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February 20, 2006

A Preview of the Beth Shemesh Abecedary Tablet Study

I'm still awaiting interlibrary loan to do its wonders so I can finish up my work on the Tell Tannack tablet. In the meantime, I thought I'd share my preliminary thoughts on the "Abecedary" tablet found in 1933 during Elihu Grant's excavations at Beth Shemesh. The Beth Shemesh Abecedary Tablet is known as KTU 5.24 or AS 33.5.165 if one prefers its excavation number. Here is my tracing from Grant's Plate XX with reference to the picture he published in 1933.

The letters around the tracing represent my efforts to identify the letters that are more or less readable. The gray areas are broken and, in two of the cases, restored areas of the tablet. I believe that the top line of the tablet should be read from right to left and the bottom part read from left to right. If correct, this is a case of, Boustrophedon, "as the ox plows."

I'll get into the details in my more formal post on this tablet, but, despite some early humorous attempts to understand the tablet otherwise, it is a list of the letters in a cuneiform alphabet ordered roughly (exactly?) after the Old South Arabic alphabetic order. Because of the broken nature of the tablet, particularly on the left and across the bottom, it is hard to tell exactly how many letters were in the alphabet. I'm in the process of seeing how the four or five suggestions for restoring the text actually fit. Just to give an indication, Lourndine (1983), 244, thought there were 24 letters on the tablet. Dietrich and Loretz (1988), 290, saw a possible 28 letters. In other words, Dietrich and Loretz thought the alphabet on this tablet is the same length (and phonically the same also) but in a different order as the canonical Ugaritic alphabet (excluding the two extra versions of the aleph know from Ugarit). It is certainly not the same alphabet that we have seen in texts like Amurriyu's Sacrifice to Baal (KTU 1.77), Record of Purchases (KTU 4.31), Wheat and Olives for the House of Yatiru (KTU 4.710) and a few others. Notice that, on the one hand, the sign, if it is on the tablet at all (left side?), does not stand for both the voiceless uvular fricative (ح) and voiceless pharyngeal fricative (خ). One of the more legible letters is the chet (third from the right at the top.). On the other hand, the small circle seems to stand for š but it is impossible to determine its phonic range. By the way, some scholars see some small wedges associated with this circular letter. I'm not so sure they are there. The m and the d have the morphology we have come to expect from the short cuneiform alphabet. All this indicates that the cuneiform alphabet was not fixed and that several variations of it were known in the Late Bronze Age. Recall the discussion of the School Text (KTU 5.22). All of this causes uncertainty if one wants to identify a specific corpus of texts as belonging to the short cuneiform alphabetic tradition.

This tablet has become the centerpiece in a rather intense discussion between Dietrich and Loretz on one side and Benjamin Sass on the other over the origins of the canonical Ugaritic alphabet and the history of the alphabet in general. Its not my intention to get in the middle of that but it is an interesting debate.

When I do my formal write-up on this text, I will also look at several other abecedaries that are known from Ugarit and elsewhere.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at February 20, 2006 3:59 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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