Abnormal Interests

September 2, 2010

Four Stone Hearth #100 Is Up

Yesterday, Martin Rundkvist posted the 100th edition of Four Stone Hearth at Aardvarchaeology. He also announced that he is relinquishing his task as coordinator. Martin has been an excellent carnival coordinator and those of us who post on the edges of anthropology owe him many thanks for his efforts to make it easy to keep informed in all things anthropological. Thank you Martin!

My old friend Afarensis has agreed to take up the mantle. And I thank him too.

Four Stone Hearth is a great resource for those of us who profit from the work of anthropologists but who are too lazy to follow their blogs on as regular basis as we should. One thing I like about this carnival is that it has, with only a few exceptions, stuck too its charter: archaeology, socio-cultural anthropology, bio-physical anthropology, and systematic theology linguistic anthropology. But perhaps that is easy when the charter is rather broad in the first place.

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Posted by Duane on Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 9:00 AM (UTC-08:00)
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September 1, 2010

Moabite(?) Temple Discovered

AP is reporting that archaeologists have uncovered an Iron Age II temple (8th century) at Khirbat 'Ataroz near the town of Mabada in Jordan. Among the finds is a four legged zoomorphic figure that Ziad Al-Saad, head of the Jordanian Antiquities Department, identifies as Hadad. Is it a bull? They also uncovered other figurines and vessels apparently used in worship at the site. More details and pictures please.

Update: Yes it is a bull. Fox News, of all places, has a picture of several figurines and pot sherds. Still, even more pictures and details please.

Update, September 2, 2010:

Todd Bolen has a good discussion of the find with pictures of the temple that were taken six(!) years ago.

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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 2:00 PM (UTC-08:00)
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Claremont Colleges Digital Library And What Isn’t In It

Charles Jones at The Ancient World Online reports on the antiquity related material available from the Claremont Colleges Digital Library. While I was generally aware of these collections and for several years of my life worked within a few feet of a couple of the collections, it is rather impressive to see them all in one place.

But that doesn’t keep me from still being upset that the “Claremont Ras Shamra Tablets” are no longer part of the collection, nor is the binding that once enclosed one of the Nag Hammadi Codices. I guess all the remaining stuff couldn’t fetch enough money from private collectors.

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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 1:17 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 31, 2010

Power From The Cross

Check it out. It may prove to be salivation to those in need.

Via Boing Boing

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Posted by Duane on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 1:31 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 29, 2010

Atrahasis At Ugarit

I’ve been looking at the work of the several scribes from Ugarit, among them Na’amrašap. He was not only a scribe but the father of scribes. We have several of his mature works. But we may also have one of his student efforts and a very good one at that. It as a badly broken Middle Bronze Age version of Atrahasis flood story. Nougayrol, 300, called it “Récit du déluge.” The tablet’s excavation number is RS 22.421. It comes from just north of House of the Tablets were many classical school texts were uncovered. While Nougayrol was very aggressive in reconstructing much of the text, I have taken a more conservative approach. Judging from Nougayrol’s, autograph, Na’amrašap hand was almost dainty with his signs sharp and well spaced. I did look at Nougayrol, 302-302, and Foster, 255, here and there. The small sections of text with translation follow the sections marked off by scribe lines on the tablet. Here’s my version of the text and translation.

Obverse [beginning of first column, it is all but certain that there were other column(s)]
1) [e]-mu-ma DINGIR.MEŠ (ilānu) im[-ta(?)-]lik-ku mil-kà
2) i-na KUR.MEŠ^ti (mātāti) a-bu-ba [i]š-ku-nu
3) i-na ki-ib-ra-ti

When the gods took counsel
concerning the lands, they created a flood
in the world regions.

4) (too damaged to make much since of)
5) i [ . . . . . . . ] É^ti (bīti) ^dé.a ina libbi-š[n-nu(?)

[            ]
[      ] house (temple) of Ea in his heart.

6) ^ma[t-]ra-am-ḫa-sí-sum-mi a-na-ku[-am(?)]
7) i-n[a] É (bīti) ^dé.a ina EN-ia (bēliya) aš-ba[-ku? ]
8) kà(?)-la-ma i-d[e₄ ( ?) . ]

“I am Atarhasis,
I was staying in the house of Ea, my lord.
I [knew] everything [ . ]

9) i-de₄ mil-kà ša DINGIR.MEŠ (ilāni) ra-ab-bu-ti [ . . ]
10) i-de₄ ma-mì-it-šu-nu ù ú-ul [ . . ]
11) i[ ?-p]a-at-tu-ú a-na ia-a-š[i]

“I knew of the counsel of the great gods,
I knew of the oath, and [?]
they would not reveal it to me.

