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August 8, 2007
A Restored Text to Restore a Horse
After a short interlude to deal with a couple of other matters, I'm back to the most difficult two sections section of the Ugaritic veterinary text (KTU 1.85:23-29). The first five lines of this next section are so badly broken that, without restoration based on three other tablets, also badly broken tablets themselves, it would be completely impossible to read. With one addition, I follow Pardee's, 23, reconstruction. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of the reconstruction, Pardee, 22, ns 32-35 and 65-67 and this PDF file that I put together will help spell it out. For an alternative approach, see Cohen and Sivan, 52- 56. However, they learned of KTU 1.97, one of the other related tablets, too late in their work to take it fully into account. If KTU 1.85:23-29 is indeed a single section, at seven lines, it is more than twice the length of any other single section. I will discuss why I think it is a now a single, if somewhat confused, section in due course. But before that, let's jump right into the restored text and my translation.
[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]
23) w . k . yg[ʿr . śśw . št . dprn . w]
24) pr . ʿṯ[rb . drʿ . w . ṯ]dq[ . mr . w]
25) tmṯl . gd[ . tm]ṯl . ṯmrg . [w . mǵmǵ]
26) w . št .nni [.] w . pr . ʿbk . w[ . št . ʿqrb . w]
27) mǵmǵ . w . pr . ḥḏrt . w[ . tmṯl]
28) irǵm . ḥmr . ydk . a[ḥdh]
29) w . yṣq. b . aph
When a horse cries out (coughs?), one crushes together a measure of juniper (oil?) and the fruit of ʿṮRB seed and bitter almond,
(which is) like gd,
(which is) like ṮMRG (some kind of plant) and MǴMǴ
(some kind of plant)
and a measure of NNI and abukkatu-plant resin and a measure of heliotrope (?) and MǴMǴ and lettuce seed
(which is) like donkey (?)IRĠN plant,
and pours it into its nose.
We have seen this symptom (KTU 1.85:2) and many of the names of the ingredients before: ʿqrb (?), (line 2), gd (line 20), mǵmǵ (line 5), nni (line 15), irǵm . ḥmr (line 18) and pr . ḥḏrt (line 14). I'll discuss a few of the new vocabulary items below. One thing is apparent; there is something wrong with the list of ingredients: mǵmǵ appears twice. There are two ways of solving this problem: 1) the way I have or 2) assuming, as do Cohen and Sivan, 52, that there are two missing lines and that two sections rather than one were in some vorlage: a line reading "and (one) pours it into its nose" and another symptom definition. They place these two hypothetical lines after KTU 1.85:24. However, if the reconstruction that I am using is generally correct, any missing lines must have come somewhere after line 25. I have vacillated between these two positions. Here's why I decided to assume a long, if somewhat strange section, rather than two sections with missing lines and to handle the first mǵmǵ the way I did. (I'll have more to say about the second mǵmǵ below.) Scribe lines separate every section in KTU 1.85. There are no scribe lines anywhere between lines 23 and 29. And the same is true of the three other fragments. Each tablet treats this segment as a single section. I will discuss the differences between the texts on these tablets in another post; but they seem close enough to require that some source predates all of them and that source, what ever it was, already had textual problems in this section. If this is obvious to us then it would have been obvious to those who wrote, copied or dictated these four ancient examples. It does not appear that there was any effort to fix the problem unless the introduction of tmṯl, "like" is an attempt to do just that. If so, it seems to have failed.
I do think there is something wrong with this section; I'm just not sure what it is. The words and phrase from št . dprn in line 23 until irgm . ḥmr in line 28 seem more like a segment of a traditional plant list (with occasional modifiers) than components in a medicinal recipe. The Uagritic word tmṯl is no doubt cognate with Akkadian tamšīlu, "like." See Cohen and Sivan, 56. While tmṯl is not found elsewhere in medical texts, it is common in lists of plants. See CAD T, 149 and AHw, 1317. In this context, does tmṯl mean morphological similar or medicinally similar? Note that in the two sections dealing with pain (or ravishing hunger?) in KTU 1.85:12-17 the donkey (?)IRĠN plant appears to be a substitute for lettuce seed. So here, tmṯl seems to mean medicinally similar. In fact, one might want to translate the word "equivalent," a meaning that it has in some Akkadian texts. So one way of understanding this text is that either gd or ṮMRG and MǴMǴ (together) may be substituted for bitter almond and that donkey (?)IRĠN may be substituted for lettuce seed. Truthfully, I could not find an Akkadian text where on thing was said to be tamšīlu to two things.
Cohen and Sivan, 35-6, correctly I think, associate dprn with Akkadian dupranu, some type of juniper tree or perhaps juniper oil. The Hebrew cognate, תדהר (see Cohen and Sivan for scholarly references), is found in Isaiah 41:19, which also contains a list of plants. ʿbk is very likely cognate with Akkadian abukkatu, which occurs in both plant and drug lists. See Cohen and Sivan, 37, and Pardee, 67, on this word and the reason I take pr, in this context, to mean "resin." Both Pardee, 66, and Cohen and Sivan, 38, think ṯmrg is "incomprehensible" to use Cohen and Sivan's word. Cohen and Sivan suggest that one read ṯmr . g[ . I'm not sure I can see this on the tablet but ṯmr . [ does seem possible. Despite their heroic efforts, even ṯmr is hard to make sense of. This word remains one of the many mysteries of this text.
I'll have a little more to say on this in a few days when I look at the overall structure of this text.
References:
(CAD) Gelb, Ignace J. et al, The Assyrian dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Chicago: Oriental Institute, 1956-
Cohen, Chaim and Daniel Sivan, The Ugaritic hippiatric texts : a critical edition, American Oriental Series Essay 9; New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1983
Pardee, Dennis, Les Textes Hippiatriques, Ras Shamra-Ougarit II, Paris: Editons Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1985
Posted by Duane Smith at August 8, 2007 2:24 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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Comments
Wow, cool! This is great stuff. I for one thank you as always. One typo in the pdf though: "Highlighted letters are no present in any version but are reasonable conjectures". But that's okay cuz me also busy with foreign language so me no speakah English either, hehe.
As someone who lacks proficiency in Ugaritic though, I think it would be helpful to readers if you could write out both your literal word-for-word translation, and the final English-proper translation. I think it would help people follow along with the grammar especially considering that a long line of consonant strings are hard on the brain without this extra explanation.
But anyways, you take "ir?m ?mr" to be "donkey irgm plant"? Maybe I'm missing something but what makes you sure it's a plant? Or is the "plant"
word somewhere in this text? In my ignorance, a "donkey plant" sounds awfully amusing ;)
[Note: this comment was originally posted on Thursday, 8/9/2007 at 2:15 AM and was accidentally deleted. I restored it from an email copy. -DES]
Posted by: Glen Gordon at August 10, 2007 12:38 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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