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November 06, 2005

The Cuneiform Short Alphabet: Part 3

Wheat and Olives for the House of Yatiru: KTU 4.710 (RS 22.03; Syria 58, 1981, 301; CRAI 1960, 85)

This is the third in my series of studies of the texts in the short cuneiform alphabet. You can find the first study, "Amurriyu's Sacrifice to Baal: KTU 1.77" at The Cuneiform Short Alphabet: Part 1 and the second one, "Record of Purchases: KTU 4.31" at The Cuneiform Short Alphabet: Part 2. Along with Part 1 is a brief discussion of the short cuneiform alphabet, a discussion of methodology and a disclaimer in which I advise the reader on my qualifications or lack of same to study these texts. Please read this material. I will also be adding a table of contents and some other study related structure to The Cuneiform Short Alphabet: Part 1 post.

Tablet KTU 4.710, the subject of this post, was discovered in 1959 in a room of a private commercial firm at the foot of the northeast slope of the Acropolis at Ugarit. It contains an economic text written with the typical signs of the short cuneiform alphabet. Based on this tablet, Virolleaud (1960) was able to decipher the only truly unique sign of the short alphabet and come to a proper understanding of how several of the other signs that differ in use between the short alphabet and the long cuneiform alphabet are used in short alphabet texts.

For more details on this tablet, please go to the accompanying PDF file.

Here is my translation:

Obverse
1) From the hand of my lord:
2) I send Guddanu.
3) For a jar of oil
4) five portions of wheat
5) (and) in addition, three portions (of wheat) for you for a shekel.
6) I transfer to the house of Yatiru
7) (a total of) eight portions of wheat.
Rev.
8) (unreadable)
9) (unreadable)
x) (continuation of line 5 on obverse)
10) Twenty-three
11) jars of olives at (a rate of) three (shekels)
12) for two jars
Lower edge
13) and three cups.

Below are four photographs of the tablet from Bordreuil (1981), 311. The one on the right is of the face of the tablet (the obverse), the one in the middle is the left edge of the tablet, the one on the lower left is of the back of the tablet (the reverse) and one on the upper left is the end of the tablet that has line 13 written on it.

KTU 4.710 Photo Line 13.

KTU 4.31 Photo rev. KTU 4.710 Photo edge. KTU 4.710 Photo obv.

Take a look at the first completely readable line in the picture on the lower left. This is the extension of line 5 from the front of the tablet. Now look at the obscure line below it. Nothing can be read of this obscure line. How does one account for how faint it is when the line above it is so sharp and at one point they come so close together? My suspicion is that some scribe erased the obscure line, the one below it and, perhaps, a complete text that was originally on the reverse of this tablet. Additional confirming (or disconfirming) evidence can only come from an inspection of the actual tablet.

KTU 4.710 Autograph

Above is Bordreuil's transcription of the tablet. I have added line numbers to the transcription for reference. Below is my transliteration.

KTU 4.710 Transliteration

Because every letter in all but two lines is completely legible, you might think this tablet would be easy to interpret. You would be wrong. While we translate almost every word identically, my interpretation is very different from Bordreuil (1981) on the one hand or Dietrich and Loretz (1988) on the other. If you are interested in how they understood the tablet, please read my detailed notes in the accompanying PDF file. I also discuss how a couple of other scholars have interpreted various parts of the tablet in the PDF file.

For such a short text, there are many problems. I will try to list the most important of them here.

  1. There is an otherwise unknown grammatical form in line 5.
  2. A couple of other grammatical forms are ambiguously written so one cannot be sure, in one case whether a certain word is a verb or a noun.
  3. All economic texts including this one use a kind of shorthand often omitting certain words the scribes deemed unnecessary but which we would like to have in the text. "Of wheat" in line 5 is an example.
  4. The very structure of the text is not clear. What do lines 1-7 have to do with lines 10-13?
  5. On what line does the text begin line 1 or line 10?
  6. Is the "oil" in line 1 olive oil or some other kind of oil?
  7. Does the word I translate "olives" in line 11 really mean olive oil instead?
  8. Is the price of wheat, olives and olive oil that may be indicated in this text supported by what we know from other texts from Ugarit or its neighbors? If the answer to this question is "no," then much of my interpretation cannot be correct.
  9. Part of this tablet may have been purposefully erased and written over. That is, it may be a palimpsest or partial palimpsest.

I address these problems in some detail in the accompanying PDF file. I have also addressed a few of them in less technical posts. You can find a discussion of the price of olive oil at "What Does This Have to Do With the Price of Olive Oil in Jerusalem?" and the price of wheat at "What Does This Have to do With the Price of Emmer in Turkey?"

So what do I think KTU 4.710 means?

On behalf of his lord, Guddanu delivered 8 portions of wheat and 23 jars of olives to the house of Yatiru. For the wheat, he received one jar of olive oil and one shekel of silver. For the olives, he received between 17 1/4 and 23 shekels of silver.

By this interpretation, the text is the Late Bronze Age equivalent of a "shipper" or perhaps an "invoice."

Posted by DuaneSmith at November 6, 2005 01:22 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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