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July 23, 2007

On My AMule Again

In this post, I do penance for making an erroneous comment about mules on Blue Cord a couple of weeks ago. Well, it was not exactly about mules but about the Ugaritic word for "mule." Much of the delay in posting this penance is due to the time required to get my hands on Pardee's Les Textes Hippiatriques. This is a small, abnormally interesting, book that contributed absolutely nothing to this post however much I hoped it would.

It seems that Kevin Wilson of Blue Cord was reflecting on 2 King 5 and got a little diverted into a discussion of mules which Charles Halton of Awilum and I took up in the comments.

Kevin ended his post,

I found it interesting that pered in v.17 is translated as ‘mule’ in every translation I could check. While it is clear that there were mules in the ancient world, it is not entirely certain that pered indicates a mule. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and female horse, but interbreeding of animals was forbidden in Israel (Leviticus 19:19), although this does not mean it was not practiced.

I noted that in Zechariah 14:15 the horse (הַסּוּס), the mule (הַפֶּרֶד, the camel (הַגָּמָל) and the ass (הַחֲמוֹר) are listed as if they where all very different beasts of burden. I commented that I could find no cognates meaning "mule" in Akkadian or Arabic. Charles, noting Akkadian perdum (pirdu) meaning some kind of equid, quoted from Koehler-Baumgartner's lexicon to the effect that prd in Ugariric means "mule," and that it also occurs in personal names. I repented of the Akkadian error in a follow-up comment. It is the idea that prd means "mule" in Ugaritic that I want to discuss here.

If you look at my comments to Kevin's post, you'll see that at first I didn't think prd ever meant "mule" in Ugaritic. But already in a follow-up comment, I started back peddling a little. And while I'm still not completely sure, I think there is a high probability that prd occurs twice in the Ugaritic texts as a common noun meaning "mule."

The root(s), but not necessarily the common noun, prd appear(s) in Ugaritic a total of five times with reasonable certainty and perhaps one additional time in a highly restored text (KTU 4.752:10) and still possibly a seventh time in KTU 1.3 I:2 at the beginning of the Anat text. Let's look at all these examples.

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

prd in Personal Names

prd
KTU 4.295:11 prd . mqby . w . [aṯt]h "Prd the Maqabian and his [wife]." This census text lists personal names followed by a geographical name with gentilic and an indication of wife and number of sons, if any, plus any household animals. The location of prd in this line assures that it is the name of a man. The tablet lists neither sons nor household animals for Prn. Gröndahl, 174, associates this name with the Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic root meaning, trennen, absondern and the Hebrew word פֶּרֶד, "mule."

KTU 4.417:10 This line is identical to KTU 4.295:11 and the structure of this census list is the same as KTU 4.295 but they differ primarily in which households are included. Prn happens to be in both.

prdny
KTU 4.369:17-19 šrm . ksp . l . / wrt mtny . w l /prdny . aṯth "20 (shekels) of silver against the credit of Wrt the Mtnian and Prdny, his wife." Prdny is clearly the name of a woman. The same name may occur in KTU 4.752:10. If so, it involves a rather difficult restoration purposed by the Ugarit Data Bank for a badly broken line and is of little use for the purposes of this review. Gröndahl, 174, simply notes that this name is feminine.

prd and prd meaning some kind of ridable barley eating animal

prd
KTU 4.337:12-13
12) rț . l . ql . d . ybl . prd .
A ritu (garment) for the messenger whom the prd brings
13) b . ṯql . w . nșp . ksp
for one and a half shekels of silver.

Bordreuil and Pardee's, 114, literal translation of d . ybl . prd is "que porte le mulet" but they translate, "qui monte à mulet" in their running translation, 113. Without KTU 4.786:4 with prdm (plural) it would be possible to understand prd in this text as a personal name. However, a common noun for some kind of riding or draft animal is most probable when this text and KTU 4.786:4 are taken together.

prdm
KTU 4.786:4 ṯlṯm . dd . šrm . l . prdm "30 pots of barley for the prdm" Note the plural.

prdmn in Anat
prdmn occurs in KTU 1.3 I:2. This instantiation of prd, if that is what it is, does not inform the question of the meaning and usages of the root(s) in Ugaritic. Rather those usages may inform it. See below for more on this word.

So what kind of an animal is a prd?

