Margins of Writing, Origins of Culture: New Approaches to Writing and Reading in the Ancient Near East Papers from the Symposium Held February 25-26 2005

Writing and the state both first began in the ancient Near East. The origins of history are traced to the place where they met. But what did they actually have to do with each other? Most of ancient Near Eastern philology consists of careful examination of the leavings of the state scribes; it has revealed a treasure-house of ancient culture, from haunting poetry to onion archives. But there is a crucial blind spot in our perspective on the largest and oldest archive of the ancient world: the…