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November 29, 2006
On the Preposition of Ownership and Transfer
As I've noted a couple of times, I'm working my way through a fairly large number of texts that use the West Semitic preposition / to mean "for" or "belonging to" or the like. Believe it or not, this is part of my work on how to recognize a scribal school and I hope I will be able to let you know how it ties in in the next couple of weeks. I am looking mostly at labels and administrative texts and have completed my work on those from Ugarit. While I am still working on some proto-Phoenician, proto-Canaanite and Hebrew examples, I thought I'd post my PDF file with the Ugaritic material as a work in progress. Here is the link to the PDF file. I'll let you know as I update it.
To whet your appetite for this study (if you have an appetite for it at all), I thought I'd give a couple of examples in this post. I've already published a few posts on this subject. Before I give a few Ugaritic samples, I thought it might be fun to look at a couple of Akkadian labels from Ugarit. For course, they do not use the same preposition but they are instructive none-the-less. Let's start with two labels that say the same thing.
RS 17.545 and RS 19.75 are labels found in the Southern Palace Archive but in different rooms. Neither has a seal impression but RS 19.75 has string holes and RS 17.454 likely once did. They both read,
tup-pu ri-kíl-li ša lugal matkar-ga-miš
"Tablet concerning the treaty of/from the king of Karkamiš"
Notice that the relative pronoun, ša, is used to mean "of" or even "decreed by." In fact, translating it "from" may not be far from the mark. van Soldt, 386, following Nougayrol, 292, reasonably speculates that these labels may have been associated with any two of the following tablets: RS 17:230, RS 17,146, RS 18.115, RS.18.19. Which two, no one knows or can even guess.
Now let's look at two other Akkadian labels.
RS 15.154 has both a seal impression and a string hole. It reads,
1 dug geštin š[a] ma-zi-ra-[na],
"One jar of wine of (from?) ’Adurānu."
But note RS 22.31, an Akkadian label with seal impression and string holes that reads,
25 dug i.meš URUna-ni-i
"25 jars of oil (of/for/belonging to) Nanu’u."
Notice that RS 15.154 uses ša in a similar way as seen in RS 17.545 and RS 19.75. But the meaning is now more "which belongs to." But RS 22.31 uses the genitive without any preposition or other particle. Does this mean something different? Perhaps the case with the relative pronoun means ownership of something that can be given to someone else, while the case with the proposition means new ownership, something just acquired.
Now let's look at a couple of Ugaritic examples.
KTU 6.11 is a label with seal impressions and string holes. It reads
kd [.] yn l prt
A pitcher of wine of/for/belonging to Purrati
I think this is to be understood more like RS 22.31, which uses only the genitive, than like RS 15.154, which uses the relative pronoun. But I'm not sure.
Now consider the first two lines of KTU 4:88, which is a record of wheels.
1) şmdm . a[pnt] pairs of wheels(?)
2) bd . prh in the hands of Parahu
So does bd, "in the hands of," mean something different from the preposition "l"? And before you make up your mind take a look at line 7, for example,
apnm . l . bn i[ a pair of wheels for the son of I????
It is tempting to see prh as some kind of collective with the lines that follow referring to specific individuals. But prh is certainly a single individual in KTU 4.134.
Well, if this doesn't stimulated you to check out all the other texts in the PDF file nothing will.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at November 29, 2006 1:31 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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