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The Strange Case of the Vanishing hayah in Ugaritic »
March 13, 2006
More on the Tel Zayit "abecedary"
Chris Heard at Higgaion has an update on the Tel Zayit "abecedary" that features a very instructive email from Paul Iversen of Case Western Reserve University. If you are at all interested in this topic, go read Chris' post.
There is one point on which I would like to elaborate. Paul Iversen suggests two possibilities for the nontraditional order of the letters on this inscription: 1) ". . . it was a novice who was practicing and thus made mistakes" or 2) "it was someone who was more concerned with practicing the shapes of the letters rather than the order." He notes Greek parallels for both possibilities.
Both possibilities can also be seen in the school texts from Ugarit. KTU 5.6 (below) represents the canonical Ugaritic alphabet.
But in KTU 5.13 the student writes a "g" where he should have written a "z" on the second line. This case is particularly interesting because this line is clearly an attempt to reproduce the first 10 letters of the alphabet following the example of a different and more mature hand in the first line. In his next four attempts, the student gets it right when he writes the complete alphabet at the end of his practice tablet.
A school text like KTU 5.9 appears to be an exercise on letter writing with two partial alphabets on the edges. This text has some wedges that are not even in the form of letters at its end.
KTU 5.15 appears to be meaningless (and orderless?) groups of alphabetic letters (e.g. g i g s g s g i at one point) with syllabic signs scattered in the mix.
Of course, we know of alternative orders of alphabets. The order of the Old South Arabic alphabet is an example of an alphabet for a Semitic language whose letters are represented in a substantially different order than what we expect to see in Ugaritic (or Hebrew). And we know of at least one tablet that uses signs something like the Ugaritic alphabet but is in this Old South Arabic order (KTU 5.24 from Beth Shemesh).
Even so, I think Iversen is correct. We should not postulate an "alternate official order" when we look at the Tel Zayit "abecedary." Nor can we say, "that this (inscription) was meant to be an abecedarium in the sense that it was used to display the official order of the letters of the alphabet, since we do not know the purpose of it."
Update: April 4, 2006
RS 88.2215 is also an abecedary in the Old South Arabic order rather than the canonical Ugaritic order
Posted by Duane Smith at March 13, 2006 7:26 PM | Read more on |
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Comments
I would be interested in seeing the other tablets in the series. KTU 5.9 5.13 etc. Can you supply a link?
Thanks.
Posted by: Suzanne McCarthy at March 16, 2006 9:28 PM
Unfortunately, as far as I know, pictures of the other tablets are not available online. The best place to see pictures of them is in Herdner, Abdree, Corpus des tablettes en cunéiformes alphabétiques, découvertes à Ras Shamra-Ugarit de 1929 à 1939 (CTA), Mission de Ras Shamra, 10, Paris: P. Geuthner, 1963. Most large university libraries will have it. Pictures are also often, but not always, available in the original publications of the tablets. Most, but not all, of them were published a journal called Syria. The picture of KTU 5.6 has been in the public domain for sometime so I felt free to use it.
Posted by: Duane at March 16, 2006 9:50 PM
Thanks.
Posted by: Suzanne McCarthy at March 17, 2006 9:13 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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