12) a-ma-ti-šu-nu a-na ki-i[k-] ku-[ši(?)]
13) i-ša-an-[an-a]

(But) their words to the reed wall
he repeated.

14) [i-]ga-ru-ma ši-m[ì ? ? ? ?]
15) (too damaged to make much since of)
[gap of unknown number or lines and/or columns]

“Wall, hear, [      ]

Reverse [last column, indication of other column(s) now missing]
[unknown number of previous lines in the column
1’) [ . . . . . . t]i(?) DINGIR[.MEŠ (?)] ba-l[a-ṭu-ma(?)]
2’) [ . . . a]t(?)-ta DAM^ka (aššatka) e[ . . . . .]
3’) [ . . . . ]?-a tuk-la-at ù ? [ . . . ]
4’ k[i-]i DINGIR.MEŠ ba-la-ṭa lu-ú [ . . . . ]

[      ] the gods li[fe      ]
[      ] your wife [      ]
[      ] help and [      ]
Life like the gods [you will] indeed [possess]”

5’) ŠU ^mSIG₅-^dGÌR.UNU.GAL
6’) S[A]G ^dŠU.GAR.DURU₂.NA

(By) the hand of Na’amrašap
Servant of ŠU.GAR.DURU₂.NA

Among the more abnormally interesting aspects of this version is that Atrahasis appears to tell the story of the flood in the first person.

Just by its fragmentary nature this text presents problems. The only one that I will discuss here is in line 8. Nougayrol reads ú-š[e-l]a-ma i? [ . ] and renders it (M’y) ayant monter, il (?) [ . . ], something like, “Having (me) take up (there), it . . “ He apparently takes ú-š[e-l]a-ma to be a Š stem (causitive) on elû, “to go up,” plus enclitic -ma. As an alternative he suggests, “J'(y) présente (des offrandes), et,” “I present (offerings).” While I’m not completely sure how Foster read the Akkadian, he translates it “I know everything.*” The * tells me that there is a note on the text but I sure can’t find it. I’m not claiming that the note isn’t there, I’m only saying I can’t find it in the conglomeration of notes on pages 278-289. I really dislike the way this book deals with notes on the text. But that’s another story. Based on his translation, I think Foster reads the line more or less as I do.

Anyway, I base my own reading on Nougayrol’s autograph. In places, the tablet is badly abraded. The sign(s) before -la-ma in line 8 appear to be particularly obscure. That said, instead of seeing, ú-še-la-ma, I see, kà-la-ma. From there it isn’t much of a stretch to read, with the appropriate amount of humility, kà(?)-la-ma i-d[e₄ ( ?) . ] and relate this line with lines 9 and 10.

Van Soldt, 181, has an interesting discussion of Na’amrašap and his family. Among the several other Akkadian texts prepared by Na’amrašap is RS 18.20 + 17.371 (PRU IV, 202). RS 18.20 + is a judicial ruling involving the king of Ugarit. At the time of publication Nougayrol didn’t understand exactly how to interpret Na’amrašap’s name. He took it to be Na’amnergal rather than Na’amrašap. For reasons that I will not go into here, the mistake is understandable, perhaps inevitable.

References:

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Posted by Duane on Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 2:01 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 28, 2010

Is There Anything That Will Keep A “Family Values” Candidate Off The Ballot?

Apparently not. Being an admitted client of a prostitute doesn’t appear to be any hindrance at all. And claiming, apparently with a straight face, that a "legislative assistant on women's issues" who was accused of domestic violence didn’t work on women’s issues doesn’t seem to hurt either. As long as you support some folks’ idea of family values, anything goes.

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Posted by Duane on Saturday, August 28, 2010 at 9:14 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 26, 2010

The Alphabet In The Atlantic

In “10 Reading Revolutions Before E-Books,” Tim Carmody’s writes for The Atlantic,

3. There are many crucial developments in the very early history of writing, but for the sake of time/space (writing being the primary technology that allows us to think of these interchangeably), let's cut to the emergence of the alphabet. From bureaucratic cuneiform to monumental hieroglyphs, early writing systems were mostly divorced from speech. Scripts where symbols matched consonants or syllables allowed you to exchange symbols for sounds. An abjad, like Phoenician, Hebrew, or Arabic, was a script for merchants, not scribes. This took on an additional order of magnitude with the emergence of the first proper alphabet, Greek. The Greeks took the Phoenician letters and 1) added symbols for vowels; 2) completely abstracted the names and images of the letters from words in the language. (In Phoenician as in Hebrew, "aleph" means ox, and "bet" means house; the Greek "alpha" and "beta" are meaningless.)

