Talk:History/Archive 6

The use of scribes Suggestion
Shouldn't we mention the use ad influence of scribes on history, historic records, historic methodology?

Some extracts from the Wikipedia article on scribe:
 * 1) Much of what is known about ancient Egypt is due to the activities of its scribes and the officials. Monumental buildings were erected under their supervision,[7] administrative and economic activities were documented by them, and stories from Egypt's lower classes and foreign lands survive due to scribes putting them in writing. ... In addition to accountancy and governmental politicking, the scribal professions branched out into literature. The first stories were probably creation stories and religious texts. Other genres evolved, such as wisdom literature, which were collections of philosophical sayings from wise men. These contain the earliest recordings of societal thought and exploration of ideas in some length and detail.

In Mesopotamia during the middle to late 3rd millennium BCE, the Sumerians originated some of this literature in the form of a series of debates. Among the list of Sumerian disputations is the Debate between bird and fish.[10] Other Sumerian examples include the Debate between Summer and Winter where Winter wins, and disputes between the cattle and grain, the tree and the reed, silver and copper, the pickaxe and the plow, and the millstone and the gul-gul stone.[11]

An Ancient Egyptian version is A Dispute between a man and his Ba, which comes from the Middle Kingdom period.


 * 1) Corrections by the scribes (Tikkunei Soferim) refer to changes that were made in the original wording of the Hebrew Bible wording during the second temple period, perhaps sometime between 450 and 350 BCE. One of the most prominent men at this time was Ezra the scribe. He also hired scribes to work for him, in order to write down and revise the oral tradition.[17] After Ezra and the scribes had completed the writing, Ezra gathered the Jews who had returned from exile, all of whom belonged to Kohanim families. Ezra read them an unfamiliar version of the Torah. This version was different from the Torah of their fathers. Ezra did not write a new bible. Through the genius of his ‘editing’, he presented the religion in a new light.


 * 1) The scribe was a common job in medieval towns during the 10th and 11th centuries. Many were employed at scriptoria owned by local schoolmasters or lords. These scribes worked under deadlines to complete commissioned works such as historic chronicles or poetry. Because parchment was costly, scribes often created a draft of their work first on a wax or chalk tablet.

How to include this into the history article? Help Thy --SvenAERTS (talk) 14:05, 30 December 2019 (UTC)
 * I've commented out the help me request as it was not being used appropriately. Primefac (talk) 14:44, 30 December 2019 (UTC)