The practice of inserting scribal remarks to the end of a manuscript in ancient Mesopotamia dates
back to the third millennium and it was continued until the end of the cuneiform tradition.
Colophons, nonetheless, underwent significant changes in time and space: they differ regarding
their form, content and function from both a synchronic and a diachronic viewpoint.
Colophons were no conventional elements of Sumerian and Akkadian manuscripts, but freely added
components providing various pieces of meta-information, e.g. on the length of the composition, the
identity of the scribe, the location or condition of the source, as well as the place and date of
production. Manuscripts with colophons may come from various contexts ranging from exercises of
apprentice scribes to master copies of scholars. Though colophons are easy to discern on cuneiform
tablets as they are visually divided from the body of the text, there is no estimate how many of the
extant literary manuscripts contain colophons. The neglecting of paratexts is due to the research
focus of the past decades. Scholars attempted the edition of literary compositions by reconstructing
the text on the basis of several fragmentary manuscripts, thus the individual manuscripts and their
unique features received less attention.
The aim of this project was to investigate the intertwining of literary production and the scribal
practice of inserting colophons during the 3rd and 2nd millennium BCE. A catalogue of respective
manuscripts and an edition of the extant colophons was a clear desideratum. The database collected
in course of the project and which also served as the basis of evaluation is presented here as the
project’s research data outcome. The following datasets are included:
A_ Archaic Colophons
B_ Colophons of the Early Dynastic IIIa Period
C_ Colophons of the Early Dynastic IIIb Period
D_ Colophons of the Ur III and Agade Periods
The colophons included in these four catalogues are the basis of a forthcoming study with the title:
A cultural biography of the Mesopotamian scribal lore: Colophons of literary and lexical manuscripts
from the third millennium BCE.
The research for this project was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany's Excellence Strategy – EXC 2176 'Understanding Written Artefacts: Material, Interaction and Transmission in Manuscript Cultures', project no. 390893796. The research was conducted within the scope of the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC) at Universität Hamburg.
