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December 12, 2005

The Cuneiform Short Alphabet: Part 5

A School Text: KTU 5.22 (RS 26.135; UF 7 (1975), 166f; UF 11 (1979), 121f)

This is the fifth 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. 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. There are also links to my other studies there.

KTU 5.22 - A School Text:

The first thing I noticed about this text was how little of it I could read, even in transliteration. Certain words like "eye" and "light" were clear enough but on the whole the vocabulary seemed very obscure. When I glanced through the secondary literature, I was surprised how often scholars cited Akkadian cognates to explain the various vocabulary items. Of course, many Ugaritic, and for that matter Northwest Semitic, words have Akkadian cognates but it is uncommon, although not unheard of, for an Ugaritic word to have only an Akkadian cognate unless it is a loanword. And when does the number of loanwords indicate that the actual language of a text is in the "loan" language? For this reason, I began to ask myself if it were possible that this word list was composed of Akkadian words rather than Ugaritic words or some other Northwest Semitic words. While, there are certain words and expressions that cannot be explained as being Akkadian, there are many others that, in my view, can best be explained as Akkadian words or loanwords.

On both internal and archaeological evidence it is likely that this text was written during the last few decades before the fall of the city of Ugarit (see the accompanying PDF file). The nature of the contents of the tablet and the lack of maturity of the hand of the student scribe indicate that KTU 5:22 is a school or training text. In addition, based on my interpretation of the last line, line 29, the text explicitly says that it is a recitation tablet.

The text is written from left to right and while some of the letters are somewhat unusual, none appear to be in the form that I have come to expect of other texts written in the short cuneiform alphabet. So why take it up? First, M. Dikstra (1986) treats it as a "text in the shorter cuneiform alphabet." Second, independent of the base language of the text, the scribe, or his teacher do use the sign in a way that reminds one of the short cuneiform alphabet. For this reason, the text may well represent an alphabet having fewer letters than the canonical long Ugaritic alphabet but more than those commonly used in the short alphabet. You can read more about this in the accompanying PDF file that, as usual, gives far more detail than I am presenting here.

There is another vexing feature of this text. While the obverse of the tablet is nicely spaced with each line clearly defined and self-contained. The reverse is a bit of a mess. Lines 12 through 21, which continue around the bottom edge of the tablet and onto the reverse, are written as one might expect. When the reverse was full, the student scribe simply rotated the reverse 180 degrees and wrote so that lines 23 through 29 are interdigitized with lines 12 to 21. The scribe even had to curve the lines here and there so they would fit.

Previously I have presented a photograph and autograph of the tablet under study. Because of the more recent publication of this tablet, I have decided not to include them in this post. Anyone who would like to see a photograph of the table can see it in Bordreuil and Pardee (1989), 328. The photo is not very good and does not show the bottom edge of the tablet where a couple problems are found. The best autograph is in Dietrich and Loretz (1988), 189. Check out the bibliography on these studies for complete reference. If you do not have easy access to a research library but would like to see the photograph or the autograph, please send me an email and I will try to make arrangements.

Transliteration:

In the transliteration below, I have used three columns. The first column represents the obverse (front) of the tablet and the bottom edge; the second column represents the continuation of the obverse onto the reverse and the third column represents the words and phrases written on the reverse after the scribe rotated the tablet 180⁰. The numbers followed by ) are reference line numbers and not part of the text.

Translation:

I have used the same structure that I used in the transliteration to present to translation below.

Obverse	Reverse (left edge)	Reverse (right edge)
1) hole	12) key	23) leather sack
2) bowl	13) stone	24) wheat
3) basket	14) sorcerer	25) emmer
4) light	15) chariot	26) wheels
5) lamp stand	16) kettle	27) window
6) sword	17) flour	28) resident foreigner
7) sandals	18) light	29) recitation tablet
8) eye	19) leaf
9) Prince of Tyre	20) twig
10) basket	21) 'Ammurapi
11) cotton card?	22) two/scarlet watering can(s)

If you are interested in seeing how others have translated this text or why I chose this or that translation of a word or line, check out the PDF file for this text.

This is without doubt a school text, written by a student in the course of his training to be a scribe. There are a few other things that can be said about the text. First, while I have not taken up the idea as a significant interpretive element, ten of these words can be understood as personal names, ‛Ammurapi, the name of the last king of Ugarit is the most obvious one. Eighteen of these words may be Akkadian rather than Northwest Semitic (Ugaritic). On the other hand, eleven of the words or phrases can only be reasonably understood as Northwest Semitic and as many as twenty one appear in otherwise known Ugaritic texts. I have a table in the PDF file that shows the word-by-word breakdown.

