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May 10, 2006
It Must Have Sounded Good in Akkadian
Chuck Jones of ABZU informs me via a comment to a previous post (thank you) that Shlomo Izre'el has transliterations of most of the Amarna Akkadian material online. Izre'el includes all of the letters beginning with EA 60 and the Amarna scholarly tablets. He says he will make EA 1-59 available on request.
If you are not a real Akkadian geek, don't bother to read the remainder of this post.
I've been looking for a way to illustrate one of the more interesting things about some of the literary texts from Amarna and, to a lesser extent, texts like RS 22.219 ('En Marge' de Gilgameš as Nougayrol called it) from Ugarit. These texts were written with very few ideograms. If you know any Akkadian at all, take a look at Izre'el's transliteration of EA 356 ("The Myth of Adapa and the South Wind"). You will need to scroll about half way down the page but you will be shocked. SHOCKED, I say.
I could find only dU.GUR, the divine name, as an ideogram. There are, as far as I can tell, no other ideograms used in some 88 lines of text. The divine determinative is used but I could not find another determinatives. In fact the scribe who wrote this text seems to me to have had a strong preference for open syllables (CV) although he does use quite a few VC type closed syllables but only a very few CVC type syllables. You may also notice that there are markers in the form of red dots on EA 356 and a couple other texts. Izre'el used a ð to indicate certain cases of the red dot and a ° to indicate uncertain cases.
The unusually small number of ideograms and complex syllables has led Izre'el and others to believe that these texts where written from dictation. The scribe knew his phonics if nothing else. There are other reasons to believe that in antiquity many scholarly texts, in fact many texts period, were products of dictation. I will leave that discussion to my forthcoming post on scribal education.
Posted by DuaneSmith at May 10, 2006 01:27 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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