ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 develops an approach to explore the letters’ non-linguistic modes. Following the argument that these letters engaged audiences multimodally, this chapter outlines the various visual and spatial modes in the letters with an emphasis on their layout and the scribes’ use of lines and wedges as marking systems. We can study the design of the letters to reverse-engineer an important spatial facet of scribal training and practice: scribes in Canaan were trained to think in 3D about the location and meaning of the various parts of letters. The chapter also puts the diplomatics approach, which has been adopted in the study of cuneiform, in conversation with the multimodal perspective. Scribes learned conventions about how to form and layout a text onto a tablet, and they mastered a range of possible line and wedge marks that could structure a text or communicate something about its meaning. In using these different modes, the scribes created a “reading path” for their audiences that communicated how to hold, use, and access the letters. This combination of linguistic and metadiscursive cues also had the potential to signal the relative importance of each letter section to readers.
