For those tracing turns in the field, a volume entitled Scribes and Language Use in the Graeco-Roman World would seem to be on the right track. Scribal labour created much of the textual record that survives on papyrus or via manuscript transmission. Yet scribes have often occupied an ambiguous position in scholarship. Blamed for errors and idiosyncrasies, they surface time and again as convenient scapegoats, boon and bane alike to the philologist. Still visible, scribal handwriting brings us into contact with lives long gone. Tracing these lives often ends at the hand; the story beyond the pen stroke is lost before the historian’s arrival. Scribes, instead, haunt the space between the word and the page, the author and the reader, and the state and its subjects. This mediating position challenges us to grapple with the agency of people about whom we know very little, adding layers of complication and uncertainty to the stories we may seek to tell about and through ancient texts.
Leveraging the scribe’s position of immediacy and mediation, the present volume’s ten essays tell stories about language: how it changes across time, context and community. Here, handwritten errors and corrections are not obstacles, but opportunities for studying bilingualism, language contact, grammar and idiom as they intersect with scribal praxis. In eight of the ten essays we find ourselves in Graeco-Roman Egypt examining documentary papyri and ostraca written in Greek, Coptic or Demotic from the Ptolemaic to the Byzantine period. The two remaining essays take us outside of Egypt for studies of Greek-language notetaking at the Council of Chalcedon (T. Mari) and Latin orthography in property records from early medieval Tuscany (T. Korkiakangas). The stories of language variation told in the essays are rich in data and detail, but caveat lector. With numerous essays steeped in the Fachsprache of linguistics, the volume presumes a specialist readership whose expertise matches that of its authors. This presumption risks isolating the contributions from the larger community of researchers examining ancient scribal culture.
Scribes sit at a nexus of concern for the groundswell of scholarship reappraising the ancient Mediterranean’s cultures of reading, writing, administration and information. Papyrologists, historians, archaeologists and scholars of literature have all taken part in efforts to reconstruct the materiality, pragmatics and sociology of scribing. Animating this work is a growing concern for the scribes themselves as historical subjects, often as an attempt to counter forces that have marginalised ancient scribes and their work. Scribal labour in the Roman world beyond Egypt and before late antiquity was often undertaken by enslaved or formerly enslaved workers. The nature of their contributions remains difficult to assess due to the impact of slavery’s master narratives. In recent efforts to describe, disrupt and repair such narratives, scholars of early Christianity and Roman literature have been especially keen to assemble traces of these ‘hidden figures’ as a basis for interrogating the politics of labour and power shaping ancient sources. Research that can better illuminate the day-to-day lives of scribal workers will find an engaged audience among such scholars.
Against this backdrop, the volume’s approach to scribes represents an exciting frontier. The linguistic background of scribal workers must have had a bearing on their labour practices, identities and opportunities. Focusing on language might turn up the kinds of traces sought by scholars reading for scribes ‘between the lines’.
Leiwo’s introduction to the volume makes two important interventions: first, that linguistic research on premodern documentary texts cannot afford to ignore the ‘scribal level’, the text as it was written and arranged. Leiwo observes that modern text editions, aiming to reproduce the authorial text, tend to regularise spellings and banish scribal errors to the apparatus. Studies that rely on the edited text risk overlooking language variation at the level most immediate to the text’s production and use.
Second, Leiwo clarifies the volume’s approach to a definitional problem. What is a scribe? In different corners of scholarship the term may refer to a state official, a personal secretary, a court clerk, a village bureaucrat, a streetcorner bookseller, an enslaved copyist or a medieval monk. The volume’s editors attempt to address this spectrum by defining a scribe as ‘anyone who records information’ (p. i); a scribe is someone who writes. This breadth ensures that all of the volume’s contributions – even those only loosely concerned with the practice of scribing – fit its title.
For scholars examining scribal praxis, the most engaging contributions are those of J.V. Stolk, Mari and Korkiakangas. Stolk asks whether the linguistic level of scribal correction can help us distinguish between drafts and final documents. Genre is the decisive factor in the study. Analysing c. 20,000 corrections preserved in documentary papyri from Egyptian archives (first to seventh centuries ce), Stolk shows the type of correction relating to the document’s genre and its stage of composition. Draft contracts, for example, tend to contain lexical and phrasal corrections whereas final contracts show corrections at the level of individual characters or forms. Letters contain corrections at all levels, suggesting a compositional process without multiple drafts. Stolk’s analysis of correction types illustrates how the writing process differed according to genre.
Mari brings a similarly detailed approach to scribal praxis in the study of notarioi producing the minutes (acta) of late-antique church councils. Aiming to mobilise these documents as ‘evidence for the spoken Greek of the mid-fifth century’ (p. 164), Mari recognises the mediating position of the scribe as a challenge. His modern-day example comparing the official and the verbatim transcript of a speech in the United Kingdom’s House of Commons illuminates the potential loss of linguistic information in the creation of the written record. Still, Mari’s statistical analysis of spoken and written statements in the minutes shows the transcribed speeches retaining expected characteristics of spoken language, suggesting that scribal intervention at the linguistic level was not transformative; the written minutes of church councils thus remain a viable source for formal spoken Greek.
Turning to early medieval Tuscany, Korkiakangas assesses the language abilities of scribes who spoke a form of vernacular Latin (L1) that differed from the classical Latin (L2) they learned in school and employed in writing. Statistical analysis of property records produced by scribes in this period checks whether variations in spelling from classical Latin correlate to grammatical variations. Korkiakangas finds that scribes with strong spelling competency made fewer grammatical errors in the domains of lexicon and morphology and vice versa. Syntactic variations, however, tend not to correlate to spelling, indicating that even well-educated scribes of this period struggled to develop competency in the complexities of classical Latin syntax. Korkiakangas attributes this state of affairs to a pedagogical focus on spelling and morphology and to the delayed development of syntactic theory as a feature of grammar books.
These three data-rich contributions are complemented by a pair of studies focusing on specific cases. R. Duttenhöfer’s careful examination of irregular spelling, bilingualism and signature patterns in early Roman ostraca receipts from Elephantine enables her to identify a previously unknown scribe writing in Greek as the Demotic scribe Petosorsmethis. The paper offers a concrete example of an Egyptian scribe working across languages and adapting to Greek as the language of tax-collection in the reign of Tiberius. Duttenhöfer’s appendix publishes two new bilingual receipts (OGL 838; O.Eleph. inv. 4317) and revises five other documents all written by Petosorsmethis. T.S. Richter’s study focuses on a single Coptic papyrus (P.Budge) documenting an arbitration hearing for a property dispute in Upper Egypt (646/7 ce). On the basis of the manuscript signatures, Richter argues that P.Budge is the original recension of a dossier that included transcripts, letters and witness statements. That this material is written in the same hand leads Richter, like Mari, to ask whether the scribe intervened at the level of language. On closer analysis, he finds that the scribe preserved the speaker’s idiom, recording a trove of Greek loanwords in one of the speeches. On the basis of the rhetorical profile of this speech Richter proposes that it reached the arbiters as a written submission rather than an oral argument, a finding that might cause readers to ask whether pre-written copies of speeches also served as a backup to the oral transcriptions examined by Mari.
Another pair of essays aims to bolster the methodologies for approaching scribal texts. K. Bentein’s study of the monastic Nepheros archive (fourth century ce) emphasises the advantages of examining papyri with a ‘multimodal’ framework that combines analysis of the language choice, linguistic register, document format and layout. Bentein’s concluding questions about scribes and multimodality are compelling; but one wishes that the essay had been structured around these concerns. Vierros and E. Henriksson recognise collaboration between authors and scribes as a challenge to sociolinguistic research – whose words are whose? Their essay attempts to leverage computational science and stylometry to verify authorship. Assembling a corpus of texts from the Zenon, Pathyris and Katochoi archives (third to first centuries bce), the contributors test whether two machine-learning models, clustering and classification, can recognise the authorship of texts whose authors are already known. That both models perform well in testing would seem to uphold authorial style as an immanent and legible feature of the text. Yet, when authorship truly operated as a collaborative, multi-person endeavour, the style of the scribe and that of the author may not be so easily distinguished. The contributors’ initial question, ‘What was the actual number of people behind the text we read?’ (p. 50), still haunts their results – like a ghost(writer).
The contributions of Dahlgren, C. Bruno and V.B. Fendel are far more concerned with language than with scribes. Dahlgren, examining Greek-Egyptian language contact in the Narmouthis ostraca (first to third centuries ce), asks whether non-standard usage by second-language learners results from failing to hear sounds correctly or from struggling to produce them. Bruno and Fendel describe shifts in Greek complementation patterns in early Ptolemaic papyri and in early Byzantine letters respectively. With stronger editorial intervention, one could envision versions of these essays that more explicitly connect linguistic insight to scribal praxis. To what extent, we may ask, were scribes drivers of linguistic change? Did the conditions of their work – the constant copying, correcting, reading and writing – leave a mark on language?
As they are, these three essays lay bare the volume’s broader commitments. Its authors are interested in scribes insofar as their presence helps or hinders linguistic research. Yet the linguistic phenomena so painstakingly detailed across the volume also bear another kind of reading – one where the frisson of language contact and the difficulties of language learning are themselves levers for better understanding the lives of scribes. At its best, the volume shows how words written on the page by ‘invisible hands’ also echo language as it existed in the minds of scribes. Such moments of linguistic resonance, emerging through thickets of specialisation, recommend the volume as an important, if halting, step forward in scribal research.
