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May 28, 2006
Testing a Hypothesis
While waiting for the book I bought in order to save money, I've been working on the post that will follow the post for which that book was purchased. I'm looking at the so called literary texts in Akkadian from Ugarit and Amarna and to a lesser extent from Emar. I'm trying to figure out to what extent these tablets are "graded." By this I mean, to what extent does the complexity of the writing system on these tablets reflect the skill level of the student scribe as he worked his way through the formal training curriculum. I'll have more to say about formal scribal training in another post. The post I'm saving money on by buying a book.
There are two or three tablets from Amarna that have the appearance of using almost no Akkadian bells and whistles, nothing much more than simple open and closed syllables. I've mentioned one of these texts before (EA 356,"The Myth of Adapa and the South Wind"). Now I'm looking at a couple of tablets from Ugairit that were published by Nougayrol in Ugaritica V: RS 22.219 which he called "'En Marge' de Gilgameš" and RS 22.421, "Récit du Déluge." The writing on both of these tablets seems a little "sub-normal" to me but not nearly as simple as EA 356. There are a number of ideograms and not everything is spelled out in simple syllables but they none-the-less seem a little deficient in terms of the complexity of the writing. This is perhaps more true of RS 22.219 than the shorter and more fragmentary RS 22.421. What I'm trying to do is to match the use of ideograms in these texts with the long lists of signs and vocabulary that was used in the formal training of scribes almost everywhere that scribes were taught to write in Akkadian.
I spent most of yesterday afternoon at Honnold Library in Claremont pouring over these lists, which are published in a series of books called Materials for a Sumerian Lexicon (MSL for short, I'll give proper bibliographic information in my more formal post on scribal training). You may remember that it is one volume of the supplemental volumes to this series that is saving me all that money but by now really trying my patience. After straining my eyes on these lists, a couple of them extending over several MSL volumes, and cross checking with the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, I am happy to report that every ideogram in RS 22.219 was introduced into the formal curriculum no later than a little past midway through it. All the ideograms on this tablet were introduced before the last two extremely difficult lists of signs and ideograms were taught (Series Izi and Series Diri, if you want to know their names). Well, truthfully, it's a bit more complex than I'm letting on. There are two ideograms that were introduced rather early in several Mesopotamian versions of the formal curriculum but no tablets from this particular series have been discovered at Ugarit or anywhere else in the west. While this bothers me a little, I don't see it as a show stopper. These ideograms are not in Series Izi or Series Diri either. Oh yeah, there's also the problem of BE+LA, which Nougayrol rendered "gamîrûta?" in Akkadian but seems to make perfectly good sense to me as the unproblematic bêla. But I digress.
As I drove home, I was pretty pleased with myself. But just as I pulled into the driveway, it hit me. I now had to go through RS 22.219 and look at every word that is expressed using syllables and see if it might have been expressed as an ideogram had the student scribe who copied it or read it actually studied these last two lists! And while the tablet isn't very long, this is a fairly difficult task. But the problem is worse than that. Not using an ideogram from the hard part of the curriculum does not necessarily mean that the scribe didn't know it. It only means that for some reason or another he chose not to use it. And a pedagogical reason is just one of several such reasons.
So it looks like I have one of those all too common problems with hypotheses of this type. It can be disconfirmed rather easily but it may not be possible to confirm it without a lot more evidence than is currently available.
Posted by DuaneSmith at May 28, 2006 11:42 AM | Read more on Ugarit |
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