This fusion of orality and literacy helps explain the potency of classical Hellenic culture. Songs and dances became literature; disputations became rhetoric and philosophy. The Greeks were able to incorporate the knowledge of the civilized world in their own language, and in turn transmit their own amalgamated culture wherever they went. As Ong notes, unlike writing or agriculture, the alphabet was only invented once - every single alphabet and abjad can trace itself back to the same Semitic roots. It was (and remains) a revolution that happened over and over and over again.

Looked at from one direction, I think this account is generally correct. But there are problems with details like “The Greeks took the Phoenician letters and . . . added symbols for vowels.” “Added” doesn’t tell the whole story by a considerable margin. “Adapted and added” might have been better but still not quite on point.

But from another direction, Carmody’s view seems Hellenoocentric to a fault. And I do mean fault. Long before any direct evidence of Greek literary texts, the scribes at Ugarit wrote what can only be called literature in a slightly modified abjad. And if you want to say that this is irrelevant to the history of the use of the alphabet because it left no lasting tradition of writing beyond the Late Bronze Age, then how about the 9th century monumental inscriptions in Aramaic, Phoenician and Moabite? These certainly transcend the usages that we see in the early alphabetic inscriptions that might well be the work of merchants. The tradition of using linear abjads in literature that they may well have inaugurated continued into what eventually became the Hebrew Bible. And while it is at best speculative, it is as likely that the Greeks first learned to write what we might call literature from the Phoenicians as that they took it up it on their own. I think Carmody’s brief explanation of the history of the alphabet moves all too quickly from reasonable speculation concerning origins to the great literature of Europe without stopping at more than a few important landmarks along the way. Is this a case of abstraction gone wrong?

Via ANE-2 News List.

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Posted by Duane on Thursday, August 26, 2010 at 9:34 AM (UTC-08:00)
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August 25, 2010

My Heroic Days

I spent yesterday and today trying to track down an UR.SAG series or something that might indicate that there was such a series. This is cleanup effort from my work on one of the Shamash prayers. The mean nasty demanding project leader and editor, Alan Lenzi, made me do it. The sumerogram complex UR.SAG stands for Akkadian qarrādu, meaning something in the general neighborhood of “hero, warrior.” The issue is that the incipit (roughly a title formed from the first few words of a text), surbû gitmālu, “O most exalted perfect one,” of the Shamash prayer is mentioned in the medical text BAM 322. Several incantations and incipits in BAM 322 begin UR.SAG. This raises the possibility that the Shamash prayer is part of a series of other prayers many of which begin with UR.SAG. Such an association might indicate an alternative ritual context for the Shamash prayer. The prayer’s most common ritual context appears to be bīt salā’ mê, “Water-sprinkling house.” But it is also known to be associated with another medical ritual. My next task is to convince Alan that this is a wild goose chase head over to the UCLA Bio-medical Library (yep, that’s where they house Die babylonisch-assyrische Medizin in Texten und Untersuchungen [BAM]), get a copy of BAM 322 and start working my way through it.

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Posted by Duane on Wednesday, August 25, 2010 at 1:36 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 23, 2010

Wanting To Believe

Yesterday Shirley and I received an email from someone who has sent us abnormally interesting, accurate, stuff in the past. What he sent us this time was rather detailed and seemed plausible. It concerned Lee Martin, Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Rodgers. The story was warm and inspiring. It was the kind of thing we wanted to believe. It was also mostly wrong. Believing the story and wanting to share it, we sent it along to a couple other friends. Luckily, one of them suspected, as we should have, that it the story was full of errors.

Shirley and I are both more than a little skeptical about most things that come our way. Because we liked this story, wanted it to be true and found strong emotional appeal in it and because it came from a usually reliable source, we believed it. We were wrong in doing so. We were wrong in passing it along uncritically. But it does illustrate how the desire that something be true, reinforced by other emotions, can lead one astray. I’m not all that unhappy that the sorry is mostly false. I am unhappy that we fell for it and shared it without giving it a good sanity check. While the origins of faith are complex, the desire that some account be true combined with its emotional appeal are surely important elements in faith.

