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Biblical Studies Carnival XVIII »
June 1, 2007
It's Still Gibberish
A couple of days ago I learned via ABZU that back issues of the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists are online and can be accessed without charge. Most of what they cover is not normally within my abnormal interests but it has been fun browsing through some of this material. For example, I found a paper on a fifth/sixth century CE Greek school tablet by Raffaella Cribiore. A. E. R Boak originally published it in 1921. Boak had said of side 1, "the writing consists of twenty lines . . . each line contains a number of isolated letters, not grouped in syllables or words . . . the work of a beginner practicing the forms of the letters (apud Cribiore who used the ellipses)." But Cribiore argues that side 1 is a list of personal names.
The practice of using personal names in writing exercises is very old. KTU 5.1, KTU 5.18 and KTU 5.22 from Ugarit are rather oblivious examples. KTU 5.1 and KTU 5.18 are of special interest. The names in KTU 5.1 all begin with the letter y and the names in KTU 5.18 begin with i. RS 94.2440 contains two abecedaries and a short list of geographic names. There are much older examples of such exercises from Mesopotamia.
Thinking about these kinds of exercises made me take another hard look at first four lines of the ‘Izbet Sartah Sherd. The fifth line is a poorly executed abecedary. The sherd and its text are best dated over a consider range, 1200 and 1000 BCE. I've discussed it before. I tried everyway I could think of to parse the first four lines as a list of personal names or geographic names. If there is a list of names on this sherd, then they are names that I could find nowhere else. Perhaps others will be more imaginative and find convincing examples. I could not.
The first four lines of the ‘Izbet Sartah Sherd are still gibberish!
Posted by Duane Smith at June 1, 2007 2:24 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
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