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September 6, 2006

Two Out of Three Is Not So Bad

My copy of Cuneiform in Canaan just arrived. While I wanted it for my next post on scribal schools, I thought I'd start by looking at how Sanders handled the three alphabetic texts that I had worked on as part of my studies of the short cuneiform alphabetic texts.

Except for the vocalization of a couple of proper names, (he says Şilli-Ba'l, I say Şillība'lu, for example) we read the Knife Blade from the Tabor Valley in the same way. See Sanders, 163-166.

We both see the Beth Shemish abecedary as having 27 letters and not 22 and we both read it in the same way: from right to left across the top then rotating 90° to read the edge and then another 90° to read the "bottom." See Sanders, 157-160. Sanders does read a t where I read a š and a š where I could not read anything. I believe he relies on the alphabetical order of RS 88.2215. I commented on this in the PDF file that goes with my post on this tablet. Sanders is also able to see certain letters on the bottom of the tablet that I could not read even though I was confident that they were there. He and I agree on the reading of the sequence k n h.

On the extremely difficult tablet from Tanaach, Sanders, 161-162, and I part company. Not that I think he is necessarily wrong; I just prefer my interpretation. In the first line Sanders reads "kkb’lp‛ş" where I read "kkb ’sp ‛ţ." He translates the line KKB’, for P‛Ş. Both capitalized words he reads as proper names. Except for his reading of the last letter, he follows Cross, 41-46, in this understanding. He is closer to Cross and Puech 206, in his reading of the remainder of the text. Sanders reads, kpršyhtk l dw and translates it, "The fee/ransom which was fixed for him." So he sees the short text as "a legal notice of remittance."

I understand this tablet as a medical text or perhaps a medical proverb. How can there be so much difference in interpretation? Before I outline the details, let me say that this short tablet has every type of problem in interpretation and even decipherment that one can imagine wrapped up in fewer than twenty letters.

There are three major points in which we part company plus a fair number of minor ones. First, I read the small wedges as word dividers or word markers and he sees no word dividers in the text. I am not alone in my interpretation and neither is he. This difference results in him reading an "anomalous" l in the first line, while I read something else. He is not alone in this reading. Second, like Cross and others he sees two personal names. I see the words in the first line as containing a proposition followed by a common noun, a verb and a noun. The proposition and the first common noun form a conditional clause. I explain why in the PDF file that accompanies my study of this text. Third, in the second line he reads kprš and takes it to be a noun meaning "ransom" or the like followed by the relative pronoun. I take this to read kprt and to mean "henna." We also disagree on the verb at the end of the line. Fourth, we read two or three letters differently. For example, I think the t should be read t rather than š, but I understand why he thinks it should be read š. If you are interested in the gory details, I explain my readings and most of the alternatives in the PDF file.

Sanders says of his efforts on this tablet,

We still lack a broad enough epigraphic base to judge whether the tablet's difficulty of interpretation is due mainly to poor writing or script variance. In absence of autopsy, the treatment here is nothing more than an interpretive suggestion and a bibliographic aid.

The sentiment of this statement applies to my efforts also.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at September 6, 2006 7:45 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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