The most direct and perhaps obvious answer is, "mule." If we see in Ugaritic prd a close cognate with Hebrew פֶּרֶד, than "mule" seems the best answer. Already in 1939, Virolleaud, 3, suggested that Ugaritic prn was related to Hebrew, פֶּרֶד meaning "mule." However, as we will see, his specific example is very problematic. There is no real reason to question the meaning of the Hebrew word. To be sure, we lack a specific context that identifies a פֶּרֶד as sterile or as the offspring of a mare and a jack (male donkey) or the other way around (a jenny and a stallion in the case for a hinny). But passages like Zechariah 14:15, cited above, and the common LXX translation of the word with ημιονος removes any reasonable doubt about the meaning of פֶּרֶד.

But the Hebrew cognate is in texts hundreds years younger than our Ugaritic examples. Exactly how much younger I will leave to others. To be sure, we know of many cognates that span many hundreds of years nearly unaffected, but it is at least worth taking a look at a possible prior cognate: Akkadian pirdu. You may remember that I mentioned it at the end of my post on Akkadian words for "mule." Pirdu is known from Old Akkadian times and may be seen at Mari. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary (CAD P, 394) defines pirdu as "an equid." Well, there you go. What kind of an equid? They do not know. So might pirdu be still another name for mule, one that was in use prior to kūdanu, parû, and damdammu and when out of common use sometime in the 18th century BCE? Of course, it might be just such an early word for mule.

prdmn in Anat again

So what does Akkadian pirdu tell us about the Ugaritic word prn. Nothing much. Between the likely Hebrew cognate whose meaning is known and the Akkadian cognate whose meaning is unknown, I tend to lean in the direction of the Hebrew cognate, but not primarily because we can be certain of its meaning. I lean this way because of how I see the relationship between the three languages. Ugaritic is , in my view, somewhat closer to Hebrew than it is to Akkadian. I say this even though I no longer think Ugaritic is as closely related to Hebrew, Phoenician, Moabite, etc and even Aramaic as I once did.

So what about prdmn in KTU 1.3 I:2? KTU 1.3 I:1-4a reads, al . tģl t[xxxxx] / prdmn . bd . ali[yn] / bl . sid . zbl . bl arș "Verily you shall lower (or "You shall not lower") . . .. Prdmn serves all powerful Baal, he waited on the prince lord of earth." Actually, Prdmn serves Ba'al dinner! Based on the vowel in sid, I read the verb as a G perfect 3rd person singular (sa'ida) and not an imperative which would likely be written sad (sa'ad). This implies that bd is also a finite verb. In this, I agree with most students of this text. But many early scholars understood the verbs as imperatives. Some have even thought them nouns. On the various attempts to understand lines 2-4a prior to 1978, see Stan Rummel's 1978 dissertation (236ff). Like Stan, (and me) most recent students have thought that Prdmn was the subject of the two verbs. For example, in 1990, Margalit referred to Prdmn as Ba'al's "butler."

One the one hand, the form of Prdmn is different from the other prd based names. One the other hand, if it is indeed the subject of these two verbs and much of the first several lines of the text, than it is virtually impossible for Virolleaud's, 3, suggestion that prdmn is the common noun prd meaning "mule" in the plural with the first person personal pronoun to be the case. That doesn't mean that it isn't somehow based on the Ugaritic word for mule. I would note that quite a few personal names from Ugarit end in -mn. Gröndahl, 53, who does not discuss prdmn, understands these names as having a double suffix, the emphatic/enclitic -ma/-mi plus the common nominal ending -anu/unu.

So I think I have now done proper penance for my errors in the commons on Kevin's blog. Of course, it remains to be seen if I will have to do penance of the errors in this post.

As a reward to whoever made it this far, I refer you to a story that Aydin of Snails Tales told almost a year ago. The story is of his meeting a certain gentleman by the name of Durali someplace in Turkey where only shepherds, sheep, mules, snails and malacologists go. Durali, a 73-year old shepherd, was riding a mule and wearing a Nike hat. Aydin has a picture to prove it. Durali introduced his mount, in Turkish of course, as follows:

This is my taxi. It is a mule. It had a donkey for a father and an animal for a mother.

Aydin and his associates politely suggested that the animal in question just might be a horse. But Durali stuck by his story.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at July 23, 2007 7:28 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Posted by: david at July 25, 2007 10:08 AM

Posted by: Duane at July 25, 2007 10:47 AM

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