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September 28, 2006

Not Completely Wasted Thoughts on the Manahat Sherd

I'm still working my way through the corpus of Late Bronze/Iron I Age texts that may have some bearing on scribal schools in Canaan during that period. Aside from seeking additional information on the Tel Zayit inscription, I think I have a good working understanding of the other obvious major candidates like the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon and the Gezer calendar. Notice I said a "good working understanding" and not a "drop dead interpretation" of these texts. But there are a number of other texts that pose interesting problems that may or may not be relevant to the training of scribes. The problem is that they require a tremendous amount of effort with often very little to show for it.

The Manahat Sherd is a case in point. In 1965, John Landgraf and Lawrence Stager discovered this potsherd in a vandalized rock-cut tomb that contained both Iron I and Roman Period sherds. The tomb is about four kilometers southwest of the Ophel in Jerusalem, near the Holy Land Hotel.

The inscription reads lšdħ (I use ħ for het.)

All four letters are clear and very readable in the picture Stager, 47, published. The text is written from right to left. While Stager, 47 n 19, is certainly correct that "the horizontal mark to the left of the het . . ." is a scratch, I am not so sure about the vertical mark in the upper left hand corner of the sherd. Stager thinks it is also a scratch but it may be a word divider. If it is a word divider, there is no way of knowing what came before it. Stager, 52, and Cross, 103, date the inscription to the 11th century BCE while Sass, 85, suggests a somewhat broader dating: eleventh-tenth century.

Stager, 48, and the others reasonably take the l to be a preposition meaning "belonging to" and šdħ to be an otherwise unattested personal name. The same use of the preposition can be seen in a significant number of comparable inscriptions, both earlier and later.

I decided to go through a thought process to determine if anything could be learned from the personal name if, indeed, it is a personal name. Without boring you with all the details, I considered the 8 theoretically possible proto Semitic roots that could be reflected in this name if one takes the name to be šdħ but is completely uncertain of the Semitic language from which it derived. Nothing useful came from this exercise. I also looked at other possibilities like a hollow root (*DY/WĦ for example) with a causative verbal stem (šamlaka, to use the Ugaritc paradigmatic form as an example). While there is an outside possibility of Hebrew or Aramaic origins, I think those possibilities are low because a different causative stem was used with this root in these languages. I could find no combination that yielded a high probability coherent entomology for the name šdħ in any Semitic language.

So this little exercise has led nowhere. An unattested name built from an unattested root and/or an unattested stem is just that: unattested. Oh, there is even the possibility that the name is not a Semitic name. How about a Hurrian or Philistine name in an otherwise Semitic context?

Stager, 52, does make an observation in his conclusion that could be of importance to my pursuit.

Given the provenience of the find, the stabilization of the script, and the somewhat disparate paleographical affinities, this writer concludes that the Manahat Sherd is the earliest example of standardized linear Canaanite script. Its script represents not an intermediary link between Old Phoenician and Proto-Canaanite, but rather a southern variation of Proto-Canaanite, contemporary with the Old Phoenician corpus of the eleventh century B.C.

If Stager's observations about the script are correct, then the Manahat Sherd may join other circumstantial evidence for a scribal tradition using a linear "Proto-Canaanite" like script in or near Jerusalem in the 11th or 10th century BCE.

I'm going through a process more or less like this on about a dozen texts. I don't plan to post on each of them separately unless something abnormally interesting comes up.

References:

Posted by DuaneSmith at September 28, 2006 07:33 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |

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