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Posted by Duane on Monday, August 23, 2010 at 7:45 PM (UTC-08:00)
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August 22, 2010

On Secondary Literature

A couple of weeks ago I was at the CBA conference sitting at a dinner table with Joseph Blenkinsopp, Jim West and a few others. We were having the typical “how have you been,” “why are you here,” “what are you working on” conversation. I mentioned I was working my way through several decades of secondary literature as part of a new research project. I even accused Blenkinsopp of contributing to my grief in this manner. He looked me straight in the eye and with a smile on his face said, “Secondary literature is overrated.” Some of it surely is. But is the best of it overrated? Is secondary literature, when taken as body of thought, overrated?

Let me start with an antidote. Last year I received a rather enthusiastic email from someone wanting to share his ideas on the origin of the alphabet. I should make clear that what I am about to say is more surmise than certainty. He might well have been familiar with the considerable body of literature on the origin of the alphabet. He may have just chosen for his own reasons not to mention any of it in his rather lengthy email. My correspondent did mention that he had taken at least one a course from a well known scholar who had worked on the problem but that mention appeared to be more by way of establishing his own credentials than as reflection on that scholar’s work. I readily admit that I didn’t fully understand my correspondent’s explanation. It appeared to have several related(?) elements. One of those elements was a somewhat confusing rehash of the acrophonic principle. The acrophonic principle isn’t exactly news but if I had understood the remainder of his explanation, it might have been a good starting place. And in lacking reference to any secondary literature on the subject, the email reflected a couple of reasons that the secondary literature is important. First, it appeared to me that my correspondent thought he had invented the acrophonic principle and just didn’t have a name for it as yet. Had he used the technical expression “acrophonic principle” or something else like it that is general stock in almost any discussion of the origins of the alphabet, he not only would have saved many words, it wouldn’t have taken me so long to figure out what he was talking about. But then I never did figure out the rest of his explanation. Had he used a little shoptalk or compared his thoughts to those of someone else, even if he thought they were full of beans, he would have done his ideas and me a considerable service. I still might not have understood his idea but I would have likely thought it my problem rather than his.

Ideas, like words, have context. In the humanities and to a great extent in science also much of that context comes from the ongoing scholarly discussion. The primary material, the data, provides the raw material for any meaningful idea or explanation; the scholarly discussion, primarily as reflected in the secondary literature, provides context. That context has several values that are hard to overrate.

First is the value of salience. How does an idea or explanation go beyond or inform the current scholarly discussion? Without knowing the state of the current discussion, there is no way to judge salience. By the way, this is as true for the reader as the writer.

The second value is clarity in expression. The vary best way bring out the important nuances of one’s view is to show how it aligns with and differs from that of others who have thought hard about the same subject. If you can’t clearly explain how your views align with or differ from those of other thinkers, it is likely that you don’t understand your own views very well.

I think the third value of secondary literature is brevity. In the light of the second value, this thought may be a little hard to swallow. But, if there is something in the secondary literature that is important to one’s idea or explanation, then one need only summarize it, reference the source and explain why one adopted this thinker’s work rather than someone else’s. One doesn’t need to spell out every detail of a referenced idea except as one might differ from it. And of course, simply referencing someone else’s thought makes for even briefer presentation when that thought is not critical to one’s own line of reasoning. Also as an aid to brevity, secondary literature provides shoptalk and technical language that often condenses into a single word or phrase whole traditions of scholarly discussion. This can be a two edged sword. One edge limits accessibility and sometimes glosses over important errors in that tradition. But the other edge can replace a detailed discussion of decades, sometimes millennia, of scholarship with a simple well understood word or abbreviation.

Finally, secondary literature, if properly used and evaluated, can protect one from inadvertent dilettantism. Nothing will protect for the truly committed dilettante. If one’s idea is crazy, a critical review of the secondary literature on the subject may prevent one from saying that crazy thing in public. In this project, secondary literature joins the primary material in setting limits on the possible and providing context for the likely.

I wrote this post without reference to secondary literature on secondary literature. It may therefore lack salience, clarity, and brevity. It may also only reflect the crazy thoughts of a secondary literature dilettante.

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Posted by Duane on Sunday, August 22, 2010 at 9:56 AM (UTC-08:00)
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