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June 24, 2007

The Manahat Sherd Again

While I haven't looked at the literature lately, I'm fairly sure that it is not a sign of good mental health to continue to beat ones head against the same rock or in my case sherd over a long period of time. But that's exactly what I've been doing for the last couple of days. I've written a post in this sherd before. As I said in that post,

In 1965, John Landgraf and Lawrence Stager discovered this potsherd in a vandalized rock-cut tomb that contained both Iron I and Roman Period sherds. The tomb is about four kilometers southwest of the Ophel in Jerusalem, near the Holy Land Hotel.

Stager published it in 1969. What is so vexing about this sherd is that it has the following inscription scratched into it.

lšdḥ

[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]

Unless there is a very unusual space after the ḥ, the ḥ is the last letter. There might have been letters before the l. If so, they are on some unrecovered portion of the sherd. It is easiest to read the l as the preposition that commonly means "belonging to" or the like when inscribed on pots or other artifacts. But what of the last three letters? If the l is indeed a preposition then the last three letters are probably a personal name.

Sass, 85, makes the following observation,

The context and the sherd itself are of no help in dating the inscription. Had it not been found by an archaeologist, one would suspect it was a forgery or a practical joke . . . Its letters have parallels in the eleventh-tenth century inscriptions. [emphasis added]

Stager, 52, and Cross, 103, would date it to the 11th century BCE. You can make your own adjustments for a low chronology if you like but it barely matters in the case of this sherd. The range of possible dates is just too great for it to matter.

In my previous post on this sherd, I thrashed around trying to find an explanation for the name. In the last two days, I've started thrashing around again. Here are two new ideas for the etymology of the name (if it is a name, if it is Semitic),

  1. Akkadian, šadāḫu, meaning, "to walk," "stride," "move forward.
  2. Š causative of נדח, which occurs as a verb in Hebrew as an H causative stem. The Hebrew word, in the H stem, means, "thrust," "move," "impel" or the like.

Now all this is good as far as it goes. But I can't find a single name anywhere that is built on either the Akkadian word or the root, even the proto-Semitic root, of the Hebrew word. I'm back to thinking it is a non-Semitic name if it is a name at all.

The whole exercise reminds me somewhat of the person who said to a roommate. "If we had bacon, we could have bacon and eggs, if we had eggs." If it is a personal name, it is a Semitic name, if it is Semitic.

I'd better move on to something else.

References:

Cross, Frank M., "Early Alphabetic Scripts," Symposia Celebrating the Seventy-fifty Anniversary of the Founding of the American Schools of Oriental Research, Vol. I, Archaeology and Early Israelite History, Frank M. Cross ed., Cambridge, Massachusetts: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1997, 97-123

Sass, Benjamin, The Genesis of the Alphabet and its Development in the Second Millenium B.C., Ägypten und Altes Testament, Vol. 13, Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1988

Stager, Lawrence E. "An Inscribed Potsherd from the Eleventh Century B.C.," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 194, Apr., 1969, 45-52

Posted by Duane Smith at June 24, 2007 6:55 PM | Read more on Archaeology |

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Comments

So... in your first theory from Akk. šadāḫu, would that then mean that the vessel belonged to "Strider"? ;-)

Posted by: Jim Getz at June 24, 2007 7:45 PM

למה לא

Posted by: Duane at June 24, 2007 7:53 PM

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