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January 26, 2007
Shifting Back Ten Centuries?
The other day Jim Davila reported on PaleoJudaica the public display of the "earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered." The Semitic material is written in Egyptian Hieroglyphics and is embedded in an Old Egyptian inscription that has been known to scholars for over a century. The inscription is on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara and Egyptologists date it between the 25th and 30th centuries BCE. Jim links to several popular accounts in English and to one technical discussion in Hebrew.
Richard Steiner at Yeshiva University recently demonstrated the Semitic nature of portions of the text. Aaron Koller, one of Jim Davila's many readers, sent Jim the following email which Jim included as a update to his post.
Following your links, I read Steiner's paper; it seems he thinks the dialect he's found does show the Canaanite shift. The "traditional" dating is based on its non-existence in Ugaritic, but if Ugaritic is outside the Canaanite family anyway, this may simply push the date of the shift back by a thousand years, and clarify to some extent the position of Ugaritic in NWS [North West Semitic - des].
For the uninitiated, the Canaanite shift is a phonetic phenomenon (original Semitic long a changes to long o) that occurred in languages like Phoenician and Hebrew and, as we will see, Late Bronze age "Canaanite" but did not happen in Akkadian, Ugaritc and Arabic for example.
I don't think it is at all surprising that the Canaanite shift predates the Ugaritic texts. The Amarna Letters from Canaan indicate that the Canaanite shift was present in the local languages of Canaan at about the same time as the Ugaritic texts were being written and used in Syria. Perhaps the best example from Amarna is the Canaanite gloss preposition ah-ru-un-ú (’ahrānhu > ’ahrōnhu) in EA 245:10, but there are dozens of other examples (see Sivan, 29-30). To be sure, there are a few counter examples also, but the preponderance of the evidence supports the Canaanite shift in the local Canaanite language of the Amarna Age. If you try to turn the clock back another 100 years and look at the Taanach letters the evidence is ambiguous. All the possible examples are names; many of them place names. The only point I want to make is that the shift coexisted in Canaan with a cognate language that did not adopt it and therefore was, on this evidence, likely older than both.
Sivan, 34 n. 1, outlines the debate as of 1984 as to when the shift first became operative. He ends this short discussion with the following words,
It is clear that all these opinions are not sufficiently authenticated, since each is based on only a few unclear examples. Thus, one cannot conclude from them the date of the shift's inception.
Well it is just possible that the Egyptain/Semitic text that Steiner worked on provides still another perhaps "unclear" example of the Canaanite shift, but this example is older than the 24 century BCE!
So what is the evidence from the Egyptain/Semitic text? I have not worked my way through the text, nor have I made more than a superficial effort to understand Steiner's Hebrew paper on the text. (To say that my ability to read Modern Hebrew is limited would be to give too much credit to my ability to read Modern Hebrew.) That said, I think the most obvious example of the Canaanite shift in this text is found in Steiner's line 15; t-w-b which Steiner renders טוב. Now, is that "good" enough? It may be good enough but I am still concerned about the context and I feel the need to dig a little deeper. Also, now, some skepticism is developing about Steiner's whole interpretation. Check out this link where Thomas Schneider, Chair in Egyptology at University of Wales Swansea claims that several of Steiner's proposed correspondences between Egyptian signs and proposed Canaanite phonemes are "IMPOSSIBLE." Perhaps, I'll have an update in a day or two.
If you can't think of any better way to spend two or three days weeks take a look at the text that Steiner provides in his paper.
By the way, if you don't check PaleoJudaica every day you will miss out on much of the modern news about the ancient Levant and elsewhere.
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Posted by DuaneSmith at January 26, 2007 05:25 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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