Scribal Families at Ugarit
Résumé
Several members of the epigraphic team of the Franco-Syrian Mission de Ras Shamra have been working actively on questions of prosopography in recent years. Thanks in large part to scribal colophons which have yielded some of the most important data, it is possible in some cases to trace the genealogy of certain families of scribes over several generations. This paper presents some results of our recent work on several such scribal families, and especially on the family-oriented educational contexts in which young apprentices were trained as scribes. Since the most important data derives from the XIIIth century BC, and since it was probably during this period that the alphabet was adopted, adapted, and institutionalized as the primary graphic vehicle for managing the domestic affairs of the kingdom of Ugarit, we will also explore some possible relationships between such families of intellectuals on the one hand, and the implementation and teaching of both the Mesopotamian cuneiform and local alphabetic cuneiform scripts on the other.
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