Abnormal Interests

« Should I Feel Sad About This?
Main
In Which I Complain About "Proof" - Again »

October 29, 2007

The Veterinary Tablets from Ugarit and Scribal Training

It has been a while since I wrote on KTU 1.85 and its three relatives but I haven't forgotten them. Today I want to address the role of this text in scribal training. The first question one needs to ask is, "Are they scribal exercises or part of scribal training at all or are they primarily trade tablets for horse doctors?" If you don't know what any of this is about and care, please visit my gateway post for this series.

While I believe there is significant internal evidence that all four tablets are scribal exercises, I want to start with the external evidence, the archaeological and archival context of their find spots. To a limited extent, I've already addressed this issue.

Let's start with KTU 1.85 itself. Schaeffer found this tablet in the "house" of the master scribe Rashapabu, west, and a little south of the North Palace at Ugarit. Along with KTU 1.85, the Rashapabu house produced an array of scribal training tablets: among them two exercise letters in Ugaritic (KTU 5.10 and 5.11,) and several Akkadian and multilingual school texts (a S^a Vocabulary [Multilingual] tablet, a S^a Syllabary excerpt, an AN list tablet, Harra=hubullu tablets 2, 5-7, 8-9 [multilingual], Harra=hubullu tablet 13 and two examples of Harra=hubullu tablets 14-15. On these school texts, see my series on how to recognize a scribal school. In addition to these obvious "school" texts, several letters, economic texts and legal texts, all in Akkadian, are part of the Rashapabu archive. The KTU 4.690, an administrative tablet listing quantities of silver, may also belong to this archive.

Schaeffer found KTU 1.97 among the ruins of the so-called House of the Literary Tablets, in the South City Trench block X. Among the Ugaritic texts found in this house, but not necessarily in the same room, are KTU 1.96, an Incantation text that clearly served as a scribal exercise (it has a part of Silbenalphabet [tu-ta-ti] on reverse); KTU 1.59, a vary fragmentary tablet that with possibly a myth and KTU 5.19 an abecedary plus several tablets too badly broken to identify (i.e. KTU 8.23). The most interesting texts for this archive are the Akkadian school texts. In addition to the Silbenalphabet already mentioned, Schaeffer found over 60 tablets containing classical school material. This material covered nearly the whole of the scribal curriculum, as we know it from Ugaritic, with many multi-lingual tablets and often several copies of the same text. For example, four Harra=hubullu tablets containing portions of tablets 18 and 19 were found, two of them were multilingual and two were in Akkadain only. But perhaps the Akkadian literary tablets are of the most interests. These include an account of the Just(?) Sufferer (RS 25.460); four wisdom tablets of which the most extensive is RS 22.439; a tale of the flood (RS 22.421); a fragmentary account possibly related to Gilgamesh (TS 22.219+) and a lyric in Sumerian and Akkadian (RS 25.421). Cohen and Sivan, 58, suggested that KTU 1.97 (RS 23.484) is part of an "indirect join" with the bilingual wisdom text whose largest fragment is RS 23.34. RS 23.34 and its three other composite fragments are from the same archive as KTU 1.97. Nougayrol, 297, lists a RS 23.484 as one of those fragments. I'm not sure about the excavation reference numbers, but the photograph of KTU 1.97 published by Pardee, 37, and unavailable to Cohen and Sivan, does not appear to match the transcription of the fragment by the same number that Nougayrol, 165, used in his reconstruction of the wisdom text. Both sides of KTU 1.97 contain elements of veterinary text in alphabetic cuneiform and the left edge is readable for several lines in a row. I see no syllabic signs on either side of KTU 1.97. I do not believe the veterinary text and the wisdom text were on the same tablet.

While the scribal trade may well have been practiced at both the Rashapabu house and at the House of the Literary Tablets, based on the archival remains, scribal training was a dominate activity at both locations.

