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Memorization and the Transmission of Sumerian Literary CompositionsAuthor(s): Paul DelneroReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 71, No. 2 (October 2012), pp. 189-208Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/666645 .

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[JNES 71 no. 2 (2012)] 2012 by The University o Chicago. All rights reserved. 02229682012/7102001 $10.00.

189

Memorization and the Transmission ofSumerian Literary Compositions*

PaulDelnero, The Johns Hopkins University

Introduction

It is widely recognized that nearly all preserved cop-ies o Sumerian literary compositions were copied byapprentice scribes as part o their training in the Su-merian language. Reerences to the use o Sumerianliterary texts as tools or training scribes, which canbe ound in nearly every treatment o Sumerian liter-ature published to date, appear as early as the seconddecade o the twentieth century, when it had becomeclear that many o the thousands o tablets ound dur-ing the initial excavations at Nippur contained scribalexercises.1 H. Hilprecht, who had participated in theexcavation that yielded most o these tablets, had al-

* Special thanks are due to Daniel Fleming, Christian Hess,Jacob Lauinger, Eleanor Robson, Christopher Woods, Martin

Worthington, Gbor Zlyomi, and an anonymous reviewer ortheir insightul criticism o an earlier drat, which was invaluable inrevising this article.

1 To cite only two more recent examples, see Jeremy Black andGbor Zlyomi, Introduction to the Study o Sumerian, inAna-lysing Literary Sumerian: Corpus-based Approaches, ed. J. Ebelingand G. Cunningham (London, 2007), 3: The majority o such claytablets (i.e. tablets containing Sumerian literary compositions) arethe material debris o the educational process, as young Babylonianscribes learnt to speak and write Sumerian in scribal academies andtraining workshops; and Piotr Michalowski, Sumerian Literature:

An Overview, inCivilizations o the Ancient Near East, vol. 4, ed. J.Sasson (New York, 1995), 2283: As is the case with most southern

ready begun to acknowledge the existence o a tem-ple school with the announcement o a orthcoming

volume o tablets rom the Temple School o Nip-pur in 1910.2 By 1916, E. Chiera had demonstrateddecisively, on the basis o the shape and ormat othe tablets on which these texts were inscribed, thatmany o the tablets rom the Old Babylonian levels oNippur, including tablets containing lists o personal

names, thematic lexical lists, syllabaries, and gram-matical texts, were produced by scribes-in-training.3

While Chiera did not include literary compositions in

literary texts o this period, the surviving tablets represent the cur-riculum o the scribal schools.

2 Hermann Hilprecht, The Earliest Version o the BabylonianDeluge Story and the Temple Library o Nippur, The BabylonianExpedition o the University o Pennsylvania, SeriesD: Researchesand Treatises, vol. 5, pt. 1 (Philadelphia, 1910), 7. The promised

volume, Model Texts and Exercises rom the Temple School oNippur, scheduled to appear as Vol. 19, Part 1, o Series A o TheBabylonian Expedition o Pennsylvania, was never published, butsome o the copies rom the volume were recently co-publishedby Niek Veldhuis and H. Hilprecht, Model Texts and Exercisesrom the Temple School o Nippur: BE 19, Archiv r Orientor-schungen50 (2003/2004): 2849.

3 Edward Chiera, Lists o Personal Names rom the Temple Schoolo Nippur: A Syllabary o Personal Names, Publications o the Baby-lonian Section, vol. 11, pt. 1 (Philadelphia, 1916), 1617 and4148.


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190 F Journal of Near Eastern Studies

this group, it is clear rom his later writings that he as-sumed they had also been copied as scribal exercises.4

Recently, with the recognition that many o thesources or these texts were the byproducts o scribaltraining, there has been a renewed interest in the

educational context in which these documents werecopied. H. Vanstiphout identied the royal hymn APraise Poem o Lipit-Etar (Lipit-Eshtar B)5 as anelementary exercise based on the tablet ormat o thesources or this text as well as the content and struc-ture o the composition itsel.6 Many o the sourcesor Lipit-Eshtar B are written on tablets which arequite clearly exercise tablets, containing a model textcopied by pupils on the same tablets. Additionally,the text contains a sequence o basic, paradigmaticgrammatical orms that seems to have been contrivedor purely pedagogical purposes. Building on Vansti-

phouts pioneeering work, N. Veldhuis, S. Tinney, andE. Robson have been able to reconstruct the contentand sequence o the scribal curriculum at Nippur (andprobably also at Ur, Uruk, and Sippar) during the OldBabylonian Period.7 According to their reconstruc-tions, the scribal curriculum would have comprised,in broad outline, an initial stage, in which syllabaries,

4 C., or example, E. Chiera, They Wrote on Clay: The Baby-lonian Tablets Speak Today(Chicago, 1938), 172: As a source orour knowledge o the important textbooks used in those times, wehave accordingly, rst, the original temple library containing all the

classics and, then, the aulty copies o these texts made by the pupilsin the school.5 ETCSL no. 2.5.5.2. Unless otherwise indicated, all o the liter-

ary compositions cited in this study will be identied with the namesand numbers assigned to these texts by the Electronic Text Corpuso Sumerian Literature (ETCSL) as they appear on the projects

website (http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk) and in Black and Zlyomi,Introduction to the Study o Sumerian, 351412.

6 H. L. J. Vanstiphout, Lipit-Eshtars Praise in the Edubba,Journal o Cuneiorm Studies30 (1978): 3361 and H. L. J. Vansti-phout, How did they Learn Sumerian? Journal o CuneiormStudies31 (1979): 11826.

7 N. Veldhuis, Elementary Education at Nippur: The Lists oTrees and Wooden Objects(Groningen, 1997); Steve Tinney, On

the Curricular Setting o Sumerian Literature, Iraq 99 (1999):15972; Eleanor Robson, The Tablet House: A Scribal School inOld Babylonian Nippur, Revue dAssyriologie 95 (2001): 3966;and E. Robson, More than Metrology: Mathematical Educationin an Old Babylonian Scribal School, in Under one Sky: Astronomyand Mathematics in the Ancient Near East, ed. A. Imhausen andJ. Steele, Alter Orient und Altes Testament 297 (Mnster, 2002).See also Paul Delnero, Sumerian Extract Tablets and Scribal Edu-cation, Journal o Cuneiorm Studies62 (2010): 5369 and Su-merian Literary Catalogues and the Scribal Curriculum, Zeitschritr Assyriologie100 (2010): 3255.

lists, metrology, model contracts, and proverbs werelearned; an intermediate stage, consisting o elemen-tary literary compositions such as A Praise Poem oLipit-Etar (Lipit-Eshtar B) and A Praise Poem oEnlil-bani (Enlil-Bani A)8; and a nal stage, in which

much o the known corpus o Sumerian literary com-positions was copied.9

In addition to providing invaluable insight into thenature o scribal education during the Old Babylo-nian Period, the observation that copies o Sumerianliterary compositions were produced by apprenticescribes has a direct bearing on how these texts areinterpreted and understood by modern scholars. SinceSumerian literature was copied or didactic reasons,the motivation or copying each o these works wasnot to produce another perectly accurate master copyto ensure the survival o the composition in written

orm, but instead to ulll the requirements o a par-ticular exercise. While the goal in each case may havebeen to produce an accurate copy, the lower level ocompetence o student scribes would have presum-ably increased the number o errors that occurred inthe process.

Another actor that would have contributed to theoccurrence o errors was the means by which exercisetablets were compiled. The types o errors that occurin a resulting copy reect the method that was used tocompile any given text. In antiquity and throughoutthe Middle Ages, beore the invention o movable

type and the printing press, duplicate copies o textswere generally produced by expert scribes who copieddirectly rom one or more available manuscripts. Theerrors that resulted rom direct copying were typically

visual and mechanical, including dittography (writ-ing the same word twice, when it only occurs oncein an original), haplography (the omission o a wordthat occurs in direct or near sequence to an identicalor similar word), and parablepsis (the unintentionalomission o everything between one occurrence o a

word and the next occurrence o the same word). Bycontrast, the errors that occur in manuscripts copiedby dierent means are qualitatively distinct, in manyinstances, rom errors made while copying rom an-other exemplar. Unlike errors that result rom directcopying, copies produced with a printing press, or

8 ETCSL no. 2.5.8.1.9 For a more detailed list o this reconstruction o the scribal

curriculum see either Robson, More than Metrology, 331 orRobson, Tablet House: 47, table 2.


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Memorization and Transmission of Sumerian Literary Compositions F 191

example, will be identical in all their details, but willalso contain the same errors that were in the manu-script beore it went to print.

Given the extent to which the dierent methods ocopying are associated with distinct types o errors, a

similar correlation must exist between how Sumerianliterature was copied and the variants that occur in theduplicates o texts o this type. But the means by whichapprentice scribes compiled tablets is rarely consideredin explanations o the cause or signicance o textual

variation in the duplicates o Sumerian literary com-positions. One o the main reasons or this is that themore basic question o how these texts were copiedhas yet to be sufciently addressed. Even in discus-sions o the transmission o Sumerian literature or oOld Babylonian scribal education, the issue o copyingmethods is rarely considered, and the ew published

statements on the subject are requently contradictory.To cite a ew examples, C. J. Gadd wrote in hisstudy o the oldest schools: The pupils in the (OldBabylonian) scribal schools were in the habit o copy-ing or having (Sumerian literary compositions suchas The Debate between Date Palm and Tamarisk10)read out to them.11 While Gadd was not precise abouthow the scribes copied these texts, the notion that thepupils in scribal schools had compositions read outto them seems to imply copying rom dictation. .Sjberg adopted a similar position in his seminal studyo the Old Babylonian Edubba, citing selected lines

rom Sumerian literary texts about scribal education,like Schooldays12 and A Dialogue Between Two Un-named Scribes,13 as evidence: The ollowing passages(rom the aorementioned compositions about scribaleducation) show that dictation was used as a methodo instruction.14

A. L. Oppenheim and S. N. Kramer, on the otherhand, suggested that apprentice scribes copied directlyrom master copies: The student copied (literarycompositions) not only or practice purposes, but, attimes, also to reproduce the original or his masters

10 ETCSL no. 5.3.7.11 Cyril J. Gadd, Teachers and Students in the Oldest Schools(Lon-

don, 1956), 39.12 Samuel Noah Kramer, Schooldays: A Sumerian Composition

Relating to the Education o a Scribe, Journal o the AmericanOriental Society69 (1949): 199215.