Final Remarks:

As I have said before, even if my interpretation that line 29 explicitly calls the tablet a "recitation tablet" cannot be supported, this is without doubt a school text. While local word clusters may be apparent, the over all text has a certain random quality. Was the student influenced by some knowledge of the short alphabet, as Dietrich and Loretz (1988), 193, suggest as an option and Dijkstra (1986), 122 thinks certain? Aside from the special use of the sign, there is no other evidence that this is so. And the presence of long alphabet letters not found in other short alphabet texts seems to provide direct evidence against this hypothesis. More interesting is Dietrich and Loretz' (1988), 193, suggestion that,

Er gehörte zu einer Bevölkerungsschicht, die das phonizisch-kanaanäsiche Substrat Ugarits und dessen Umgebung sprach und deswegen bei der Darstellung der von ihm artikulierten Laute durch das standardgemässe Langalphabet zahlreiche Unsicherheiten mitbrachte [emphasis added].

But, as far as I can determine there is little evidence of uniquely Phoenician-Canaanite influence. Rather, I think our student was heavily influenced by the Akkadian scribal tradition. In the course of the line-by-line analysis (see PDF file) I noted several instances were the student seems to have used Akkadian orthographic and phonetic glosses.

In a previous post, I asked readers to point out any patterns larger than a few words that they might see in a preliminary translation of the text. I got three interesting responses. My good friend Glen Griffith told me at our regular Thursday lunch get-together that he was reminded of a spelling test where the teacher dictated the words and the students wrote them down. Something like that is certainly going on here. It is possible that the student is writing from memory but it is more likely that he is writing from dictation. The fact the some words repeat makes it appear that something other than an old-fashioned spelling test is involved. While it was a long time ago that I took my last spelling test, it was within the last three millennium, so it is possible that Glen is correct and repeat words were not a problem in those, even more, ancient times. Another interesting idea came from Aydin Örstan of Snails Tales. Aydin suggested that "that the Prince of Tyre was visiting Ammurapi or vice versa & this was an account of that visit, maybe including the gifts exchanged or food served." We do know that the king of Tyre and the king of Ugaritc corresponded because a couple of those letters are extent (KTU 2.38 for example). While I am not sure that the genre of this text supports such an interpretation it did lead me to arrange it as shown above. It is interesting that the number of words between the beginning of the text and the phrase "prince of Tyre"(8), the number of words between the "prince of Trye" and the name Ammurapi (11) and the number of words from the name Ammurapi to the end of the text (8) are all about the same. In addition, the two words that repeat in the text as a whole do not repeat in any one section so defined. I don't know what, if anything, to make of this. Finally, G. Brooke of Brooke's Battez-vous speculated that the pattern might be in the cuneiform rather than the content. ". . . perhaps there is one or a set of orthographic patterns being taught/reinforced. Sort of like a student of cursive English might have a list of words with many descending or ascending letters." This is an interesting suggestion. There are, of course, recognizable writing styles at Ugarit and elsewhere. We also know of texts where the teacher seems to have written the first part of the text and the student tries to duplicate the teacher's efforts. The abecedary exercise table KTU 5.13 has a first line in a firm hand and lines 2-6 are a student's attempt to duplicate the partial abecedary of the first line and lines 7, 8 and 9 contain a complete alphabet. I took a close look at KTU 5.22 but could see nothing.

Like KTU 7.60, the inscribed votive nail, this text does not appear to be in the short cuneiform alphabet tradition and will, for the time being, be excluded from further study. It may be necessary to revisit it when I consider the larger question of the origin of the short cuneiform alphabet. At that time and also when we consider the Bet Shemesh abecedary, it will be necessary to look at additional school texts from Ugarit and elsewhere.

I close with a Sumerian proverb, one version of which Joe Cathy is using in the right hand header on his blog.

dub-sar eme-gir₁₅ nu-mu-un-zu-a a-na-am₃ nam-dub-sar-ra-ni

What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?

(ETCSL Proverbs 6.1.02 line 80)

Indeed, at Ugarit, what kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Akkadian?

Posted by Duane Smith at December 12, 2005 2:39 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Posted by: Joe Cathey at December 13, 2005 6:13 AM

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