Scribe

A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing.

The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as secretarial and administrative duties such as the taking of dictation and keeping of business, judicial, and historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities.

The profession of scribe first appears in Mesopotamia. Scribes contributed in fundamental ways to ancient and medieval cultures, including Egypt, China, India, Persia, the Roman Empire, and medieval Europe. Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam have important scribal traditions. Scribes have been essential in these cultures for the preservation of legal codes, religious texts, and artistic and didactic literature. In some cultures, social functions of the scribe and of the calligrapher overlap, but the emphasis in scribal writing is on exactitude, whereas calligraphy aims to express the aesthetic qualities of writing apart from its content.

Previously a prominent fixture in literary cultures, scribes lost most of their prominence and status with the advent of the printing press. The generally less prestigious profession of scrivener continued to be important for copying and writing out legal documents and the like. In societies with low literacy rates, street-corner letter-writers (and readers) may still be found providing scribe service.

The Sumerians developed one of the earliest writing systems (cuneiform), the first body of written literature, and an extensive scribal profession to further these activities. The work of Near Eastern scribes primarily exists on clay tablets and stone monuments written in cuneiform, though later in the period of cuneiform writing they begin to use papyrus, parchment, and writing tablets. The body of knowledge that scribes possessed belonged to an elite urban culture, and few had access to it. Traveling scribes played a vital role in the dissemination of literary culture.

During the middle to late 3rd millennium BCE, Sumerian literature in the form of disputations proliferated, such as the Debate between bird and fish; the Debate between Summer and Winter, in which Winter wins; and others between the cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, silver and copper, the pickaxe and the plough, and the millstone and the gul-gul stone. Nearly all known Sumerian literary works were preserved as a result of young scribes apprenticing for their profession. In addition to literary works, the contents of the tablets they produced include word lists, syllabaries, grammar forms, and lists of personal names.

To the extent that the curriculum in scribal schools can be reconstructed, it appears that they would have begun by studying lists and syllabaries and learning metrology, the formulas for writing legal contracts, and proverbs. They then might have advanced to praise poems and finally to copying more sophisticated works of literature. Some scholars have thought that apprentice scribes listened to literary compositions read aloud and took dictation; others, that they copied directly from master copies. A combination of dictation, copying, and memorization for reproduction has also been proposed.

One of the most important professionals in ancient Egypt was a person educated in the arts of writing (both hieroglyphics and hieratic scripts, as well as the demotic script from the second half of the first millennium BCE, which was mainly used as shorthand and for commerce) and arithmetic. Sons of scribes were brought up in the same scribal tradition, sent to school, and inherited their fathers' positions upon entering the civil service.