13 ETCSL no. *5.4.01 (unpublished).14ke Sjberg, The Old Babylonian Eduba, in Sumerological

Studies in Honor o Thorkild Jacobsen, ed. S. J. Lieberman, Assyrio-logical Studies 20 (Chicago, 1975), 15979.

or his own use, this being the usual way o building upa collection,15 or, more explicitly, . . . literary works

were studied, copied, and redacted with zest and zeal,with care and understanding; almost all the literaryworks that have come down to us are known only

rom copies and redactions prepared in what mightbe described as the post-Sumerian edubbas.16 Finally,J. Black and his colleagues have suggested memori-zation, along with dictation, as a copying method:Examining the dierent sources or individual (lit-erary) works shows us that compositions were passedon not through the copying o earlier manuscripts butthrough dictation, repetition, and memorization.17

As illustrated by these citations, the three primarymethods o compiling a copy that were possible inantiquitycopying directly rom another textual ex-emplar, copying rom dictation, and copying rom

memoryhave all been proposed as methods em-ployed to create duplicates o Sumerian literary com-positions. Yet none o these explanations relies upona systematic consideration o the evidence. Sjbergdid cite textual reerences that might allude to thepractice o copying rom dictation, and Black and hiscolleagues called attention to errors in copies o Su-merian literary texts that appear to have resulted rommishearing and misremembering to demonstrate thatscribes copied rom both dictation and memory. Buteven in these instances, the evidence presented wasconned to a relatively small number o examples, lim-

iting the extent to which they can be representative.In the absence o a more thorough investigation, thequestion o which method or methods were used tocopy Sumerian literature remains unresolved.

In this study, the question o how Sumerian literarycompositions were copied will be reconsidered in lighto the types o variants that occur in their duplicates.To establish criteria or determining how the errors inthe sources or these compositions were introduced,laboratory research on verbatim memory by cognitivepsychologists and studies o memory errors in othertext corpora will be examined. On the basis o the cri-teria derived rom these studies, it will be argued thatnearly all o the preserved copies o Sumerian literary

15A. Leo Oppenheim,Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait o a DeadCivilization(Chicago, 1977), 243.

16 S. N. Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, andCharacter(Chicago, 1963), 169.

17 J. Black et al., The Literature o Ancient Sumer (Oxord,2004), xlviii.


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works were copied rom memory, and not by copyingrom dictation or rom other exemplars.

Memory Errors in CognitivePsychology Research

The errors that are likely to occur when copyingrom memory dier signicantly rom other typeso copying mistakes. Reproducing a text entirely onthe basis o how well it is stored in the mind, with-out being able to see or hear the text while copying,typically leads to the occurrence o errors that arecausally linked to this process. Even when a text hasbeen memorized well, it can rarely be reproducedperectly, as certain details, i not entire words andphrases, will inevitably be orgotten and inaccuratelyrecalled. Although a systematic study o the types o

mistakes that can be expected to result rom memoryerrors has not been undertaken or Sumerian texts,memory and the process by which the mind remem-bers and orgets has been investigated extensively orover a century by cognitive psychologists. The nd-ings o these studies provide a valuable rameworkor identiying memory errors in the duplicates oSumerian literary compositions.

The rst modern scientic studies o human mem-ory were carried out in the late nineteenth centuryby H. Ebbinghaus, who examined rote memorizationby testing subjects recall o lists o nonsense syllables

ater periods o learning and relearning these lists. Theresults o his experiments, which were published in1885 in a book entitled ber das Gedchtnis, demon-strated that ater twenty minutes o learning a list, sub-

jects were likely to have orgotten more than hal oits content, but that ater one month o relearning thelist each day, subjects could recall over three-quarterso it. The rate o retention observed by Ebbinghaus,

which is sometimes called the curve o orgetting,established two o the undamental attributes o hu-man memory: details are orgotten rapidly, and theability to recall material memorized by rote memori-zation improves steadily over time only ater repeatedintervals o relearning.

The observation that memory weakens over timehas inspired countless studies in cognitive psychol-ogy on how memory works. Since understanding whypeople orget is essential to determining how memoryunctions, thousands o experiments have been con-ducted that examine dierent types o orgetting. Thetitle o D. L. Schacters seminal book, The Seven Sins

o Memory, alludes to what he identies as the sevenprimary orms o orgetting.18 Schacter categorizesthe rst threetransience, absent-mindedness, andblockingas sins o omission, in contrast to the re-maining ourmisattribution, bias, suggestibility, and

persistencewhich he counts as sins o commission.Within the category o sins o omission, the mostcommon type o orgetting, transience, denotes thephenomenon observed earlier by Ebbinghaus, thatmemory or detail declines with the passing o timeand that most orgetting takes place during the earli-est stages o learning;19 absent-mindedness reers tothe ailure to recall inormation that was either neverencoded properly or was overlooked at the time o re-trieval, typically because o external distractions;20 andblocking is the so-called tip-o-the tongue phenom-enon, when a person eels that he or she is on the verge

o remembering something, but nevertheless cannotretrieve the inormation that is being sought.21 O thethree sins, transience and blocking are particularlyuseul or identiying the types o omissions likely tooccur in texts copied rom memory. Transience pre-dicts that details in a narrative will inevitably be or-gotten during recall: the number o details that areorgotten will increase in proportion to the amount otime that elapses between memorization and retrieval,and decrease in proportion to the number o timesthe text has been learned or memorized. Blocking, onthe other hand, occurs requently with proper nouns

and numbers. One explanation or why lexical itemso these two types can be difcult to recall is thatthey are typically expressed with words that bear littleor no discernible semantic or conceptual relationshipto the person, entity, or thing they denote, and arememorized more as sounds than as concepts.22 Sincesounds are more difcult to remember than wordsthat can be retrieved by association with other wordsbelonging to the same conceptual eld, proper nounsand numbers are more likely to be blocked duringrecall than words o other types. The sensation o hav-ing the word on the tip o the tongue is caused bythe eeling o certainty which arises rom rememberingthe conceptual category to which the word belongs

without being able to remember the word itsel. As

18 Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins o Memory: How the Mind For-gets and Remembers(Boston, 2001).

19 Ibid., 1340.20 Ibid., 4160.21 Ibid., 6187.22 Ibid., 62.


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an example, people will oten recall car beore re-calling the name o the car manuacturer Honda,because in contrast to car, which is a concept thatis activated on a daily basis, Honda is little morethan a meaningless and easily orgotten sound to many

English speakers.23

Blocking thereore predicts thatmore specic (and less conceptual) lexical items likethe names o people and places, as well as numbers andunits o measurement, are more likely to be recalledincorrectly than more meaningul and amiliar wordsor concepts.

One o Schacters sins o commissionmisattri-butionis another particularly common type o mem-ory error. Mistakes o misattribution are instances in

which a lexical item is recalled erroneously as anotherword that is semantically, phonologically, and/or visu-ally associated with it. Schacter identies three types o

misattribution: unconscious transerence, remem-bering a specic detail rom a diferentplace, time,or (in this case) text in place o the correct detail;24memory binding, when details or components romdierent sources are brought together as rememberedaspects o the same experience;25 and memory con-

junction errors, in which two or more separate pieceso inormation are combined into a single unit, such as

when the words spaniel and varnish are recalledas spanish.26 Each o these three errors is caused by

what cognitive psychologists call intererence. In-tererence is dened as the process by which memory

errors result rom any orm o previously acquiredknowledge intruding or interering with the recallo the inormation one is trying to remember.

This phenomenon was rst identied in a series oexperiments published in 1900 by G. E. Mller and

A. Pilzecker, who observed that subjects had muchgreater difculty remembering the content o a list

when asked to perorm another task beore recallingthe list than when the list was recalled immediatelyater it was learned.27 This eect, which Mller andPilzecker labelled retroactive inhibition, was then

23 Ibid., 6568.24 Ibid., 92.25 Ibid., 94.26 Ibid., 95.27 Georg Elias Mller and A. Pilzecker, Experimentelle Beitrge

zur Lehre vom Gedchnis, Zeitschrit r Psychologie, Ergnzungs-band 1 (1900). For a more complete survey o the earliest experi-ments on intererence see L. M. Johnson, Similarity o Meaning asa Factor in Retroactive Inhibition, Journal o General Psychology9(1933): 37789, rom which the summary presented here is largelydrawn.

shown to increase (i.e., to lead to more orgetting)when subjects were asked to perorm a similar task(such as learning another list) beore recalling theoriginal list.28 The eect increased even urther whenthe content o the later (or interpolated) list was sim-

ilar to the content o the initial list.29

The decisive breakthrough in understanding thecauses o intererence, however, only came in a 1931experiment conducted by J. A. McGeoch and W. T.McDonald.30 Having subjects memorize dierentlistsconsisting o either synonyms, antonyms, un-related adjectives, meaningless syllables, or three-placenumbersthey observed that recall was lower or thelist o synonyms than or any o the other lists, indi-cating that retroactive inhibition is the highest whenit becomes necessary to recall synonymous or seman-tically associated words. This observation was soon

elaborated upon by A. W. Melton and J. M. Irwin,who observed that inter erence can occur proactivelyas well as retroactively, when previously learned itemsinterere with the recall o subsequently learned ma-terial, including items within the same list (inter-listintrusions).31 The results o these experiments dem-onstrate that memory errors oten involve the conu-sion o one word or another word associated with itin meaning or orm, especially when the similar wordis learned beore or ater the correct word, as a resulto proactive or retroactive intererence.

