‘Literacy in literate societies’: the scribe in Nabataean and other Aramaic contexts

Abstract

This paper reviews the key role of scribes reflected in surviving documents in late Aramaic, including Nabataean. The approach is to examine the explicit and implicit role of scribes in the drawing up of Nabataean legal documents such as those found in the Babatha archive and lying in the background of the Дegrā tomb inscriptions, which appear to be summaries of archived documents. This material has a clear affinity with earlier Aramaic scribal tradition and with the Jewish Aramaic Babatha documents, as well as with some slight evidence from Palmyra and more substantial evidence in early Syriac. All of these data can be exploited to build a fuller picture of the scribal culture of the region in the Graeco-Roman period. The discussion is framed by the ambiguities in the use of the terms ‘literacy in oral societies’ and ‘literacy in literate societies’. In the latter, scribes might have been among the relatively few literates, but they fulfilled a specific role in what were really literate societies. The terms used for ‘scribe’ are also examined.