The chapter, written for my PhD thesis, argues that “authorship” means two things at once: textual production and its presentation, that is, the way authors are depicted in our sources. I argue that such depictions have an inherently narrative form, and that for ancient cultures, it is more methodologically sound to study the narratives than the reality of authorship. But authorship’s double nature also imbues it with an odd temporality: authorship-as-presentation claims to be identical with authorship-as-production, but it is in fact born belatedly, in the wake of a text’s circulation.
“Narratives of Authorship and Cuneiform Literature,” in Authorship and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Sonja Ammann, Katharina Pyschny, and Julia Rhyder (2022, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck), pp. 17–35.