Building on the groundwork established by earlier

studies, much o the more recent research on memoryhas ocused on the causes o intererence rather thanits eects. In a classic study, J. Deese observed thatcertain words are more likely to be conused with as-sociated words in recall tasks than others. Words withnumerous associates have higher associative powerthan words with ewer associates, so that a word likechair, which has high associative power, is morelikely to be incorrectly recalled as table or anothero its associates (sit, legs, seat, desk, stool,etc.), than a word like buttery, which has ewer

28 Jacqueline E. DeCamp, A Study o Retroactive Inhibition,Psychological Monographs19 (1915): 169.29 S. E. Robinson, Some Factors Determining the Degree o

Retroactive Inhibition, Psychological Monographs28 (1920): 157.30 John Alexander McGeoch and W. T. McDonald, Meaningul

Relation and Retroactive Inhibition,American Journal o Psychol-ogy43 (1931): 57988.

31Arthur Weever Melton and J. M. Irwin, The Inuence oDegree o Interpolated Learning on Retroactive Inhibition and theOvert Transer o Specic Responses,American Journal o Psychol-ogy53 (1940): 173203.


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associates with which it could be conused.32 As aconsequence, more mistakes are made recalling listso words with high associative power than are maderecalling lists o words with low associative power.

Deeses results, which were largely overlooked

when they were published, were replicated almostorty years later by Roediger and McDermott, withthe additional renement that subjects were asked torecall words in the same order in which they appearedin the original list, rather than in any order, like thesubjects in Deeses experiment.33 They ound thatitems in the middle o the list were more requentlyconused with their associates than items at the be-ginning and end o the list. Tendencies to recall thebeginnings and ends o a list or text more eectivelythan its middle are observed requently in memoryexperiments, and are known more generally as serial

position eects. The two most common serial posi-tion eects are primacy, or the more accurate recallo earlier items, and recency, the more accurate recallo later items.34

To explain the cause(s) o the results obtainedby Deese, Roediger, and McDermott (also knownas the DRM paradigm), a theoretical model calleduzzy-trace theory has been proposed.35 According tothis model, rst put orward by C. J. Brainerd andJ. Kingma,36 inormation is encoded in memory using

32 James Deese, On the Prediction o Occurrence o Particular

Verbal Intrusions in Immediate Recall,Journal o ExperimentalPsychology58 (1959): 1722.33 Henry L. Roediger and K. B. McDermott, Creating False

Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists, Journalo Experimental Psychology - Learning, Memory and Cognition 21(1995): 80314.

34 This phenomenon is also clearly observable in the patterns ovariation ound in the copies o Sumerian literary sources. In generalthere tend to be signicantly ewer variants and mistakes amongthe individual sources or the lines at the beginning o a text thantoward the middle, where the number o textual variants and errorsoten increases substantially. It may also account or why many othe extracts o the metrological tables that were memorized by ap-prentice scribes tend to cluster toward the beginning as opposed

to the middle or end o a series o tables. For a discussion o thedistribution o extract tablets containing metrological tables and theplace o such tables in the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum, seeRobson, More than Metrology, 33945.

35 Special thanks are due to Peggy Intons-Peterson or bring-ing the literature on uzzy-trace theory cited in this section to myattention.

36 Charles J. Brainerd and J. Kingma, Do Children Have toRemember to Reason? A Fuzzy-trace Theory o Transitivity Devel-opment, Developmental Review4 (1984): 31177. Further rene-ments o uzzy-trace theory include C. J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna,

two distinct processes: verbatim memory and gistmemory. As the terms suggest, verbatim memorystores the exact content o a particular stimulus, andgist memory reduces the same inormation to its gen-eral sense or gist, in a process called gist extraction.37

Verbatim and gist memory represent two ends o acontinuum o exactness, with the precise details o astimulus at one end and the general sense or uzzytraces at the other.

What distinguishes uzzy-trace theory rom othermemory models, which assume that memories are re-constructed rom a combination o verbatim and gisttraces, is the notion that the mind can choose to recallinormation using either verbatim or gist memory,depending on the nature o the task. By conceiving

verbatim and gist recall as separate processes, uzzy-trace theory provides a convincing explanation or di-

erent types o intererence, according to which wordsare conused with other associated words because themind conuses the uzzy traces, or associations, o astimulus in gist memory, with the details o the samestimulus in verbatim memory. Learning related wordsbeore or ater stimulus words strengthens the gistmemory o those words at the expense o verbatimmemory, accounting or why proactive and retroactiveintererence are requent causes o memory errors.38Furthermore, uzzy-trace theory applies not only tosemantically related words, but also to words that arephonologically associated.39 Phonological associates,

like semantic associates, are stored separately in gist

Gist is the Grist: Fuzzy-trace Theory and the New Intuitionism,Developmental Review10 (1990): 347; C. J. Brainerd and V. F.Reyna, Explaining Memory Free Reasoning, Psychological Sci-ence3 (1992): 33239; V. F. Reyna and C. J. Brainerd, Fuzzy-traceTheory: An Interim Synthesis,Learning and Individual Diferences7 (1995): 175; and C. J. Brainerd and V. F. Reyna, Fuzzy-traceTheory and Childrens False Memories, Journal o ExperimentalChild Psychology 71 (1998): 81129, among many others. For auseul overview o uzzy-trace theory and other models o memoryaccuracy, see especially Asher Koriat, M. Goldsmith, and A. Pansky,Toward a Psychology o Memory Accuracy, Annual Review

o Psychology51 (2000): 481537 and H. L. Roediger and K. B.McDermott, Distortions o Memory, in The Oxord Handbook oMemory, ed. E. Tulving and F. I. M. Craik (Oxord, 2000), 14962.

37 Brainerd and Reyna, Gist is Grist, 78.38 For a similar application o uzzy-trace theory as an explana-

tion or intererence and other types o memory errors see Jona-than W. Schooler, The Distinctions o False and Fuzzy Memories,Journal o Experimental Child Psychology71 (1998): 13043.

39 M. S. Sommers and B. P. Lewis, Who Really Lives NextDoor: Creating False Memories with Phonological Neighbors,Journal o Memory and Language40 (1999): 83108.


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memory apart rom the verbatim traces o the sameword, and are thus more likely to be conused withsimilar-sounding words than words which are phono-logically distinct.

Most research on memory errors in cognitive psy-

chology has been conducted using word and syllablelists, but many o the results apply equally to prosetexts, with a ew modications. One o the earliestexperiments testing the verbatim recall o continu-ous narratives, as opposed to lists, was carried out byF. Bartlett, who had subjects memorize and recall ashort text called War o the Ghosts.40 The mistakesmade in Bartletts experiment are the same types oerrors that occur when lists o words or syllables arerecalled. The most requent errors were omissions,

with subjects shortening the text considerably by leav-ing out content that had been orgotten as a result

o transience. Moreover, proper names and numberswere omitted with particularly high requency, a resultwhich can be attributed to blocking.41 In addition toomissions, Bartlett identied certain types o memoryerrors that seemed to be specic to recalling prosetexts, including the tendency to replace events that didnot seem logical to the readers with material that wasmore concordant with their experience, and to substi-tute amiliar expressions or more archaic language.42

The cognitive psychologist David Rubin, whostudied memory errors as a way o explaining whythe content o epics changes as a result o oral per-

ormance, has conrmed many o Bartletts results.43To test the eects o long-term memory on verbatimrecall, Rubin had subjects memorize and reproduce

well known texts like the preamble to the constitu-tion, Hamlets soliloquy, and popular Beatles songs.The results he obtained veriy that intererence is justas much a cause o alse recall with prose narrative asit is with word and syllable lists, particularly when thesource o intererence is similar to the line or passage

40 Frederic Charles Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experi-mental and Social Psychology(Cambridge, 1932).41 Bartlett, Remembering, 8182.42 Ibid., 8489.43 See, in particular, David C. Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions:

The Cognitive Psychology o Epic, Ballads, and Counting-out Rhymes(Oxord, 1995); but also D. C. Rubin, Very Long-Term Memoryor Prose and Verse,Journal o Verbal Learning and Verbal Behav-ior16 (1977): 61121; and D. C. Rubin and I. E. Hyman, Memo-rabeatlia: A Naturalistic Study o Long-term Memory, Memory andCognition18 (1990): 20514.

being recalled, or contains a word with high associa-tive requency.44

Recalling the song Rocky Raccoon, or example,subjects incorrectly substituted words like every-body and legs with the semantically associated

words most people and hands, and erroneouslyreplaced words like Dan and revival with phono-logically related words like Stan and survival.45Subjects also transposed similar words and phrasesrom dierent sections o the song as a result oproactive and retroactive intererence. For instance,subjects transposed the expression walked into orchecked into in line 8 because walked into occursin a similar context earlier in the song in line 6, andtransposed grinning a grin or into his room inline 8, because grinning a grin occurs in a similarcontext in line 18.46

Finally, Rubin observed that subjects were muchmore successul when recalling the beginning o a textthan the middle, conrming that the serial positioneect known as primacy occurs or continuous nar-ratives to the same extent as it does or lists.47 Rubinsexplanation or these types o mistakes is also compat-ible with uzzy-trace theory. To account or the errorsthat occur in the recall o prose texts, Rubin arguedthat, in the process o learning narratives, people en-code the meaning, sound, and appearance o each

word and passage, and combine inormation romall three o these encoded sources when reproducing

the text rom memory.48 Since words are rememberedas a combination o their auditory, semantic, and vi-sual properties, mistakes occur most requently whena word that is phonologically, semantically, and/orgraphically similar intereres during recall.

