact UWA Formatting Multigraphic Artefacts RFI03 Sumerian Akkadian Colophons Cuneiform 2023-06-09 en https://www.fdr.uni-hamburg.de/record/oai:fdr.uni-hamburg.de:12531 10.25592/uhhfdm.12530 Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Open Access The practice of inserting scribal remarks to the end of a manuscript in ancient Mesopotamia dates back to the third millennium and it was continued until the end of the cuneiform tradition. Colophons, nonetheless, underwent significant changes in time and space: they differ regarding their form, content and function from both a synchronic and a diachronic viewpoint. Colophons were no conventional elements of Sumerian and Akkadian manuscripts, but freely added components providing various pieces of meta-information, e.g. on the length of the composition, the identity of the scribe, the location or condition of the source, as well as the place and date of production. Manuscripts with colophons may come from various contexts ranging from exercises of apprentice scribes to master copies of scholars. Though colophons are easy to discern on cuneiform tablets as they are visually divided from the body of the text, there is no estimate how many of the extant literary manuscripts contain colophons. The neglecting of paratexts is due to the research focus of the past decades. Scholars attempted the edition of literary compositions by reconstructing the text on the basis of several fragmentary manuscripts, thus the individual manuscripts and their unique features received less attention. The aim of this project was to investigate the intertwining of literary production and the scribal practice of inserting colophons during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE. A catalogue of respective manuscripts and an edition of the extant colophons was a clear desideratum. The database collected in course of the project and which also served as the basis of evaluation is presented here as the project’s research data outcome. The following datasets are included: A_ Archaic Colophons B_ Colophons of the Early Dynastic IIIa Period C_ Colophons of the Early Dynastic IIIb Period D_ Colophons of the Ur III and Agade Periods The colophons included in these four catalogues are the basis of a forthcoming study with the title: A cultural biography of the Mesopotamian scribal lore: Colophons of literary and lexical manuscripts from the third millennium BCE. The research for this project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.