There were brave men before Agamemnon, and epics were sung before they were written - at least, some were. But written they were, and in written form they traveled through time and space, outlasting or deferring any performance beyond scribe’s and reader’s. This chapter explores the ways in which they did so, focusing not directly on the dynamics of transmission or even on the conditions of readership but on the physical media themselves, the media of poems recurrently instantiated in concretely textualized form, where the eye takes precedence over the ear as the organ of reception.
The principal media may be said to be three: clay tablet, papyrus scroll, and parchment codex. That will mundanely determine the organization of this chapter. Underlying the physical forms is the intersection of writing systems and materials. Cuneiform script (“wedge’’-writing) is correlated with clay, while alphabetic Greek came into the Egyptian tradition of papyrus and ink. That is a mini-set of data with implications and ramifications that go far beyond the scope of this chapter. Another important factor is the cultural function performed by textualization. Written epic is typically not put on public display, does not take the monumental form of incised stone. Rather than memorializing, it preserves and transmits itself, in the more dynamic form of what may broadly be called books. Only at Helicon would Hesiod’s Works and Days (see Chapter 23, by Nelson) be perpetuated in lead.
A stripped-down narrative account would go like this. The standard textual vehicle throughout the Near East (Egypt apart), for some three thousand years, was the clay tablet. It died not with the advent of papyrus but with the death of cuneiform, killed off by Aramaic. Sumerian and Akkadian epic went with it, as did Ugaritic (see Chapter 16, by Wyatt). Greek and Latin literature was carried on papyrus scrolls. Later the codex form superseded the scroll, and papyrus was displaced by parchment. That account embeds more than facts, and certainly needs refining and contextualizing, but it is usable. The main divide, unmistakably, is between Near Eastern on the one hand, in cuneiform, and Greek and Latin on the other, in pen and ink; the interface between the Ancient Near East and early Greece (see Chapter 20, by Burkert) did not extend to the written medium. The papyrus scroll, for its part, has as long a history as the cuneiform clay tablet, but within the Greek-Latin continuum something remarkable occurs: a shift of medium, as the scroll gave way to the codex.
Each of the three, clay tablet, papyrus (or parchment) scroll, and parchment (or papyrus) codex, makes a very different kind of book, and a reader experiences each in a correspondingly different way. The Akkadian Gilgamesh epic (see Chapter 15, by Noegel) consists of a set of separate tablets. A reader takes the first, reads the text on the front, flips the tablet vertically to read the text on the back, then moves on to the next tablet. The Iliad, up to the time of the Roman empire, is a set of papyrus scrolls, the text written in a series of columns. A reader works his way laterally through each scroll, ending up each time with a scroll that needs to be rewound. The codex, by contrast, has pages. On reaching the end of a right-hand page, you turn it over and continue - or not, of course; these idealized vignettes, in outlining what actual reading entails in the respective media, presume a user whose interest is in reading the text. Cultural leveling apart, that is to respect the function that text-carrying objects ostensibly serve, but in fact they tend to make their presence felt as the artifacts that they are. In mediating the contact between text and user, the artifact sets the terms under which both its featured text and its contextualizing self are viewed.
These three, each in approximate turn the culturally dominant medium, claim primary status; no matter that the parchment codex is genetically a bastard form. But other media too come into play, which fit less neatly into this already over-tidy schema. Sometimes used for high-class library texts in Mesopotamia, alongside clay tablets but far less visible in the archaeological record (see Chapter 9, by Sherratt), were waxsurfaced boards (or tablets) of wood or ivory. Two things give wax tablets special interest. They bridge the cuneiform/alphabet divide. And unlike clay tablets they can be joined together; the most familiar form is the diptych, a joined pair, but they were often multiple. And then there is skin. For ink-written scripts in the Near East and other regions where papyrus was not available (it was an Egyptian product), and sometimes even where it was, suitably prepared animal skins were used; they could be cut to shape and stitched together. Preparation techniques are complex, but skin and papyrus make comparable writing materials. Unfortunately, the history of writing-skins prior to the emergence of the parchment codex early in the Roman empire is exceptionally hard to track, and their use for epic is quite uncertain. These matters will receive more attention below, as will the well-attested but relatively short-lived papyrus codex, a second-generation bastard.
