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May 04, 2006
van Soldt on Scribal Training at Ugarit
Since I paid $58.20 for the privilege, I thought I'd provide a top level summary of van Soldt's "Babylonian Lexical, Religious and Literary Texts, and Scribal Education at Ugarit and its Implications for the Alphabetic Literary Texts" today. In this way I can get at least two posts out of it; this one, and the one I am working on for posting sometime in the future.
van Soldt begins with a very detailed account of how scribal students were taught at Ugarit. His major focus in the first couple of sections of the paper is on the teaching of Akkadian. He then turns to how alphabetic Ugaritic was taught and then to the scribal families. I will take a couple these items up in more detail in a forthcoming post. The real burden of van Soldt's paper rests on his analysis of the religious and literary texts in Akkadian. Many of these texts are clearly associated with the education of scribes. While van Soldt cites several examples, I will focus here on the Šubê-awilim wisdom text (RS 22.439). Long ago, I studied this text in some detail. This text is known from Boğazköy and Emar as well as Ugarit. The version from Boğazköy is a Hittite-Akkadian bilingual text.
While many parallels between this wisdom text and texts from Mesopotamian, Egypt and the Hebrew Bible have been adduced, van Soldt draws our attention to the colophon. He notes that the colophon gives the name of the scribe, "ME.DI.A.UM son of Adbu the scribe" but also the name of this teacher, ALIM.SAG?[ ]. This is a common feature of "school texts" as opposed to texts written for other purposes which, if they mention the scribe at all, do not name his teacher. van Soldt points out that the find spot of this text is associated with the other texts in the "Lamaštu" archive at Ugarit. A very large number of clearly school texts, lexical and otherwise, were found in this library.
When van Soldt turns to the alphabetic texts from Ugarit he notes that in KTU 1.6 (vi54-58) and possibly KTU 1.17 (left edge) the name of the scribe, Ilimalku, and the name of his teacher, Attênu are given. KTU 1.6 is part of the Ba'al cycle and KTU 1.17 is part of the Legend of Aqhat. On the basis of his analysis of the colophons and supported by internal evidence (primarily scribal errors), van Soldt suggests that these texts were dictated to Ilimalku by Attênu in the final stages of Ilimalku's training.
What, if anything, might this say about the possibility of there being a scribal school in Jerusalem during the United Monarchy (if there was such a thing)? Stay tuned.
References:
Soldt, W. H. van, "Babylonian Lexical, Religious and Literary Texts, and Scribal Education at Ugarit and its Implications for the Alphabetic Literary Texts," Ugarit: ein ostmediterranes Kulturzentrum in Alten Orient: Ergebnisse und Perspektiven der Forshung, Dietrich and Loretz eds., Abhandlungen zur Literatur Alt-Syrien-Palästinas ;Bd. 7, Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1995, 171-212
Posted by DuaneSmith at May 4, 2006 03:42 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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