Scribe

Portrait of the Scribe Mir 'Abd Allah Katib in the Company of a Youth Burnishing Paper (Mughal Empire, ca. 1602)

A scribe is a person who serves as a professional copyist, especially one who made copies of manuscripts before the invention of automatic printing.[1][2]

The work of scribes can involve copying manuscripts and other texts as well as secretarial and administrative duties such as the taking of dictation and keeping of business, judicial, and historical records for kings, nobles, temples, and cities.

The profession of scribe first appears in Mesopotamia. Scribes contributed in fundamental ways to ancient and medieval cultures, including Egypt, China, India, Persia, the Roman Empire, and medieval Europe. Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam have important scribal traditions. Scribes have been essential in these cultures for the preservation of legal codes, religious texts, and artistic and didactic literature. In some cultures, social functions of the scribe and of the calligrapher overlap, but the emphasis in scribal writing is on exactitude, whereas calligraphy aims to express the aesthetic qualities of writing apart from its content.[3]

Scribes, previously so widespread across cultures, lost most of their prominence and status with the advent of the printing press. The generally less prestigious profession of scrivener continued to be important for copying and writing out legal documents and the like. In societies with low literacy rates, street-corner letter-writers (and readers) may still be found providing scribe service.[4]

  1. ^ Harper, Douglas (2010). "Scribe". Dictionary.com. Online Etymology Dictionary. Dictionary.com, LLC. Retrieved 6 June 2017.
  2. ^ Wikisource This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domainEaston, Matthew George (1897). "Scribes". Easton's Bible Dictionary (New and revised ed.). T. Nelson and Sons.
  3. ^ Cory MacPherson, Inventions in Reading and Writing: From Calligraphy to E-readers (Cavendish Square, 2017), pp. 22–23.
  4. ^ "Women of letters doing write for the illiterate". smh.com.au. Reuters. 12 June 2003. Archived from the original on 26 January 2018. Retrieved 25 January 2018.

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