A mechanism or tactic · 660 BC · Antiquity
The craft of the sage Adapa
A tablet from Nineveh written in the voice of Ashurbanipal, listing what he had been taught and by whom - a named sage he never met - and then what he did with it, which was to put the tablets in his palace for the instruction of his subjects.
A named individual, dead or legendary, reached entirely through writing, and a resume of the arrangement. The School Days Inscription reads: I learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret hidden lore, all of the scribal arts; I am able to recognise celestial and terrestrial omens and can discuss them in an assembly of scholars; I have read cunningly written texts in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian that are difficult to interpret. Everything the tie required was on one side of it. The teacher never appears, and the whole apparatus existed so that what he had absorbed could be performed in a room full of other people. Then the sentence that is this site in one line: I have written upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe, and I have placed them in my palace for the instruction of my subjects. A clerk's counter that serves everybody, built by the only man in Assyria who could read the stock his own nobles could not. Two things keep it from being a parable. The collection was assembled partly by coercion - Babylonian scribes were taken captive during the campaigns and set to work in the royal libraries, so the archive that taught the world was built by people who did not choose to be in it. And when Nineveh fell in 612 BC the fire that destroyed the palace baked the tablets into ceramic: the destruction is the only reason the library can be read now. It survived by being destroyed, which is this site's argument about archives in one accident.
Application. One-sided attachment put to work on purpose. Creator economies, community, fandom as infrastructure, and the things that genuinely help people. Not automatically good - a tool with an obvious use is a tool that will also get a bad one.
Where it sits
3000 BC Before 0 · 660 BC 1 BC
Provenance · 4 source record(s)
- retrievableBoth quotations. The School Days Inscription, described as reading almost like a modern-day resume: I learned the craft of the sage Adapa, the secret hidden lore, all of the scribal arts; I am able to recognise celestial and terrestrial omens and can discuss them in an assembly of scholars; I have read cunningly written texts in obscure Sumerian and Akkadian that are difficult to interpret. And Ashurbanipal's statement of purpose: I have written upon tablets the noble products of the work of the scribe, and I have placed them in my palace for the instruction of my subjects.Finkel, I., & Taylor, J. Cuneiform. The British Museum. Quoted in Missed History, The Lost Library of Ashurbanipal. ↗
- retrievableScale and standing: a combination of dedicated scholar and supremely powerful ruler, he gathered at Nineveh an unrivalled wealth of specialist knowledge accumulated over many centuries; the largest, broadest and most important library ever assembled over 3,500 years of cuneiform culture, and until the Library of Alexandria the most significant library of antiquity, with almost 32,000 tablets and fragments surviving.Ashurbanipal Library Project, A royal collection. ORACC, University of Pennsylvania Museum, with the British Museum. ↗
- retrievableHow the collection was assembled and who was in it: tablets bear colophons naming Ashurbanipal, and around a quarter record individual scribes, most appearing only once; acquisition lists from 648 BC show many individuals donating only a tablet or a handful. Separately, that Babylonian scribes were taken captive during the campaigns and forced to work in the royal libraries.Ashurbanipal Library Project, Assembling the Library and Library colophons. ORACC and the British Museum. ↗
- retrievableThe destruction as preservation: Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE and a great fire during the burning of the palace is believed to have baked the clay cuneiform tablets, which is why so much Mesopotamian literature survives at all.Library of Ashurbanipal. Wikipedia. ↗
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