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January 19, 2007

An Egyptian Word in the Vocabulary of an Akkadian Letter to Taanach

Some time ago, I wrote a post on the possibility of there being Egyptian loanwords in Epigraphic Hebrew. I found one, but it likely came into Hebrew in an indirect way. Well, it turns out that there is likely an Egyptian loanword in one of the fifteenth century BCE Akkadian letters found at Taanach, TT 6, and a cognate of this word appears in Biblical Hebrew.

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The Akkadian reads ˹ḫa˺-na-ku-u-ka (TT 6:8) and refers to some kind of guard or mission, "your ḫanakū." Albright, 221, first pointed out the relationship between this word and Egyptian ḥnk.w. The meaning of the Egyptian word is in the range of "armed retainers." Albright, following Yahuda, 282, also noted the likelihood that חניכיו, "his trained men (NRSV)" in Genesis 14:14, is itself related to this Egyptian word. But unlike Yahuda, Albright argued that the Hebrew and Canaanite words were borrowed from the Egyptian rather than the other way around. More precisely, I would suggest that the Hebrew is a reflection of an Egyptian word that already had a very long currency in the West Semitic dialects spoken in Canaan although its continued use may have been reinforced from time to time by contact with contemporary (ancient) Egyptian. Here is what Albright, 221, said of the word,

The word is unquestionably connected with Egyptian ḥnkw, used in the Aechtungstexte, about 2000 B. C., for the armed retainers of the chieftains of Palestine and Syria. . . . There is no suitable Semitic etymology; the verb חנך, حنك, though originally identical with Egyptian ḥnk, possesses a different meaning, and has developed in a different way.

Rainey, 1996: I 140, takes the word to be West Semitic or Egyptian. But he apparently misread Albright and thought that Albright supported a West Semitic origin of the word. However, by 1999, Rainey 1999, 159* seems to have more fully adopted an Egyptian origin for the word. Horowitz and Oshima, 142, say, "ha-na-ku is most probably an Egyptian loan word" and site Genesis 145:14 and Rainey 1999. Lambdin, 150, also cites this word in Tanaach letter 6 and notes the Egyptian origin of it and its Hebrew equivalent.

ḫanakū is the subject of the verb i-ba-šu, ibāšū, 3rd person, masculine, plural, preterite tense of bašu, "to be, to exist" in TT 6. The complete syntax of the sentence negates the verb. Horowitz and Oshima, 142, translate the whole sentence, "Furthermore, your retainers are not on guard." Is ḫanakūka a collective or is the long u an example of the standard nominative plural with suffix as Rainey, 1996: I 140, thinks? The orthography lacks MEŠ or LU.MEŠ. My guess is that one should treat it as a plural but I can imagine that the scribe was trying to emulate the Egyptian.

Another interesting question, which I hinted at above, is how those who wrote and read this word understood it. In other words, was it understood in Canaan as being an Egyptian loanword in the same way that we think of "spaghetti" as being an Italian word? There are two ways to argue this question. On the one hand, this letter and TT 5 are from a person by the name of Amanhatpa. That sure sounds Egyptian to me. While it is unlikely that he was a Pharaoh, it is likely that he was an Egyptian military officer in Canaan. See Rainey, 2006: 76. So his self-conscious use of an Egyptian word might be expected. On the other hand, the complete text of this letter and the other one from Amanhatpa, TT 5, contain many West Semitic usages. Of example, the very sentence containing ḫanakūka also has one of the three examples of the West Semitic enclitic m seen in this letter. (I'll have more to say about that when I get around to posting my translations of all four of the letters from Taanach in a few days. I need to take a trip to UCLA to check out a couple of things before that post will be ready.) These West Semitic intrusions reflect local Canaanite scribal activity. In fact, it is likely, based on what we read in TT 5, that Amanhatpa sent that letter to Talwašur of Taanach from Megiddo. And despite the phrase i-na URU ḫa-za-t[i] i-ba-ša-ni, "I was in Gaza" or "I am in Gaza," as Rainey, 2006: 76 would have it, I agree with Horowitz and Oshima, 140, that both letters originated at Megiddo. And if Amanhatpa did indeed send both letters from Megiddo, then he likely used a Megiddo based scribe. Reflecting on TT 5 and TT 6, Rainey, 1996: II 31, says, "Their dictus is almost identical with that of the Megiddo Amarna letters." It would help if we knew how this letter got from Amanhatpa's mind to the tablet. For example, did he dictate it in Egyptian, to someone who translated it into the local version of Akkadian? If something like this happened, then the translator hearing the Egyptian word would have known that using it in an Akkadian letter would be understandable to the scribe who received the letter for Talwašur. It is just possible that the scribe who wrote the letter knew the word was an Egyptian word and the scribe who received it thought it was a somewhat strange (Dare I say "abnormal"?) Canaanite or Akkadian word. But all this is in the realm of speculation. Note: in 1996 Rainey, II 31, thought both letters were written from Gaza but he may now think that TT 5 came from Megiddo. See Rainey, 2006: 76. I'll have more to say on this issue also.

One other thing worth noting is that certain technical words like ḫanakū have a very long life indeed.

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Posted by Duane Smith at January 19, 2007 7:33 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |

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