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July 25, 2007

How to Take Care of a Coughing Horse

Well, how you might take care of a coughing horse if you lived in Ugarit during the Late Bronze age.

The other day I mentioned Pardee's Les Textes Hippiatriques. The book deals with four Ugaritic tablets, all broken to varying degrees, which offer specific treatments of horses. While these four tablets are not exactly identical, they are enough alike to be helpful in reconstructing the most complete of them (KTU 1.85). Pardee's book also deals with an Akkadian hippic text from Ugarit.

I've never worked on this kind of a text. So, I thought it might be fun to look at KTU 1.85 in detail. The text is extremely difficult and there are many strange words and some grammar that is unusual. Pardee, 39- 68 provides extensive note. Below is the text of the heading of the tablet and the first of eleven sections. Each section deals with a different ailment.

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

1) spr . nʿm . śśwm
----------------------------------------------------
2) k . ygʿr . śśw . št . ʿqrbn
3) ydk . w ymsś . hm . b . mskt . dlḥt
4) hm . b . mndģ . w . yṣq . b . aph

With more than a little help from Pardee, I translate this as follows,

Document for the Health of Horses

When a horse cries out (coughs?), One crushes(?) a bunch(?) of scorpion plant (Aconitum anthora)? and liquefies it into a fresh mixture and/or into a mndģ (sprinkle?) and pours it into its nose.

Some places I have likely been overly literal ("cries out") and other places ("a bunch') I have been overly free. The scientific name of the plant is little more than a guess. The verbal forms are not completely clear. I use "one" as the subject because the verbs appear to be 3rd person masculine singular (jussive?). One might expect an imperative or a 2nd person. Perhaps something like "let one" would be better, if a little over formal in English.

Here is how Pardee translates these lines.

Document de thérapeutique pour chevaux

Si le cheval tousse (?), on doit broyer (une mesure ?) - ŠT de cQRBN (« la plante-scorpion ») et le dissoudre ou dans un mélange de jus nature ou dans du MNDĠ et l'administrer par ses narines.

As I said, this kind of text is extremely difficult and full understanding is only possible for those who have steeped themselves in similar literature written in Hittite, Akkadian and even Greek. And even then, there are often problems with vocabulary. I am not so steeped in this literature. I hardly know anything about this literature but it is abnormally interesting and very intriguing.

Reference:

Pardee, Dennis, Les Textes Hippiatriques, Ras Shamra-Ougarit II, Paris: Editons Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1985

Posted by Duane Smith at July 25, 2007 7:22 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Comments

I remember working on a few of these texts at Brandeis with David Wright. For some reason the refrain of pouring every mixture up the horses' nose was quite humorous to us; and we wound up making a song out the prescriptions. They're a good example of how repetition and fix formulae are not the same as poetry. :-)

On a more serious note, Chaim Cohen and Daniel Sivan have also done an edition of the hippiatric texts: The Ugaritic hippiatric texts : a critical edition, (American Oriental Series Essay 9; New Haven, Conn. : American Oriental Society, 1983). I don't know Cohen's other work, but Sivan definitely gives you a different view of how the grammar works, given his association with Rainey. It is worth checking out.

Posted by: Jim Getz at July 26, 2007 8:07 AM

Jim,

Thanks. Was the song to a popular tune? I do need to take a look at Cohen and Sivan. The use of the verbs is an interesting problem. I did look at how Sivan parsed yşq in his grammar (3 m p). I think Pardee has about the same view although he doesn't say so explicitly with regard to this verb. But I preferred a modified version of the suggestion Pardee attributed to Fornzaroli.

Posted by: Duane at July 26, 2007 9:19 AM

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