Daniel L. Selden Making the Grade: Classical Philology and the Totally Administered Society The deconstruction of language is broken up (coupée) by political discourse, circumscribed by the very old realm of the signifier. —R. Barthes, Le plaisir du texte 1. Philology as a State Apparatus Whatever the vicissitudes of history, textual criticism (emendatio) and elucidatory com‐ mentary (enarratio) have remained a fixture of Levantine and European cultures now for over four millennia. According to J. S. Phillimore, in fact, philological exercise constitutes “the pecu‐ liar mark of high civilization.” 1 Something of this neo‐humanism still drives Eckhart Frahm’s recent publication of the Babylonian and Assyrian Text Commentaries (2011), which claims not on‐ ly that the “nearly one thousand clay tablets dating from the eighth to the second century B.C.E. comprise the earliest substantial corpus of textual commentaries known from anywhere in the world”: their hermeneutic procedures, Frahm suggests, constitute the “origins of interpreta‐ tion.” 2 Oddly enough, for an Altorientalist, Frahm’s asservation sidesteps the well attested Egyptian institution of the House of Life (Pr-anx), 3 which figures consistently in the archeolo‐ gical record from the Old Kingdom down through the Graeco‐Roman period (c. 2650 BCE – 250 CE). Maintained and supported by the crown in all major religious centers (Hw.wt nTr) throughout Egypt, the House of Life not only oversaw research in theology, medicine, history, geography, and mathematics: it concomitantly took charge of the preservation, emendation, and elucidation of older texts, as well as the composition of new religious, scientific, and literary works. 4 New Kingdom redactions of the Book of Emerging Forth into the Light ( ), for example, not only supply textual variants; some spells ( ) intercalate rubricated commen‐ tary on each uncertain word or phrase, for which the scribes frequently supply multiple inter‐ pretations.