Abstract
Researchers often draw a correlation between the type of text and its supposed level of difficulty. There would be scribes of varying degrees of skill associated with distinct textual genres. At the bottom of the hierarchy are those who wrote letters and administrative bills. Without seeking to confirm or invalidate such an assertion, this paper proposes to explore the syllabaries of the scribes who wrote the letters and administrative texts discovered in the palace of Mari. The sources are numerous - several thousand tablets, i.e. several hundred thousand occurrences of cuneiform signs - but we can now use digital methods (processing editions in XML format) to list, count and analyze all these signs. The aim is to objectively evaluate the number of cuneiform signs required to write a letter, receipt, inventory, etc. ; to study the frequency of signs, their polyphony (the set of values associated with each one) and their distribution ; or to analyze the type of writing (phonetic or logographic) favored according to the type of text produced (letter vs. administrative text). We'll also examine cases where scribes have clearly deviated from graphic norms.
