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October 05, 2005
"P" is Really Here
I've been looking forward to the "P" volume of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. It's been off the press now for a few months but has just hit the shelf at the Claremont School of Theology library. I want to say a little more about the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary later but first I want to ask for the help of any reader that has access to
Comptes Rendus de l'Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Letters volume 85, 1960, I am looking for Ch. Virolleud's editio princeps of RS 22.03 (KTU 4.710).
I am also looking for "La troisième inscription phénicience de Larnaka," by A. M Honeyman, Le Museon, Revue d' Estudes orientals (li 285ss). I don't know the year.
I cannot find either of these works in Southern California or Ohio for that matter. I have a special "research assistant" in Ohio. I thought the first one was a UCSB but when I got there, it was not in their collection although volumes 86, 1961 and following were. I am interested in the second work because of the possibility that it documents a Phoenician word, פרס; a likely cognate word also occurs three times in the short cuneiform alphabetical text RS 22.03 (KTU 4.710) as prš2m. The exact meaning of this word is the smaller one of a host of issues that is keeping me from posting on KTU 4.710. From context and cognates, it is quite clearly some kind of measure and it may be modified by another far more problematic word that may serve as its adjective. The word is certainly related to standard Ugaritic prs(ś), with a meaning ranging from "portion" to "payment" to "ration" to "salary" on the one hand, to "half" on the other hand.
And this brings me back to the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and particularly the "P" volume. parīsu meaning a measure of capacity. The passage, "(the price) of three parisani of emmer is one shekel of silver, (the price) of one parisu of wine is a half shekel of silver" is an Akkadian gloss in a Hittite text. This passage is striking when compared with what is seen in KTU 4.710 line 5. You'll just have to wait on this or look it up yourself; but I hope it will be worth the wait. There are, of course, other Akkadian/Assyrian Dictionaries. Von Soden's Akkadisches Handwörterbuch is a great tool. On a somewhat smaller scale, so is Black, George and Postgate's, A Concise Dictionary of Akkadian. But there is nothing like the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. There are now eighteen "volumes" but a few of these so-called volumes have two or three several hundred page separately bound parts. The first volume ("H") appeared in 1955. T, Ţ, U, W are still to be published. I remember the excitement at the Institute of Antiquity and Christianity in Claremont when the "K" volume came out in1970. There was cheering and some pushing and shoving as well as a few thinly veiled threats when it arrived on the shelf. It seemed that all the world had an Akkadian word beginning with "k" to look up. As I looked along the shelf that bears the burden of these weighty volumes, it was easy to judge their relative age. The banner on the spine that gives the volume number and letter designation fades with time so that it is now a light orange on the oldest volumes but still a dark red on the newer ones.
Now the exact meaning of prs(m) is among the least pressing problems facing me as I prepare to post on KTU 4.710. I may have to jump ahead to another, also difficult, text if I don't get hold of all of the rather extensive (for these texts) secondary literature and reach conclusions soon on a number of the outstanding perplexing issues: the meaning of the word following prš2m is among them.
Posted by DuaneSmith at October 5, 2005 08:57 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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