Long before Gutenberg rolled out the presses, there were scribes to record the knowledge and wisdom of numerous ancient traditions. Even after the printing press gained popularity, scribes were still asked to help plan for rubrication and illumination.
Wikipedia defines a “scribe” as a “person who writes
books or documents by hand as a profession,” and
points out that scribes later “developed into public
servants, journalists, accountants, typists, and lawyers.”
Ancient Egyptian scribes did not always write in
hierogylphics. They also wrote in hierotic and demotic scripts, which were quicker cursive ones. Mesopotamians engraved cuneiform letters into clay tablets. Sumerians had a body of wisdom literature which included creation stories, faith-related texts, and a series of philosophical “debates” (between bird and fish, winter and summer, cattle and grain, silver and copper, etc.).
The process that ancient Israelite scribes used for copying the Torah, and eventually other sections of the Tanakh, was quite complex. The following is a sampling of the many instructions for doing so: only clean animal skins should be used, the ink was to be made according to a specific recipe, before writing YHVH’s holy name the scribe’s entire body had to be washed, each word must be said aloud while being written, worn-out manuscripts had to receive a proper cemetery burial, and the usable documents had to be stored in sacred places such as synagogues.
Much of the wisdom literature that we have today can therefore be ascribed to the inscriptions of all these ancient scribes.
Resources
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubrication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illuminated_manuscript
Copyright September 8, 2011 by Linda Van Slyke All Rights Reserved
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