Memory Errors in Other Text Corpora

While research on the errors that are likely to occurwhen copying rom memory has yet to be conductedor the purpose o classiying variants in the dupli-cates o Sumerian texts, studies o this type have beencarried out or at least three other text corpora: OldEnglish poetry, Middle English romances, and the rstprinted editions o such William Shakespeare plays asRomeo and Juliet, the Merry Wives o Windsor, and

44 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, 14755.45 Rubin and Hyman, Memorabeatlia, 210.46 Ibid., 210.47 Rubin, Memory in Oral Traditions, 17688.48 Ibid., 9094.


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Hamlet. The criteria or identiying memory errorsin the copies o these texts accord completely withthe results o experiments on memory conducted bycognitive psychologists. Moreover, the eatures thathave been determined to be characteristic o memory

errors or each individual text corpus are nearly identi-cal across all three corpora, indicating that the criteriacan be generalized with equal validity or composi-tions o dierent types.

One o the earliest attempts to establish denitivecriteria or identiying memory errors in copies o lit-erary works was carried out by the Shakespeare scholarB. Shapin in 1944.49 Prior to Shapins study, an inu-ential book was published by G. I. Duthie, who ar-gued that some o the textual corruption and errors inearlier manuscripts, or quartos, o Shakespeares playHamlet were the results o mistakes made by actors

who had copied the play rom memory.50

To test thistheorywhich has become known as the memorialreconstruction hypothesisShapin memorized a playentitled Witch Huntto determine whether the errorsshe made in recall were similar to the types o mistakesound in the so-called bad quarto oHamlet. Theerrors she reported making include omissions, cona-tions, transpositions o clauses, and the anticipationo a word or line and its omission rom its rightulplace.51 Since similar mistakes occur in the badquarto, Shapin concluded that Duthies argumentor memorial reconstruction was essentially correct.

The results o Shapins study have been corroboratedby other scholars attempting to conrm or reute thememorial reconstruction hypothesis, including mostrecently by L. E. Maguire, who replicated Shapinsexperiment with a dierent memory experiment o herown.52 Beginning in 1979, the BBC lmed a series oShakespeare plays to be broadcast on television. Sincethe plays were produced under time pressure, the par-ticipating actors were given an average o six weeksto memorize and rehearse the plays beore they werelmed. Due to time and budget constraints, very littlere-lming was done to correct mistakes that had been

49 Betty Shapin, An Experiment in Memorial Reconstruction,Modern Language Review39 (1944): 917.

50 George Ian Duthie, The Bad Quarto o Hamlet (Cam-bridge, 1941).

51 Shapin, An Experiment in Memorial Reconstruction, 9.52 Laurie E. Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The Bad

Quartos and Their Contexts(Cambridge, 1996).

made by the actors during perormance, so the num-ber and types o memory errors that occurred could beaccurately determined by simply studying the broad-cast recordings.53 By comparing the directors play-text used or each play with the lmed perormances,

Maguire catalogued and analyzed all o the errors theactors made or six plays (Hamlet,Julius Caesar, TheWinters Tale,Antony and Cleopatra, Richard III, andHenry IV).54 The errors that occurred were numer-ous (55163 errors per play), but distributed more orless evenly across roles.55 The most common types oerrors observed by Maguire were:

1) Grammatical errors- including changes otense, changes o mood, alterations o singular to plu-ral and vice-versa, and changes in the orms o posses-sive pronouns.56

2) Substitutions- usually o a correct word with

a synonym (e.g., orce or strength, holy orlordly, just or good, etc.) or with a similar-sounding word (e.g., ought or ot, so bade orobeyd, and in sight or incite).57

3)Additions- typically o connective or emphaticconjunctions such as and and but, or yet andnow.58

4) Omissions- oten o conjunctions, inductions,explanations, and other small units o text, but alsomore substantial omissions o hal lines, whole lines,and entire sequences o lines.59

5) Inversions - both locally within a line (e.g.,either pluck back or push on or either push onor pluck back, we would, an i we could or wecould, an i we would, etc.), and with entire linesthat were moved erroneously rom one place in theplay to another.60

53 Ibid., 135.54 Ibid., 136.55 Ibid., 136.56 Ibid., 136.57 Ibid., 13639. Although the substitution o similar-sounding

words was not included in the discussion o errors made by actorsor the BBC recording, they are discussed in the section or auralerror in Maguires analysis o the errors that occur in the quartosor dierent Shakepeare plays (pp. 19698).

58 Ibid., 13941.59 Ibid., 14244.60 Ibid., 14445. Maguire labels these types o errors transposi-

tions, but the term inversion seems more precise to prevent con-usion with transpositions in the sense o blocks o texts transerredrom one point in the text to another as is the case with anticipationsand preservations (discussed below).


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6) Numerical errors- such as three and twentyor three and thirty, a thousand or ten thou-sand, etc.61

7) Compound errors- two or more o any o thesetypes o errors in combination, including substitu-

tion and inversion (e.g., Time as much again / Mybrother would be lld up or Time as long again/ Would be lld up, my brother), as well as addi-tion and omission (e.g., the wrongs that I have donethee or the wrongs I have done thee stir).62

All o these types o errors are caused by actorsidentied in experiments conducted by cognitive psy-chologists. Omissions are the inevitable consequenceo transience, conrmed by Ebbinghaus curve oorgetting; substitutions, grammatical errors (in

which the correct grammatical orm is substituted

with an analogous construction), and inversions arecaused by proactive and retroactive intererence, aspredicted by the DRM paradigm and uzzy-tracetheory; the orgetting o numbers is the anticipatedresult o blocking; and the addition o conjunctionsand stock phrases to convey what is perceived to bethe style o a text can be attributed to what Bartletttermed the reproduction o style.63 Furthermore,almost exactly the same types o errors identiedby Maguire have been ound in other text corporathought to have been compiled rom memory. In

A. Jabbours study o the errors in the medievalsources or the Old English text Soul and Body, orexample, he noted a prolieration o omissions, ad-ditions, inversions o word-order, and substitutionso synonyms and similar sounding words, as well asmemorial skipsrom one phrase to a similarphrase arther along.64 The same types o memoryerrors have also been observed by M. McGillivray,

who studied the mistakes that occur in manuscriptso the Middle English romances Floris and Blaunche-ore, King Horn, The Seege o Troy, and Sir Oreo.65

61 Ibid., 14546.62 Ibid., 146.63 Bartlett, Remembering, 81.64Alan Jabbour, Memorial Transmission in Old English Po-

etry, Chaucer Review3 (1969): 18487.65 Murray McGillivray, Memorization in the Transmission o the

Middle English Romances(New York, 1990).

In addition to grammatical variants,66 substitutionso similar expressions,67 omissions,68 and auditoryerrors,69 McGillivray identied another type o errorcalled transpositions, which he dened as expressionsinterchanged within the same line or between dier-

ent lines within the same text.70

Basing his denitionson a similar classication by H. R. Hoppe, who in-vestigated the memory errors in a seemingly corruptmanuscript o another Shakespeare play, Romeo andJuliet,71 and a less elaborate typology or variants inmedieval vernacular texts by J. Rychner,72 McGillivraydistinguished our subtypes o transpositions:

8a) Anticipations - the insertion o words orphrases several lines or scenes beore their properplace.73

8b) Preservations- words and lines used laterthan their proper place.74

8c) Repetitions - the replacement o words orphrases with expressions that occur earlier or later inthe same text.75

8d) Borrowings- the transerring o material roma dierent text.76

All our types o transpositions are memorial trans-er errors that involve the replacement,77 addition,78or omission79 o words and phrases as a result o con-usion with similar expressions or passages withinthe same text (or, in the case o borrowings, romanother text).80 Like substitutions, grammatical er-

rors, and inversions, transposition errors can also beexplained as having been caused by cognitive interer-ence. Anticipations are the expected result o proactiveintererence, in which encountering similar material

66 Ibid., 3637.67 Ibid., 3739.68 Ibid., 40.69 Ibid., 4041.70 Ibid., 47.71 Harry Hoppe, The Bad Quarto o Romeo and Juliet: A Bib-

liographical and Textual Study(Ithaca, 1948).72 Jean Rychner, Contribution ltude des abliaux (Geneva,

1960).73 McGillivray, Memorization, 4849.74 Ibid., 5051. McGillivray and Hoppe use the term recollec-

tion or this type o transposition, but preservation seems moreprecise.

75 Ibid., 52.76 Ibid., 5253.77 Ibid., 6367.78 Ibid., 6771.79 Ibid., 7174.80 C. McGillivray, Memorization, 63, 67, and 71.


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beore learning new material leads to alse recall, andpreservations are analogous to errors caused by ret-roactive intererence, in which material learned lateris conused with similar material earlier in the text.Intererence would also account or repetitions, which

could be caused by either proactive or retroactive in-tererence (depending on whether the incorrectly re-peated passage occurs earlier or later within the sametext), and or borrowings, which presuppose that theborrowed passage was transerred rom a previouslylearned text as a result o proactive intererence.

Because the causes o transposition errors are evi-dently rooted in memory, it is unlikely that they werecaused by other orms o textual reproduction. Mc-Gillivray considers such transer errors particularlydiagnostic:

Memorial transer, the movement o materialrom one part o a text to another part which isphysically remote, but which is liable to conu-sion with it because o similarities o situations,content, or language, is a very secure indica-tion that the entire text in which it occurs hasat some stage in its transmission been copiedrom memory.81

Memory Errors in the Sources forSumerian Literary Compositions

Nearly all o the types o memory errors that occurin other text corpora, and in particular the eightidentiied by Maguire and McGillivray describedabove, are attested in duplicates o Sumerian l iter-ary compositions. To illustrate memory errors oeach o these types, examples were selected romthe sources or a group o ten literary compositionsknown as the Decad. This group comprises the ol-lowing texts:

1) A:A praise poem o ulgi (ulgi A) = ETCSLno. 2.4.2.01

2) LiA: A praise poem o Lipit-Etar (Lipit-Etar A)= ETCSL no. 2.5.5.1

81 McGillivray, Memorization, 5 apud Linda Marie Zaerr andMary Ellen Ryder, Psycholinguistic Theory and Modern Peror-mance: Memory as a Key to Variants in Medieval Texts, Mosaic26/3 (1993): 33, who corroborated the results o McGillivraysstudy by identiying similar types o memory errors in the sourcesor another Middle English romance, entitled The Tournament oTottenham.

