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March 5, 2006
Something Else to Worry About
While waiting for interlibrary loan to produce one relatively old book (Walter Wreszinski's Der Papyrus Ebers; Umschrift, Übersetzung und Kommentar, 1913), and one relatively new article (Ran Zadok's "A Prosopography and Ethno-Linguistic Characterization of Southern Canaan in the Second Millenium B.C.E.," Michmanim 9, 1996) I started to worry about a sign in KTU 5.24, the Beth Shemesh abecedary tablet. I posted this tracing of the tablet a week ago or so.
The sign that is worrying me is the sign I labeled š, at the top, just to the left of the central crack that runs from top to bottom about the middle of the tablet. Why does this sign worry me? I'm not sure. Because of its place on the tablet, there can be little doubt that is stands for /š/. Both Dietrich and Loretz (1988, 1998) and Sass (1991), as well as most other recent students of the tablet, agree on this. The real question is what the sign looks like. Sass sees a circle more or less as I have drawn it while Dietrich and Loretz (1988) see two small wedges flanking it. Here is what their autograph of the sign looks like: 
. Just for the record, Puech (1986) also only sees a circle. I see the little circle on the two photographs I worked from (see my earlier post) but I see it somewhat larger than they do. In part due to the crack, the photographs are somewhat unclear in this vicinity. The two small wedges, if they can be seen on the picture at all, are nearly invisible. That doesn't mean I wouldn't see them if I was able to hold the tablet in my hand and rotate it under a light.
Not having direct access to the tablet, is there any other sign that might help resolve the question? Well maybe. KTU 1.66 (RS 5.182) has a strange sign. It looks like a more or less standard Ugaritic ‛ayan with a circle around it. Here is how two of them look in Herdner's Plate LXXXV: 
. This is from line 30 but this strange sign occurs several other places in the text. As far as I know, this sign only occurs in this tablet and only in the word pr○○ (where ○ stands for the strange sign). On the basis of the small circle in the short alphabet cuneiform texts without doubt representing /š/, Gordon (1965) suggested that the sign might also stand for /š/. I can't find that anyone has taken him up on this. The text is generally thought to be in the Hurrian language rather than Ugaritic or any other Semitic language. If you look very closely at the second instance of the sign in the small picture above you will see that the lower right tail of the central "‛ayan" may extend outside the circle. What I am wondering is, if the circle were a little smaller and/or the "‛ayan" a little larger, would it look more like what Dietrich and Loretz think they see when they look at the tablet? I don't really know but this is what I am worrying about.
I do have a few other things to worry about but if something like this is even on one's long list, life must be pretty good.
References:
Dietrich and Loretz (1998): Dietrich, Manfried and Oswald Lorenz, "The Cuneifrom Alphabets of Ugarit," Ugarit Forschungen 21, Münster: Verlag Butzon and Bercher Keverlaer, 1998, 101-112
Gordon, (1965): Gordon, Cyrus, Ugaritic Textbook, Analecta Orientallia, 38, Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1965
Herdner (1963): 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
Sass, Benjamin, "The Beth Shemesh Tablet and the Early History of the Proto-Canaanite, Cuneiform and South Semitic Alphabets," Ugarit Forschungen 23, Münster: Verlag Butzon and Bercher Keverlaer, 1991, 315–326
Posted by Duane Smith at March 5, 2006 6:28 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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