I've discussed the find spot of KTU 1.71 and KTU 1.72, within or in the entrance to Tomb V on the acropolis at Ugarit, in another post. At that time I wasn't completely certain what was found with them. I'm still not completely sure. Bordreuil and Pardee, 38-39 list the following tablets as found in the tomb or its entrance: KTU 6.12, an inscription on a label; RS 5.302, a fragment of an AN list and perhaps KTU 7.54, an extremely fragmentary unclassifiable tablet. In addition, I believe, KTU 1.73 was found in the same general area. KTU 1.73 is clearly a scribal exercise with the first 7 lines written in the Akkadian language using the Ugaritic alphabet but the remaining 11 lines in the Ugaritic language. In addition, KTU 1.7 and/or KTU 1.9, both perhaps part of the Ba'al cycle, may be from the same archive. See Schaeffer, 120. Dietrich, Lorentz and Sanmartin, 28, 29, suggest that these two tablets were scribal exercises. My guess is that these tablets were not originally from Tomb V itself but from the house above the tomb. In other words, they were not tomb deposits but from an archive once in the house that was above Tomb V. While the interpretation of these archival remains is not as clear as in the case of both the Rashapabu house and at the House of the Literary Tablets, they are consistent with scribal training as a major activity.

One other small point: While the archaeological record is far from complete with regard to the find spots of the four tablets, there is nothing that would make one think that any of those three find spots reflected places where horses were kept or cared for.

None of this proves conclusively that the four veterinary tablets were scribal exercises but this evidence certainly points in that direction.

When we turn to the tablets themselves, we see further evidence that they were scribal exercises. Three of the four tablets (KTU 1.85, KTU 1.71 and KTU 1.72) end at differing places on the reverse with considerable unused tablet area in all three cases. Because of its fragmentary nature, one cannot be sure how KTU 1.97 ended. Master scribes tended to make the tablets so that the written material completely filled them. There were of course exceptions, but this was the general rule. A tablet with a large portion of its writing service blank is likely a scribal exercise. In addition, all four tablets have a relatively high density of scribal errors with KTU 1.85 having the fewer. Cohen and Sivan, 47, have documented many of these errors. The most striking feature of the errors, in my view, is the number of orthographic errors. For example, KTU 1.71:26 has w.yk!hp where the k is not quite correctly formed (note I am using Pardee's line numbering); KTU 1.72:21 has another malformed k, this time in ak!l and KTU 1.97:2' has a malformed ś in ś[św]. Other letters, particularly in KTU 1.71 and KTU 1.97 seem clumsily formed. One might account for some other errors in terms of errors in dictation but the orthographic errors and clumsiness is best attributed to an inexperienced student scribe.

These considerations, when combined with their archival context, make the tablets' use in scribal training all but certain.

The omission of whole words that we see most clearly in KTU 1.87 and KTU 1.71 may be attributed to something quite different from normal student errors. The scribes who wrote these texts, I think from dictation, may not have understood them. (I've previously discussed why, contra Cohen and Sivan, 47, I believe the occurrences of a w at the beginning of some sections are additions, perhaps artifacts of dictation, rather than their absence at other places being an omission.) And while the more obvious omitted words, aḥdh, śśw, and ydk are common enough, the technical vocabulary of these texts may have been so obscure to the student scribe that they were confused and made errors that were in part driven by this confusion. They got the hard words correct but made errors with the easy ones. It is possible, in my way of thinking, that the students had no better idea what many of these technical terms meant than we do. Certainly part of scribal training was to give the novice scribe practice in dealing with technical matters beyond their personal experience and I think that this is exactly what we see in the use of this text on these tablets. I would agree with anyone who accuses me of speculation well beyond the evidence. But I am convinced that something like this is the part of the story of these tablets. In any case, in the context of their discovery and the unambiguous internal evidence, no one used these particular tablets to instruct ancient veterinarians.

This doesn't mean that some, now lost, more extensive, version of these texts wasn't used as a manual in veterinary medicine. I'll take that up in the next post on this subject. It only means that these four tablets weren't used for that purpose.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at October 29, 2007 8:06 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2302

Tags: