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Secrets in the Library: Protected Knowledge and Professional Identity in Late Babylonian Uruk1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2014

Kathryn Stevens
Kathryn Stevens*
Affiliation:
Trinity College, Cambridge CB2 1TQ, UK, [email protected]
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Extract

Injunctions to secrecy in the colophons of scholarly cuneiform tablets offer potential insights into the classification and protection of knowledge in Mesopotamia. However, most models of a body of “secret knowledge” defined by the so-called “Geheimwissen colophons” have found it difficult to account for a seemingly disparate corpus of protected texts. This study argues first for an expanded definition of intellectual protection, which leads to a larger corpus of protected texts. Through a case study of Late Babylonian colophons from Uruk, it is suggested that there is a strong correlation between texts related to the professional specialism of the tablet owner, and the occurrence of protective formulae in the colophon. This implies that it is fruitful to consider “secret knowledge” less as an abstracted corpus of esoteric texts and more as a mutable categorisation strongly linked to professional and individual intellectual identity.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 75 , 2013 , pp. 211 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 2013

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Footnotes

1

This article was originally written with the support of an AHRC doctoral studentship, and revised during a postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Canon and Identity Formation at the University of Copenhagen in 2012–13; it also benefited from insightful comments and questions from the members of the Centre for Canon and Identity Formation on a seminar paper presented in November 2011. I am grateful to Eleanor Robson, Dorothy Thompson, Nicole Brisch, and Matthias Egeler for many helpful suggestions, and to Jonathan Taylor and the anonymous reviewer at Iraq for their comments which led to considerable improvements in the argument. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.

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