Building skeleton texts out of rescripts and responsa: Recent work on early scientific thought how now acknowledged, at least in some provinces, that individual cases can be embedded in larger encompassing texts in radically different ways: an individually- authored, Greco-Roman treatise offering us a rather different co(n)text than a Mesopotamian infrastructural compendium. This paper looks at the social processes through which case histories—both legal and medical—were depersonalized in ancient Mesopotamia in order to ready them for inclusion in a normative compendium. The question of differential embedding speaks directly to the concerns of both Forrester and Furth with case-driven models of rationality and technical practice.