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April 03, 2006
Oops, I almost Missed an Elephant
One of the problems with being out of the loop for a couple of decades is that you are really out of the loop. Sunday I was putting what I thought were the finishing touches on my study of the Beth Shemesh abecedary when I ran across something that I should have known about months ago. A final pass through the secondary material led me to a couple of important articles that I hadn't looked at. One of them by Juan Pablo Vita hit me right between the eyes. Lo and behold, there is an abecedary tablet from Ugarit that is in the same order as the Beth Shemesh tablet. And worse, it had been published by Bordreuil and Pardee in 1995! And when I went back and looked at Sass (2005), 122, there it was again. How did I miss it? And just to drive the nail into the coffin, Hayajneh and Topper, 1997, mention the tablet from Ugarit at some length. Heaven only knows who else may have mentioned what I missed.
Well, my last sentence is not exactly correct because I now know of several other important works that mention it. Most of these are not available at my local university research library, Honnold Library in Claremont. For example, Bordreuil and Pardee's original publication of the tablet is in the ever popular Comptes-rendus del'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Letters. So off to UCLA I go to try to get my arms around this tablet. For those who keep score, the tablet is RS 88.2215.
Not including RS 88.2215 in a discussion of the Beth Shemesh tablet would be like ignoring the proverbial elephant in the living room. So I need to go clean up after another elephant.
References:
Hayajneh, Hani and Josef Tropper, "De Genese des altsudarabischen Alphabets", Ugarit Forschungen 29, Münster: Verlag Butzon and Bercher Keverlaer, 1997, 183-198
Pardee, Dennis, "Abécédaure" in M. Yon D. Amaud (eds) Étydes ourgaritiques I, Travaux 1985-1996, Paris: 2001, 341-348
Sass, Benjamin, The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium, The West Semitic Alphabet CA. 1150-850 BCE, The Antiquity of the Arabian, Greek and Phrygian Alphabets, Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University Occasional Publications, Number 4, Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications, 2005
Vita, Juan Pablo Alfabetos "Lineal y Cuneiforme: Relaciones en el II Milenio A.C.," Huelva Arqueológico, 20, 2003, 9-40
Posted by DuaneSmith at April 3, 2006 07:21 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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