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October 10, 2006

On the ‘Izbet Sartah Sherd

As I said yesterday, I will be publishing, on approximately a weekly basis, comments on several texts and artifacts that have a bearing on the possibility of scribal schools in Canaan during the end of the Bronze age and the beginning of the Iron Age.

One of the most vexing artifacts that may relate to scribal training in Canaan is the ‘Izbet Sartah Sherd. A picture and a good drawing of the sherd can be seen on the Biblical Archaeology website (Registration may be required). The "text" on this sherd consists of about 62 or so faint late Proto-Canaanite linear alphabetic letters with very little uniformity that yield no meaningful understanding in any known language plus a clumsily written abecedary. The abecedary is in the expected order, with a few obvious errors, for example the r is missing and it looks like there are two qs, one after the other. One of the most interesting anomalies is that the letter p comes before ‛, rather than after it. This may be an error also but as Demsky, 17-21, pointed out, this same variant appears at Kuntillet Ajrud and the order is preserved in much later acrostic poems in the Hebrew Bible. See my post about the order of the Hebrew alphabet. Depending on how one counts, there are five lines, the fifth line being the abecedary. The third line is short and cut off by the fourth line or perhaps inserted in a triangular gap formed by the curves of the second and fourth lines. Letters are of inconsistent heights and shapes. Dever, 83, apparently an easy grader, gives the scribe who wrote this mess a C-.

Only Dotan and Shea have attempted to interpreter the ortracon as anything other than a student exercise. Their results are inconsistent with each other. Harvey Minkoff suggests that "Oreph son of Nahum" can be read at the beginning of line four and that this may be the name of the scribe. But this is very hard for me to see. I read the first seven letters of line four, ‛ w(?) g b n h m(?) . . . Cross, 9, can't even bring himself to see the m(?) and reads only "?" in this position. It's hard to see Oreph in this. It is possible that the second letter is an "r" and the third a "p" but I think this is a much harder reading than the one I just presented. The lack of a second "n" (bn nhm) should not be too troubling. I discussed the possible assimilation of the "n" in bn in my PDF file on KTU 6.1. Given the almost certain fact that nothing else in the first four lines makes any sense whatsoever, there is no real reason to think that the first seven letters of line four do either. The errors in the abecedary and the seemly random letters written above it make it all but certain that this is a student exercise, perhaps a student exercise gone bad.

The real problem with this sherd is where it was found. If this sherd came from Jerusalem, or Gezer or Hazor or Megiddo or any big well-known place, it would be easy to cite it as evidence of a scribal school at that location. But this sherd comes from ‘Izbet Sartah which Dever, 83, calls a "village." Finkelstein, 73-80, one of the excavators, would agree with this characterization. It is likely that the population peaked at about 100. The silo in which the sherd was found does not clearly associate with any of the three occupation phases of the site, so the archaeological context would allow a date for the sherd anywhere between circa 1200 and 1000 BCE. While some, for example, Demsky and Kochavi, have thought that a more narrow date in the range of 1200 BCE could be secured on comparative epigraphic grounds, I agree with those such as Sass (2005), 45, that this inscription is not useful for epigraphic study and therefore the forms of the letters contribute little or nothing to the question of date of composition. We must be content with a 200 year window in which the inscription on the sherd could have been written. The real question is what this quite obvious student exercise is doing in a place like ‘Izbet Sartah, a village three kilometers (1.8 miles) from Aphek. Aphek certainly had a scribal school during part of the time period that a silo at ‘Izbet Sartah might have been there to throw a sherd into. But during the most flourishing period of ‘Izbet Sartah, Tel Aphek was either abandoned (1240 - ~1100 BCE) or little more than a village itself (~1100 - ~1000 BCE). On the scribal school at Aphek see the fourth post in this series. We can be quite certain that the Aphek scribal school was active circa 1230 BCE. It was likely abandoned within a decade. I've tried to synchronize the archaeological evidence from Aphek and ‘Izbet Sartah's elsewhere.

Lemaire (1981), 7- 10, has a lot to say about this inscription. Perhaps the most interesting is this (10),

L'ostracon d''Izbet Sartah a été trouve dans un silo lié à une installation agricole vraisemblablement israelite, a 3 km à l'est d'Aphek, sur un éperon rocheux rattaché à la chaine des collines de la "montagne d'Ephraïm". Par ailleurs, la découverte de tablettes cunéiformes, en particulier de fragments de dictionnaires, dans le palais du Récent Bronze d'Aphek, semble témoigner on faveur de l'existence d'une tradition scribale cananéenne assez développée dans cette ville au XIV-XIIIéme siècle. Dès lors, l'ostracon d''Izbet Sartah pourrait être l'œuvre d'un israélite apprenant à écrire en dépendance de l'école "cananéenne" d'Apheq tout proche.

Which I translate,

The ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon was found in a silo associated with a probably Israelite agrarian installation, just 3 km east of Aphek on a rocky spur attached to the chain of the hills in the "mountain of Ephraïm." Moreover, the discovery of cuneiform tablets, particularly fragments of dictionaries, in the palace of Late Bronze of Aphek, seems to argue in favor of the existence of a well developed Canaanite scribal tradition in this city in the XIVth-XIIIth century. At this same time, the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon could be the work of an Israelite, learning to write in association with the Canaanite school of nearby Aphek.

While this understanding of the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon is tempting, it is also very speculative. Remembering that there is no way to be certain what language the student was learning and that written Canaanite, not Hebrew, was taught at Aphek, other options come to mind. 1) It is only a coincidence that the ostracon was found in a village near Aphek. 2) The "author" of the ostracon was actually studying Canaanite, his native language, at Aphek and threw a practice ostracon into a silo at ‘Izbet Sartah during one of its periods of abandonment. 3) A passing student dropped the ostracan in the still open silo but after ‘Izbet Sartah was no longer occupied and Aphek was in Philistine or Israelite or someone else's hands. Other options could be listed.

If Lemaire's speculation about a direct relationship between the scribal school at Aphek and the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon is correct then the language that the student was attempting to learn to write was likely not Hebrew. As I indicated in a previous post, based on admittedly little evidence, the West Semitic language taught at Aphek was Canaanite more like Phoenician than Hebrew. Conversely, if the student was studying Hebrew writing he likely didn't learn it at Aphek. It is true that Hebrew could have been taught along side of Canaanite and Akkadian. But there is no evidence for this. There should be no worry about the fact that the extant Aphek tablets are written in syllabic cuneiform while the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon is written in some version of the West Semitic linear alphabet. At Ugarit, all the vocabulary texts are in syllabic cuneiform but students learned to write in the cuneiform alphabet also. That the media changed is not so important either. Scribes at Amarna could write Akkadian in syllabic cuneiform on clay tablets and Egyptian in hieroglyphics (or hieratic) on papyrus.

I have my own wild speculation on this and what I am about to say in this paragraph should not be taken seriously as anything other than food for thought. It is, as they say, considerably beyond the evidence. It is possible that the "author" of the ‘Izbet Sartah ostracon learned something about writing at Aphek and hoped/tried to apply it to Hebrew? Enough idle speculation.

The ‘Izbet Sartah sherd does tell us that writing using a linear alphabetic script was being taught in the Late Bronze/Early Iron I period. The p ‛ order of the alphabet, while possibly another of several errors, may also indicate the existence of a scribal tradition that continued well into the Late Iron II Age. This scribal tradition may be a (southern?) Hebrew tradition as opposed to a Canaanite scribal tradition.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at October 10, 2006 3:07 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |

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