‘‘Book,’’ ‘‘epic’’ - we are dealing in terms and concepts far more at home in Greek and Latin context than in ancient Near Eastern, where the continuities of discourse with our own culture are less direct, the category systems less transparent, the goal of a truly historicized account further beyond reach (see Chapter 14, by Sasson). It is rightly harder to think of a clay tablet as a book than to think of a papyrus scroll as one, and it is highly questionable whether any Near Eastern civilization had any notion of epic (see Chapter 1, by Martin). Cultural distortion is built in. But the problems of relativization can here be skirted without too much intellectual discomfort, at least in one important respect; for however we may choose to define it, epic has no medium peculiar to itself. Greco-Roman epic is one literary genre among others, the most prestige-laden to be sure, but not mediumistically distinct fTom other kinds of literature. In the Near East the category itself is more dubious, but it is on the basis of textual form and content, not of medium, that modern scholarship affixes or withholds the label. ‘‘Literature’’ has various ways of distinguishing itself from other kinds of document - calligraphy, dedicated storage areas (libraries) - but otherwise shares its media with much else. In the cuneiform world formal communications and records of all kinds were committed to clay, and archived. In the Greco-Roman world, where writing had greater social penetration, papyrus scrolls served an even more extensive range of purposes; the codex, a more elaborate and custom-made product, is less multi-purpose, but still quite versatile. To say that the media of epic are not genre-specific is not to say that epic manuscripts are entirely without distinctiveness as a class. If epic is defined formalistically - as composition in dactylic hexameter in Greek and Latin, less straightforwardly in Akkadian - the look of the text as laid out on (so to speak) the page enables a Greek or Latin epic text to be recognized as such at a distance, practically at a glance, without reading a word. That may not be quite the case with tablet texts, but experienced eyes have little difficulty identifying the nature of a text by appearance alone.
Something all the media have in common is materiality, and a text which in consequence is artificially broken up. Until the codex becomes sufficiently capacious to accommodate epics in their entirety, the text has to be parceled out over more than a single carrier object. That makes for practical problems of continuity and sequentiality, and may have less obvious effects on poems’ stability and identity, as well as conditioning their internal articulation. Size matters. A banal but related point is that as textual vehicles get roomier, epics get bigger. The rule is valid only in the most general terms, and the capacity of the medium is not the only factor, but even so, it is no accident that the shortest epics (if they may be called that) are Sumerian, the longest Nonnus. And whether or not a text can be contained within the compass of a single manuscript, it still has to be interrupted at frequent (ideally regular) intervals, turned into a succession of blocks of text, whether sides or columns or both. Each of the various media organizes the text in its own manner, and acquires its own aesthetic proprieties.
It is worth bearing in mind that an ancient book, being a manuscript (a thoroughly anachronistic concept, if we discount cylinder seals), has a uniqueness that its modern printed counterpart does not. A written text is a less fleeting performance than an oral-aural one (see Chapter 13, by J. Foley and Chapter 4, by Jensen) - the thing is still palpably there when a song is but a memory - but a poem in writing depends no less on replication (never exact) for its continued existence, and institutional praxis variously addresses or evades the issue of textual instability. Greek and Latin epics unvaryingly sustain their given identity, and while variants may sometimes be registered, evidencing collation of one text against another, it is rare to find individuation of manuscript or of edition, or notice of transmissional lineage; the austerity is eventually broken at Rome with subscriptions to texts of the Aeneid. Akkadian epics can be transmitted in no less faithfully fossilized form, but tend to be ontologically more labile. Scholars talk of different ‘‘versions’’ or the like, but the point at which a poem evolves into a different one is not readily fixed. The opening words serve as a poem’s identifier, however, and subscriptions (‘‘colophons’’) define a particular tablet-set’s place in the world.
Clay tablets may get chipped, or crack and break, but can last practically forever. Portable but bulky, they tend not to move far from home, except when carried off as booty. Tablet-texts from one place may be copied onto new tablets at another, and a copy may record points at which the exemplar was damaged. Tablets are local products, whereas papyrus as a writing material is a commodity imported from Egypt in the form of made-up scrolls ready for use; it is the written scroll that is the local product, easily transportable in turn, and with a shelf-life comparable to that of modern books. Scrolls were liable to suffer wear and tear at the edges and especially at the beginning; a cedar-oil preservative was sometimes applied to protect them from insect and worm damage; if torn, they could be repaired.
With all that by way of preliminary, we can take a closer look at the individual media.
World History
