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December 29, 2007
Please, Send One Scribe ASAP
Charles at Awilum has called our attention to several papers that relate to the general subject of ancient authorship and literacy. While each is abnormally interesting in its own way, I found Parpola's paper on the neo-Assyrian tablet K 652 especially relevant to couple of things I am working on.
The tablet is a brief letter from one Sin-na'di(?) to his king. I follow Parpola's readings but offer my own rather wooden translation.
Obverse
1) a-na LUGAL BE-ia
2) ARAD-ka md30-i
3) (lu) DI-mu a-na LUGAL
4) be-il-ia
5) a-na bé-et
6) LUGAL iš-pu-ra-ni-ni
7) LÚA.BA i-še-e!-a
8) la-a-si!
9) LUGAL li-iš-pu-ru
10) a-su-mu a-na LÚEN.NAM
11) ša URUarrap-ra-ap-ha
Bottom edge
12) a-su-mu
Reverse
1) a-na maš-šur!-U-LAL!
2) 1-en LÚA.BA
3) i-še-e-a
4) li-is-pu-ru
5ob-8ob) Where the king sent me, there is not a scribe with me.
9ob-4re) Let the king send (a message), either to the governor of Arrapha or to Aššurbelutaqqin, that one scribe be sent to me.
Anyone even slightly familiar with neo-Assyrian Akkadian, and it is certainly not my forte, will see several strange things in the text (ana in line 5 for the more common ina for example or asumu for summu [šummu] and there are several others). But the tablet itself seems to have couple of interesting abnormalities. The pictures accompanying the article are not very good but they are clear enough to see that the text goes less than half way down the reverse. This is often taken as an indication of the work of a student scribe who had not learned how to judge the required size of a tablet. But here it may further indicate the work of member of a literate elite. Also, the lines appear to curve up from left to right. Experienced scribes generally wrote in very straight lines. Some care need be taken on this last point because the surface of the obverse of the tablet is itself curved in a way that may have caused the writing to appear curved in the picture. But if one looks at the picture of the right edge of the tablet, the curved nature of the lines seems all the more apparent.
So here, we likely have a professional, with considerable training in the art of writing, but not a professional scribe himself, on a mission in the Zargos area, asking the king, very possibly Sargon II, to get him a real scribe. Abnormally interesting!
By the way, Parpola is far from the first scholar to look at this tablet, others did not necessarily understand it the way he does and the way I do. See page 315 (don't panic, it's the first page) of his paper. However, I think he makes a very good case for his understanding and that is why my translation, in large measure, follows his. Parpola has many other interesting things to say about this tablet and on the question of literacy at least among professional elites in Assyria.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at December 29, 2007 3:36 PM | Read more on Akkadian |
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