3) Al: The song o the hoe = ETCSL no. 5.5.44) InB: The exaltation o Inana (Inana B) = ETCSL

no. 4.07.25) EnA: Enlil in the E-kur (Enlil A) = ETCSL no.

4.05.1

6) KH: The Ke temple hymn = ETCSL no. 4.80.27) ErH: Enkis journey to Nibru = ETCSL no.1.1.4

8) IEb: Inana and Ebi = ETCSL no. 1.3.29) Nu: A hymn to Nungal (Nungal A) = ETCSL

no. 4.28.110) GH: Gilgame and Huwawa (Version A) =

ETCSL no. 1.8.1.5

These texts were selected because they are among thecompositions or which there are the most preservedduplicates, and which appear to have been copied re-quently as a group by apprentice scribes. Since these

compositions were copied extensively during the OldBabylonian Period, each o the lines in these textsis preserved in an average o teen to thirty copies,providing abundant data or distinguishing intendedorms rom erroneous variants.82 Furthermore, sincecomplete scores o all o the texts in this group couldbe consulted, it was not necessary to rely on compositetexts in selecting the examples cited.83

At the time the scores used or this study were com-piled, a total o 742 exemplars had been identied. Othese, 541 were rom Nippur, out o which nearly hal,or 204 exemplars, were rom a private house at thesite known as House F. This house, which was almostcertainly a place where scribal training was conducted,contained a representative cross section o the literarycompositions copied as part o the scribal curriculum

82 For a more detailed discussion o the use o the Decad as acorpus or studying Sumerian grammar and or urther reerencesto select treatments o the individual compositions in this groupo texts, see P. Delnero, Pre-verbal /n/: Function, Distribu-tion, and Stability, in Analysing Literary Sumerian: Corpus-basedApproaches, ed. J. Ebeling and G. Cunningham (London, 2007):11618 with notes 515, and P. Delnero, Variation in Sumerian

Literary Compositions: A Case Study based on the Decad, Ph.D. dis-sertation (Philadelphia, 2006): 2224 with notes 1727. For treat-ments o the Decad as a group o compositions and its use andsignicance in the Old Babylonian scribal curriculum see Tinney,On the Curricular Setting o Sumerian Literature; Robson, Tab-let House; Black et al., The Literature o Ancient Sumer, 299301;and Delnero, Variation in Sumerian Literary Compositions, 22147(with additional literature).

83 For these scores, see Delnero, Variation in Sumerian LiteraryCompositions, 18572473.


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throughout Mesopotamia at the time.84 Moreover, theduplicates rom House F were probably produced bya small group o scribes during a short period o timebeore the house was abandoned in the tenth year othe ruler Samsuiluna (ca. 1739 b.c.).85 To eliminate

variants that may have been the result o synchronic ordiachronic actors, only examples that occur in sourcesrom Nippur, and whenever possible, rom House F,

will be cited. All o the variants noted occur only ina single source. In addition to it being unambiguousthat these variants are incorrect on the basis o theextent to which they deviate rom the standard ormexpected in the context o the clause or passage, thelarge number o sources that contain the orm rom

which they vary is a urther indication that they aremistakes.

Since the identication o certain variants as mis-

takes is essential to the argument being made in thisstudy, some additional clarication about how mis-takes can be distinguished rom other types o variants,such as acceptable alternative writings, orthographiceconomy, and intentional grammatical alteration, isrequired. In discussing the transmission o pre-mod-ern texts that have not been mechanically reproduced,the ollowing assumption can and should be made:cultural attitudes toward reproducing a text so that acopy o the text is identical in every, or nearly everyrespect to a hypothetical Vorlage were almost certainlyless strict in antiquity than they are today, when the

technology exists or producing identical copies o amaster text. The possibility must thereore be allowedthat dierences in the way certain words or orms arespelled and grammatical constructions are renderedare not necessarily errors, but acceptable alternative

writings that would have been tolerated when concep-tions o aithul reproduction were less rigid andmore tolerant o alterations intentionally introducedby scribes. Recognizing that copies o Sumerian liter-ary compositions were rarely, i ever, intended to becompletely aithul reproductions o a single deni-tive version o the text, and that a certain degree o

variability was unquestionably permitted and indeedinevitable, the objection could be raised as to whethersome o the variants that have been identied as mis-

84 For a detailed discussion o the archaeology o House F andthe reconstruction o the scribal curriculum on the basis o the tab-lets that were ound there see Robson, Tablet House.

85 Ibid., 42.

takes are not mistakes at all, but ree alterations re-sulting rom a more general tolerance or variability.

To address this issue, it is necessary to determinethe extent to which variability was tolerated in thecopying o Sumerian literary works and to establish

criteria or distinguishing between ree variants andscribal errors. Although this is not the place or a de-tailed presentation o the evidence, there are two goodreasons or assuming that the content o the com-positions copied during the Old Babylonian Period

was relatively xed (at least in the versions that weretaught to apprentice scribes) and that constraints werenormally placed on the amount o variability tolerated(again in the context o scribal training).

First and more briey, the content o the individualduplicates or compositions that survive in numerouscopies rom the same period is more oten identical

than it is dierent. For the ten compositions in theDecad, which in some instances have as many as thirtycopies per line, an average o 9095 percent o thecontent o all o the duplicates or the line is com-pletely identical in every orthographic and grammat-ical detail, and when variation occurs at all, there aretypically ewer than ve to ten textual variants or thatline. The consistency with which multiple sources doin act have the same content thereore suggests a cer-tain degree o stability in the content o the version(s)that served as model texts in dierent scribal centersat the time the known copies o these compositions

were compiled.Secondly, with the exception o a small number

o duplicates which contain a substantial number ovariants and whose content diers signicantly inmany other respects rom other sources, there are ewsources which consistentlycontain variant spellings andgrammatical interpretations o particular words andorms. When a source contains an orthographic orgrammatical variant that is not attested in any othersource, there are rarely additional variants o a sim-ilar type in the same source. This is contrary to what

would be expected i there was a large amount o toler-ance or rendering orms reely. I scribes had beenpermitted to choose reely between two or more ac-ceptable renderings o a orm, such as the omission ogrammatical elements that could have been deducedrom the context, or the use o dierent cuneiormsigns to render the same word, tendencies to makesuch choices should be observable throughout indi-

vidual sources and not merely in isolated instances


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within a single source. I variation had been moregenerally tolerated, why would a scribe choose to ren-der a orm dierently only once when it would havebeen permissible to do so with each and every similarorm? Since ree variants seem to be the exception

and not the rule, it is more likely that a variant thatoccurs only once within the same source and amongthe other preserved sources or the line is an error andnot an intentional alternate writing.

These two observations have important implica-tions or how variation in copies o Sumerian liter-ary compositions is interpreted more generally. Therst implies that something like a standard text wasused as a model or many o the surviving duplicates,allowing or minor dierences in orthography andgrammar among the dierent versions o this stan-dard text that served as models in dierent places.

The second implies that scribes generally did notpermit themselves a signicant amount o exibilityin the rendering o the words and orms in the com-positions they copiedwith minor exceptions, suchas the use o nearly identical graphemes (gi or gi4,uru or urua, mu2 or mu3, etc.) and the omis-sion o determinatives (such as na4with za-gin3, andg i with al) and phonetic complements (such as ulu3ollowed bylu).

To summarize, then, what types o variants havebeen identied as mistakes: it is notbeing assumed thatevery textual variant, isolated or otherwise, is an er-

ror, since variants o other types, including synchronicvariants, diachronic variants, idiosyncratic variants,variants that are the result o source relationship, andree variants, are all attested in duplicates o Su-merian literary compositions. Instead, it is only be-ing claimed that scribal errors do occur and that it is(sometimes) possible to distinguish such errors rom

variants o other types. Thus, or the purposes o thisstudy, a variant has only been classied as an error iit meets allo the ollowing conditions:

1) the variant only occurs in one o the preserved

sources or the line;2) the source in which the variant occurs does notcontain multiple variants o the same type;

3) variants o the same type are rare in Sumerianliterary sources; and

4) whenever distinguishable, the orm is overtly in-correct and diers substantially rom the orm thatoccurs in the other preserved sources.

In classiying memory errors, it is useul to makea distinction between conscious and unconsciousmistakes. As shown above, the human mind, by itsnature, is only able to store inormation temporarily,and is thus subject to a continual process o decay.

As a consequence, mistakes made while copying rommemory oten result rom the inability to recall spe-cic details. In light o this, it is very likely that there

were instances in which the scribes who producedthese sources could not remember all o the details othe composition they were copying, and ater unsuc-cessully attempting to remember more clearly, eitherguessed and wrote something they thought could havebeen correct, or simply omitted what had been orgot-ten entirely. Since the acts o intentionally omitting,adding, or substituting occur consciously, mistakes othis type can be considered conscious memory errors.

Variants involving conspicuous omissions, substitu-tions, or additions can be identied as mistakes thatresulted in this manner. Examples o these types oerrors rom the Decad include those treated below.

Conscious Memory Errors

Omissions

(1) IEb14086: ba-ti (3 N-T 728) or ba-an-i-in-ti (4,4)87

86All o the examples cited in this study ollow the line number-ing o the scores o the Decad in Delnero, Variation in SumerianLiterary Compositions, 18572473. Since, in this system, only linesthat occur in the majority o extant sources were numbered with

whole numbers, and lines that occur in less than hal o the pre-served sources were given lettered numbers (e.g., 48a, 56b, etc.),the line numbers do not always correspond exactly to the line num-berings or these compositions in the ETCSL corpus. For the equiv-alences o the line numbers used in this study and the correspondingETCSL numbers, see Delnero, Pre-verbal /n/, 11920 n. 15 andDelnero, Sumerian Extract Tablets, 54041 n. 33.

87 The rst orm cited in each example is a variant orm thatonly occurs in one o the preserved sources or the line in which itis attested. The museum number o the source in which this variant

occurs is listed in parentheses directly ater the citation o the vari-ant orm. The orm ollowing this citation is the orm that is oundin the majority o preserved sources or the same line. This orm isollowed by two numbers in parentheses. The rst number reersto the total number o sources that contain this non-variant orm,and the second number (ater the comma) reers to the numbero sources rom this total which are rom Nippur. So, or example,(11,7) indicates that there are a total number o eleven sources withthe non-variant orm, and out o these eleven, seven sources are


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(2) A40: gub-ba me-en omitted (3 N-T 927,525) (11,7)(3) InB69: ki bi2-g ar (3 N-T 721) or ki-si3-gabi2-ib-g ar (19,13)

Substitutions

(4) EnA 45: uri5(E.AB) ru2-a uri2(E.UNUG)ki(3 N-T 507) or ki uri3(E) ru2-auri3(E) (9,6)(5) Nu33: ku2nu-til-legal (CBS 3424b) orpe10 gal (6,6)(6) KH 112: EN.PAP-e ki am3-ma-MU3-lean-ma-MU3-e (UM 29-13-422) or enkum-e-ne KAxLI ki am3-ma-g al2-le-e (11,6)

Additions

(7) EnA125: nu-mu-ni-ib2-ra-ra (CBS 10475)

or nu-ra-ra (3,2)(8) KH 12: dub-ba-am3 mu-un-g a2-g a2 (N3534+N 3530) or dub-ba g a2-g a2 (6,3)

Unconscious Memory Errors

In addition to these types o errors, some o the mis-takes that are ound in the copies o the compositionsin the Decad appear to have been committed withoutimmediate or direct awareness that they had or couldhave been made. These types o errors can be classi-ed as unconscious memory errors. While memory

errors deemed to be conscious can be explained asinstances in which the scribe actively tried, but ailed,to remember the content o the text, these mistakesseem to have taken place passively, when the scribe waseither not aware o having alsely recalled something,or was not concentrating ully on the task at hand,and in a moment o distraction unintentionally omit-ted, added, or replaced a correct sign or lexeme withanother that was not correct.

Another set o unconscious mistakes consists o theinversion o the order o specic elements or lexemes,and the transerence o writings or orms that occurin a similar context to another where they are incor-rect. These types o errors, which occur requently

rom Nippur. All o the variants cited occur only in sources romNippur and are unique to the sources in which they are attested.Sources that are rom or near House F at Nippur carry 3 N-Tnumbers. All o the other museum numbers (CBS, UM, and N)reer to tablets that are rom unknown ndspots at Nippur.

in experiments testing verbatim memory, and arealso commonly attested in copies that were producedrom memory o Old English compositions (e.g., theAnglo-Saxon Chronicle, or Middle English romancessuch as Sir Oreoand the Seege o Troy) are attributed

to what cognitive psychologists term proactive orretroactive intererence, and are clearly diagnostic omemory errors; examples include inversions, anticipa-tions, and preservations.

Inversions

(9) ErH86: ni2-bi nam-KU. . . ni2-bi nam-du8(3 N-T 791) or ni2-bi nam-du8 . . . ni2-binam-KU (9,3)(10) CBS 8533: (mu-ni-in-)si3or (mu-ni-in-)sig7(9,5) in EnA96 and sig7-ga or si3-ga (2,1)in EnA157

Anticipations (ant.)

(11) GH88: gir3-e3(3 N-T 465) or gir3 (7,5)in ant. oe3 in kur-e3and uru

ki-e3(12) EnA78: (an-ne2) us2-sa(CBS 14152) or(an-ne2) im-us2(10,8) in ant. o(an-ne2) us2-sa(7,6) in EnA144(13) A84: (an-ne2) aga zi ma(sag -g a2. . .gi-en) (UM 29-16-198+N 1519+N 1572,collective source with Aand LiA) or (an-ne2aga) ku3-ge (sag -g a2. . . gi-en) (7,3) in ant. o(an-ne2 aga) zi ma (sag -g a2. . . gi-en) (11,6)

in LiA24Preservations (pres.)

(14) A 72: i3(NI)-e3-g a2-g a2[-de3] (3 N-T826) or i3-g a2-g a2(-de3) (10,4) pres. o(e2-a-)ni-e3(15) InB22: nig 2-me-lam2(-)g ar (3 N-T 302)or nig 2-me(-)g ar (9,6) pres. o (ni2) me-lam2(13,9) in InB21(16) LiA24: (an-ne2. . . sag -g a2) e2-em-mi-in-gi-en (UM 2913615) or (an-ne2. . . sag -g a2) mu-ni-in-gi-en (11,7) pres. o(an-ne2. . .sag -g a2) e2-em-mi-in-gi-en (5,3) in A84

Two o these examples, line 84 oAand line 24 oLiA, are o particular interest. Although cases in whichorms are erroneously transerred rom one part o atext to another are requently inuenced by similarorms that occur later or earlier in the same line (orin a dierent line in the same composition), these


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two examples involve the conusion o orms romdierent compositions. From catch-lines connectingAand LiA, and rom collective tablets containingboth o these texts, it is known that the two composi-tions were sometimes copied in sequence.88 Line 84

oAand line 24 oLiAare identical in all but twodetails. In A, aga crown is qualied with ku3-ge,pure, instead ozi mah true majestic, and the verbalchain preceding the verb gi-en, to establish, is he2-em-mi-in- instead omu-ni-in-. As shown in example13, however, one source or A line 84 has zi mahinstead oku3-ge ater aga, anticipating the orm inLiAline 24; and in example 16, one o the sources hasthe verbal chain he2-em-mi-in- instead omu-ni-in-,preserving the verbal orm rom Aline 84. Both othese variants are instances o the memory errors Mc-Gillivray identied as borrowings, in which similar

material is erroneously transerred rom a dierenttext; these are clearly indications that the sources withthese mistakes were copied rom memory.

Visualizing Errors

Other types o mistakes that could have occurred whilecopying rom memory include visualizing errors,89

88 For lists o the sources connecting Aand LiA see Tinney,On the Curricular Setting o Sumerian Literature, 16970; Del-nero, Variation in Sumerian Literary Compositions, 3034; andDelnero, Sumerian Literary Catalogues, 33 n. 4 and 3435 withn. 7.

89 To avoid conusion with visual errors that are caused by see-ing the content o the source text incorrectly while copying di-rectly rom another written exemplar, the term visualizing is usedthroughout this study to reer to memory errors that are triggeredby a visual aspect o the content o a text as it is being remembered.

As described in the section above entitled Memory Errors in Cog-nitive Psychology Research, memory has both a visual and a mne-monic (phonological) component, and each o these two aspectso a stimulus are requently combined during the act o recall. Justas a particular melody is recalled by hearing in the mind how itsounds, visual stimuli, such as landscapes, are recalled by seeingin the mind how they look. In neither case, however, does see-ing or hearing take place in remembering in the same way asit occurs when actually seeing or hearing by direct perception. Inthe case o words and orms, which have both a visual and an auralcomponent (the way they look when they are written and the waythey sound when they are pronounced), both aspects are combined

when the word is remembered. Although words (and other stimuli)are experienced dierently in the mind than they are experienceddirectly through the senses, they can nonetheless be visually (andphonologically) conused with similar looking (or sounding) wordsin much the same way as they can when they are seen (or heard)directly. For this reason some o the same types o visual andphonological errors can occur while copying rom memory as

such as the conusion o lexemes or signs that are vi-sually similar, or the misreading o a sign with a valuethat is incorrect in a way aecting the rendering o anentire orm. Examples o such errors include:

Resemblance Errors

(17) Nu78: a2-ag 2-g a2command (3 N-T 675)or a2-g a2in my arm (6,6)(18) InB 1: (nin me) du10-ga (UM 29-15-422+CBS 7847) or (nin-me) ar2-ra (12,8)

Division Errors

(19) ErH 24: im-ma-ti-a (HS 1447) orni2(IM) u-ti-a (7,4)(20) Al36: g ialmu2-mu2 (3 N-T 919,463) oral-mu2-mu2 (14,8)

Phonetic Errors

Phonetic errors (e.g., the conusion o signs with iden-tical or similar phonological readings), the phonetic

writing o multi-sign logograms or substantives, andthe phonetic combination o two orms into a singleorm (also known as sandhi writings) are other er-rors o this type.

Homophonous Signs

(21) A 40: ne(-ba) (3 N-T 927,525) orne

3(-ba) (8,7)

(22) IEb120: (gurun im-)la(3 N-T 577+3 N-T440) or (gurun im-)la2(7,6)

Syllabic Writings

(23) A73: (u-)ni-gin (3 N-T 826) or (u-mu)-nig in2(7,2)(24) InB 118: gi-ri2-na (3 N-T 469) or gi-rin-na (14,9)(25) InB 79: (munus-bi) in-ga-am3-ma (3N-T 781) or (munus-bi)in-ga-ma (7,3)

Sandhi Writings

(26) IEb 145: a2-tar-ri-a-ta (CBS 4586) ora2-ta ri-a-ta (10,8)(27) Nu 1: ug 3-gir 3-e3 (CBS 3424b) orug 3(UN) erim2(NE.RU)-e3 (7,5)

when copying directly rom another source. Even though the errorsare qualitatively identical, their underlying causes are completelydierent and should be distinguished when evaluating how mistakes

were caused.


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Mechanical Errors

The last group o variants relevant to this discussioncomprises mechanical errors. These include dittogra-phy, haplography, metathesis, and parablepsis, as wellas simple omissions, additions, or transpositions o

single signs or lexemes. Although mechanical errorso these types are more amiliar to the text criticism obiblical and classical manuscripts as mistakes that canoccur in sources copied directly rom another exem-plar, their requent occurrence in sources which alsocontain variants that are more diagnostic o memoryerrors (e.g., conspicuous omissions, anticipations, orpreservations) demonstrates that they could have alsooccurred during copying rom memory.

One example o a source that contains both me-chanical and memory errors is 3 N-T 728, a our-column tablet rom House F containing the entire

composition oIEb. This source, which is in the Ori-ental Institute in Chicago, contains the writing rin-gior gi-rin, a mechanical error involving the reversalo two signs, called metathesis, requently attested insources that were copied visually. The presence o nu-merous conspicuous omissions, like the writings ba-tior ba-an-i-in-ti, mu-si-le or mu-un-si-il-le, theomission o the orm an-ki-a, and the entire verbalchain beore the verb gur5-gu2, however, show clearlythat this source was copied rom memory, and that thereversal o the signs gi and rin must also have been theresult o a memory error. The same holds true or er-rors o dittography and haplography, which are com-mon in sources copied directly rom another exemplar,but are also attested in sources or compositions thatcontain diagnostic memory errors. Examples o me-chanical errors include:

Dittography

(28) ErH64: nundum-nundum (3 N-T 532)or nundum bur2-re (12,7)(29) GH 130: dlugal-ban3-ban3-da (3 N-T777+3 N-T 778) or dlugal-ban3-da (11,7)

Haplography

(30) A73: danna (3 N-T 826) orkaskal danna(KASKAL.BU) (12,6)(31) EnA 68: dur-an-ki (. . . tag) (HS1576) or dur-an-ki ki (. . . tag) (6,4)

Metathesis

(32) IEb55: rin-gi(3 N-T 728) or gi-rin (4,2)

(33) InB84: an-na(-ku2-u3-de3-en) (UM 29-15-422+CBS 7847) or na-an(-ku2-u3-de3-en)(12,9)

Parablepsis

(34) A75: nibruki

-ma (3 N-T 826) ornibruki uri5(E.AB)ki-ma (12,5)

(35) IEb83: e11 da-ga (3 N-T 577+3N-T 440) or e11-da-gin7 da-ga (7,7)

Omissions

(36) InB 115: da--na (3 N-T 721) orda-nun-na (12,7)(37) A39: a-ma-ab- (3 N-T 927, 525)or a-ma-ab-du11(7,3)

Additions

(38) InB70: u4-di-de3 ba-te (3 N-T 917, 393)or u4-de3 ba-te(-en) (15,8)(39) GH129: (u ki-a) li-bi2-in-um2(3 N-T777+3 N-T 778) or (u ki-a) bi2-in-um2 (5,4)

Substitutions

(40) InB 41: (dumu gal) dsuen-ra (CBS12594) or (dumu gal) dsuen-na (9,3) (genitivalconstruction; no dative)(41) KH 116: (su3-sa4) mi-ni-gar (3 N-T478) or (su3-sa4) mi-ni-ib-za (8,3)

The Evidence for Memory Errorsin Individual Sources

The strongest evidence that Sumerian literary compo-sitions were oten copied rom memory is the occur-rence o numerous memory errors o more than onetype within individual sources. While nearly all o themost common types o memory errors that occur inother text corpora and in experiments conducted bycognitive psychologists are also attested in the copieso Sumerian literary works, this in itsel is not sufcient

proo that the copies o these texts were necessarilycopied rom memory. As noted above, some classeso memory errors also occur when duplicates are pro-duced by a dierent means, such as copying rom dic-tation or copying directly rom another exemplar. Thisis especially evident with phonetic errors which are justas likely to result rom scribes mishearing a word ororm being recited to them as it is when they are recall-ing compositions rom memory, or rom visual errorscaused by scribes visually conusing graphically similar


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signs when copying texts directly rom other tablets.

Conversely, many o the mechanical errors (e.g., dit-

tography, haplography, metathesis, and parablepsis)

are errors typically associated with direct copying.

There are, however, some types o mistakes more

diagnostic o memory errors than others. McGilli-vrays observation that memorial transer errors are

the most reliable indication that a source was copied

rom memory is almost certainly correct. It is dicult

to envision that all o the orms o memorial trans-

er together, such as anticipations, preservations, and

borrowings, were caused by any other means than

by copying rom memory. A scribe copying directly

rom dictation or rom another exemplar would have

been more likely to conuse a word or orm with a

word or orm that was similar to one he or she had

just seen or heard than to substitute it or one that

occurred in a similar context earlier or later in the sametext. Additionally, omissions o entire words, phrases,

and even lines are less likely to have occurred i the

scribe had access to written or aural duplicates o the

composition than i he or she had to rely entirely on

memory to reconstruct the content o the text. The

same holds true o conspicuous additions, which are

dicult to explain as mistakes o the eye or ear that

occurred immediately ater seeing or hearing the text.

Even more diagnostic o copying rom memory

than the extento such errors, however, is the occur-

rence o large numbers o dierent types o memory

errors within a single source. Unless a scribe is particu-larly careless and unskilled, the number o errors in

a source copied directly rom another written dupli-

cate is generally small. Even the most attentive scribe

would occasionally omit a word or orm, or conuse

graphically similar orms in the moment between

looking at a source text and copying what has just

been seen onto another tablet or manuscript. But it is

rarer that a competent scribe would make numerous

minor and major mistakes when copying rom a clean

and clearly written duplicate than he or she would

rom memory, since the scribe could compare the new

copy with the other source to correct or avoid making

mistakes. For dierent reasons, sources copied rom

dictation by inexperienced or careless scribes who did

not know or understand the texts are more likely to

contain numerous phonetic errors than errors o the

types that occur primarily in duplicates copied visu-

ally or rom memory. As a result, i a source contains

numerouserrors odiferenttypesincluding diag-

nostic memory errors, memorial transer errors and

signifcant omissionsin addition tophonetic errors,

visualizing errors, and/or other mistakes that can

also occur in sources copied rom dictation or rom

another exemplar, the probability is higher that the

source was copied rom memory.

One o the many examples o a source with a dis-tribution o errors corresponding to the number and

types o mistakes expected in a duplicate copied rom

memory is 3 N-T 577 + 3 N-T 440 (= NI7

). The text is

a well-preserved our-column tablet rom House F at

Nippur, which originally contained the entire compo-

sition oIEb. There are over seventy omissions in this

source. In more than hal o these instances, a single

sign representing one or more grammatical elements

is omitted. These include:

the omission o (-)a(-) in the orms ma-za or

ma-a-za (line 11), te-me-en or te-a-me-en (lines

2931), u or u-a (line 54), an-ki or an-ki-a

(lines 66 and 88), a2-ta-ri-ta or a

2-ta-ri-a-ta (line

145), and e3-za or e

3-a-za (line 12);

the omission o -(C)e in the orms kur or kur-re

(lines 2930), ebiki or ebiki-e (line 140), ebiki

or ebiki-ke4 (line 31), and gaz or gaz-e (line

73); and

the omission o other elements in the orms ga-mi-

or ga-am3-mi- (lines 36 and 94), an-na or an-

na-ka (line 74), an-na-e3

or an-na-ka-e3

(line

85), u6-di or u

6-di-de

3(line 121), gid

2-da or

gid2-da-bi (line 84), a

2-ma or a

2-ma-za (line

161), and kur-ku or na-kur-ku (line 165).

Furthermore, there are twenty-one verbal orms

in which the pre-verbal elements /b/ and /n/ were

omitted.90 In addition to the omission o grammat-

ical elements, however, there are also more signifcant

omissions, including:

the semantic omissions nu-za or nu-e-ga(-za)

(line 9), g iBU or g imu-bu-um-gin7

(line 70), na4

or na4-su (line 143), a

3-tur

3or mu a

3-tur

3

(line 145), and the omission o g i-an-dul3

(line

122); the omission o two or more elements in the orms

ga-zu or ga-am3-mi-ib-zu (line 35), e

2-em-um

2

or e2-em-mi-in-um

2(line 78), ga-bad or ga-

an-i(-in)-bad (line 81), ki-dar-ba or ki-in-dar-

90 The element /b/ was omitted in the verbal orms in lines 90,

95, 96, and 98; and /n/ was omitted in lines 6, 65, 79, 80, 82,

83, 84 (twice), 107, 108, 122, 141, 148, 149, 167, 171, and 174.


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ra-gin7 (line 82), and sig3 or sig3-ga-ke4 (line164); and

the omission o lines 27, 38, 104, 106, 175, and176 entirely.

While it is possible that in some cases (such as the

omission o the pre-verbal elements /n/ and /b/ andnominal endings -a and -Ce) the omissions wereintentional because the presence o the omitted ele-ments could be easily inerred, the number and natureo omissions, many o which are substantial, suggestthat they are the result o memory errors.

Another indication that most o the omissionswithin source NI7 were the result o memory errorsis the occurrence o large numbers o other types omistakes. Grammatical variants such as:

kur-re or kur-ra (line 84), im-da-an-ri or im-

da-ri (line 115), g in-a-zu or g in-a-za (line 13)and mu-de2-e or im-ma-de2-e (line 151);

and phonetic writings such as:

kur-e or kur-re (lines 6 and 149), e-en orKI.E.NE.DI.dMU3 (line 97), us2-a or us2-sa (line 103), kin-g a2 or kin ga- (line 105),I.DU or I.DU8 (line 74), -du-be2 or -dub2-be2 (line 82), and im-la or im-la2 (line 120)

all suggest that the scribe who copied this source haddifculties understanding the grammar and orthog-

raphy o the composition, and as a consequence wasunable to memorize the composition properly. Thescribes inability to learn the content o the text is alsoclear rom the semantic errors gal-zu or dumu-gal(line 22), im-si or im-sa2 (line 121), and ub2-TA?-gin7-EN or ub2-dar AK(line 3), and the mechanicalmemory errors an nig in2-na-g u10-ne or nig in2-na-g u10-ne in line 26, caused byan being erroneouslycarried over rom the beginning o the preceding line,and e11 da-ga or e11-da-gin7 da-ga in line 83, wherethe scribe omitted all o the signs between the twooccurrences oda (parablepsis).

Since source NI7 is rom House F at Nippur, andthe literary sources rom this house generally containew substantial mistakes, it is unlikely that variantsthat occur in this source are synchronic or diachronic.Moreover, the quantity and nature o the variants thatoccur within the duplicate are consistent with thetypes o errors made by less advanced or experiencedscribes. It is thereore very likely that the omissionsand other erroneous writings in this source were the

result o mistakes made by a scribe who had learnedthe content o the composition poorly.

Another example o duplicates o Sumerian literarycompositions with a similar distribution o variationis a group o extract sources rom Ur containing con-

nected sections oIEb. Sources Ur1, Ur2, Ur5, and Ur7are all Type III tablets, which are similar in ormatand contain extracts o approximately the same lengthrom dierent sections o the text.91 The tablets, whichare relatively small, landscape-shaped tablets with alonger width than length, each contain between thirtyand thirty-our lines and probably belong to a series osources with dierent sections o the entire composi-tion. Since all our sources contain nearly the samenumber o lines and Ur1 (which contains the rstthirty-our lines o the text) ends with the same line

with which Ur2 (which contains lines 34 to 65) begins,

there must have been two additional tablets betweenUr5 (which has lines 95 to 119) and Ur7 (which hasthe last thirty-two lines, lines 150181) containinglines 65 to 95 and 119 to 150. It is likely that thisgroup o sources was copied during the same periodo time by the same scribe. Like the series o tabletscontaining IEb, many o the literary sources rom Urare also groups o Type III extract tablets that hadoriginally connected sections o entire compositions.92Since most o the Type III sources rom Ur with a se-cure provenience come rom a private house known asNo. 1 Broad Street, and since some o these tablets

have colophons indicating that they were copied byDamqi-iliu, it is not unlikely that the group o sources

with IEbwas also written by this scribe.Each o the sources in this group also contain nu-

merous phonetic variants, including the writings

me or me3, ur5 or ur3, and du-du or du7-du7inlines 3, 48, and 68 o Ur1;

gu3 or gu2 in lines 45 and 49 o Ur2; -su or the verb -su3 (Ur2 line 47 and Ur5 line

106); and a2-nig in or a-nig in (Ur2 line 46 and Ur5 line 105).

91 Ur1 = UET6/1: 12; Ur2 = UET6/1: 13; Ur5 = UET6/1:15; and Ur7 = UET6/1: 17.

92 Examples include three tablets containing extracts o the com-position Ewe and Wheat = ETCSL no. 5.3.2 (UET6/1: 33, 34;and 35), and additional groups o sources or The Ur Lament= ETCSL no. 2.2.2 (UET 6/2: 136, 137, U16900N, 138, and139), The Lamentation over the Destruction o Sumer and Ur =ETCSL no. 2.2.3 (UET6/2: 124, 128, 129, 131, 132, and 133),and Bird and Fish = ETCSL no. 5.3.5 (UET6/1: 38 and UET6/1, 40 + UET6/3, 617).


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But in addition to these phonetic writings, there arealso a large number o grammatical variants, including

mud-bi or mud- and an-ne2 or an-na in lines2 and 13 o Ur1;

ga-ba-ni-ib2-si-sa2 or ga-ba-ab-sa2 and mu-ni-in-

gub or bi2-in-gub in lines 39 and 59 o Ur2; ga-ba-i-in-gub or ga-ba-i-ib-gub and ebi2-bi

or ebi2-gin7in lines 9695 and 100 o Ur5; and mu-un-na-de2-e or im-ma-de2-e and nu-mu-un-

ra-ab-ur3-ra-zu-e3 or nu-ur3-ra-zu-e3 in lines151 and 157 o Ur7.

These variants are unlikely to have resulted rom mis-takes made while copying rom dictation. Since thereare also numerous omissions in all o the sources inthis group, including

ga-ba-su or ga-ba-ni-ib-su3

and e-ka or e-er-ka-an in lines 47 and 54 o Ur2;

kur or kur-re in lines 112 and 113 o Ur5; and mir or mir-g u10in line 169 o Ur7

it is more probable that these duplicates were copiedrom memory, and that the phonetic variants werecaused by a scribe who had difculties rememberingthe orthography o the composition, incorrectly spell-ing certain orms with phonologically similar or iden-tical writings o the correct orms. The occurrence omemorial transer errors such as

na-ma-ra-an-te-a-gin7 or na-ma-ab-te-a-gin7 inline 3334 o Ur1, resulting rom the preservationo the inx -ra- in the verbal chain na-ma-ra-ab-AK-gin7 in line 32, and

the orm mu-un-na-an-ab-be 2 or mu-na-ab-be2in line 60 o Ur2, resulting rom the preservation othe inx -an- o the verbal orm mu-un-na-an-gubpreceding it in the same line

are urther evidence that this group o sources wascopied rom memory.

The pattern o variants most directly characteris-

tic o sources copied rom memory is not connedto the sources described in this section. Nearly allo the duplicates or the compositions in the Decad,

whenever they are sufciently preserved to contain arepresentative number o variants, have a distributiono variation that is consistent with the pattern mostclosely associated with sources copied rom memory.

O the more than seven hundred sources or thisgroup o texts, ewer than ten apparent exceptions

could be identied. One o these sources is NBC 7799(= X3), an almost perectly preserved our-columntablet o unknown provenience containing the en-tire composition oKH. Thirty o the variants in thissource (approximately one third) are phonetic writ-

ings.93

Moreover, in addition to the phonetic variants,over hal o the remaining variants in the source areomissions.94 The quantity o syllabic writings, together

with the absence o numerous occurrences o the typeso grammatical and semantic mistakes characteristic osources copied rom memory, may indicate that X3 orKH, among all the duplicates or the compositions inthe Decad, is one o the ew examples copied romdictation. Additionally, CBS 4586 + Ni 4199 (= NI4),a our-column source or IEb rom the early seasonso excavation at Nippur, contains a similar distributiono phonetic writings, and could also have been cop-

ied rom dictation. Finally, there is evidence that AO9067 (= X3) and AO 6714 (= X4), two extract sourceso unknown provenience or ErH, were copied romanother exemplar, and not rom dictation or memory.

There are at least two signicant indications thatthe two sources are directly related, and may even havebeen produced by the same scribe. One indication isthat X3, which contains lines 182 o the composition,ends with the same line as X4, which contains exactlyhal the number o lines as this source (lines 4182).The other indication that the sources are related is thatthe lines which overlap in X3 and X4 share 26 variants,

21 o which are unique to these two sources. Theseinclude the consistent writing oden-ki-ka in place oden-ki-ke4(in lines 58, 66, and 70), the semantic vari-ant ni2 ma or i7 ma (in line 59), the grammatical

variant nam-ma-gub or am3-ma-gub (line 78), the

93 These include the syllabic writings sig7-a or sig7-ga (l. 85),du3-du3 or du7-du7 (l. 60), du3 or du10 (ll. 117118), de2 or de6(l. 107), tug2-ba or tug2-ba13(ME) (l. 108), an-e or an-ne2 (l. 37),and g ial-g ar-sur-ra or g ial-g ar-sur9-ra (l. 116); the phonetically

written logograms and diri-compounds a-ra-ta or arattaki (lines1314) and a-lim or alim(ANE) (1. 46); and the sandhi writingsmen-na-da or men an-da (l. 66), a3-gi16 or a3 ki (l. 76), tu-da-

KIN or tu A.KIN (l. 110), i-in-ga-nu-tu and i-in-ga-nu-u3-tuor i-in-ga-an-u3-tu (ll. 19, 54, 70, and 122), and ug 3-g al2 orug 3(UN) gal (l. 92).

94 The omissions include the orms ur-sag -ur-e-ne or ur-sag -ur-sag -e-ne (l.59), un- or mu-un- (l. 60), ama-la or ama gal-la(l. 77), nam or na-nam (l. 52), im?-il2-il2 or mi-ni-ib-il2-il2(-i)(l. 4), du10 or e2 du10 (l. 23),

den-lil2 orden-lil2-le (l. 37), du7-du7

or du7-du7-dam (l. 61), uumgal or uumgal-am3 (l. 76), ensi2or ensi2-ke4 (l. 78), an-da-an-ti or am3-da-an-ti (l. 80), su3 orsu3-ud (l. 74), and ka or ka-a (ll. 119120).


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omission mu-da-g al2 or mu-un-da-g al2 (line 80),and the omission o lines 49 and 54.95 Since bothX3 and X4 or ErH share a relatively large numbero variants, many o which are unique to these twosources, but contain very ew variants that occur in

one o the two sources but not the other, and veryew conspicuous errors o the type typically ound induplicates copied rom memory, they were probablycopied rom another exemplar which contained these

variant orms.The presence o possible exceptions does not de-

tract, however, rom the amount and nature o theevidence demonstrating that most o the preservedsources or Sumerian literary compositions were cop-ied rom memory. The exceptions are just thatex-ceptionsand since all but one o these sources are

without clear provenience, and may have been written

at a later date, it is possible that these were copied at aplace and time in which scribes were not being trainedto reproduce the compositions they were learningrom memory.

Del Nero j Nes Memorization

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