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January 26, 2008

Semi-Literates in the Hinterlands of Ugarit?

I have been exchanging emails with Rochelle Altman on scripts and scribal training. She believes it possible, in many cases, to distinguish between the written work of a professional scribe, that of a well-trained member of the literate elite and a semi-literate. Her work focuses on Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. I thought I'd try to see if her thesis could be extended to the alphabetic texts from Ugarit by looking at a couple of tablets found in the Central Palace but quite clearly written in the hinterlands. I believe that both KTU 1.79 and KTU 1.80 show signs of having been written by someone who was neither a professional scribe nor the active student of a professional scribe. I believe that one or perhaps two semi-literates or at best literate professionals wrote these two texts. If that is all you need to know or more than you want to know, stop reading here. I have greatly delayed this post while I pursued good high quality pictures of these two tablets. So far, I have failed in that effort. Should I acquire them at some later date, I will either update this post or write a new one. I believe I have made my case without the pictures. But it would sure be nice to know exactly what Virolleaud meant by "irrégulière ou hésitante" in his description of the writing on KTU 1.80 and by his similar language with regard KTU 1.79. If you are interested in why I think semi-literates or literate professionals wrote KTU 1.79 and KTU 1.80 please read on. It may get a little tedious at times. Perhaps those who want a little more detail but are not up to the whole load may want to jump to the summaries I provide at the end of my discussion of each tablet.

KTU 1.79

Let's start with KTU 1.79. Virolleaud first published this tablet in the journal Syria in 1951. He republished it with slightly expanded comments in 1957 (PRU II). It is this later edition that I will cite in the following. Virolleaud described the tablet as crudely manufactured with a very irregular writing. While I do not have a photograph of the tablet, the first thing I noticed when I looked at Virolleaud's, 184, drawing is that with the clear exception of the last line (line 8) and possibly the first line, all the other lines extend from the left side of the obverse around the right edge and well onto the reverse. Line 7 extends all the way around the tablet ending on what would be the left edge looking at the tablet from the obverse. There is no other text on the reverse and there is a horizontal line marking the end of the text well before the end on the tablet. This is an extremely strange way to use the space on a tablet. I'll have more to say about this later. For now, I turn to the text itself followed by my translation and notes.

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

1) [bd] gt nṯṯ
2) [xxx]xšh w l ytn ḫsn
3) ʿbd ulm ṯn un ḫsn
4) gdy lqḥ ṣtqn gt bn ndk
5) u mrxxx gt nṯṯ ḫsn l ytn
6) l r˹ģ-n d lq˺ḥ ṣtqn
7) bt qbṣ u ˹b g˺t ilštmʿ dbḥ ṣtqn l
8) ršp

1) [ On the ] plantation of NṮṮ
2) [ . . . ] his ram and Hasānu, the servant of Ulmi, he even gave (it).
3) Hasānu repeated a complaint,
4) Ṣitqānu took a kid of the plantation of the son of Nadaki
5) and myrrh [ . . . ] of the plantation of NṮṮ. Hasānu even gave this
6) to RĠN. That which Ṣitqānu took
7) from the meeting hall and in the plantation of Ilishtami, Ṣitqānu sacrificed to
8) Rashap.

Notes:

KTU 1.79 appears to be a report from a rural community (the plantation of Ilishtami?) of events involving the plantations of NṮṮ, the son of Nadaki, and Ilishtami itself. The exact nature of these events is not clear but appears to involve the misappropriation of property, a kid and perhaps other things (myrrh?), belonging to plantation of NṮṮ. The text ends with a summary account of a sacrifice. It is possible, and this is completely speculative, that this report was motivated by a request from the capital, Ugarit, for an explanation of what was being done to calm the situation. If so the authorities may well have been responding to Hasānu's (first?) complaint. In any case, the report ended up in an archive at central palace at Ugarit.

To summarize the findings with regard to KTU 1.79: We have a text on a crudely manufactured tablet in a very irregular writing. The tablet came from a rural agricultural community. The person who wrote this did not follow normal conventions for the use of the space on the tablet. As a matter of fact, the person who wrote this report seriously violated those conventions. These things together lead to the conclusion that whoever wrote this report was not a trained scribe. Nor was he or she an apprentice scribe on assignment to a rural community. A student scribe, sufficiently trained to take on such work, would not have made the formal mistakes seen in this tablet.

KTU 1.80

Much like his description of KTU 1.79, Virolleaud, 183, described the writing on KTU 1.80 as "irregular and halting." The text does not cover the entire obverse and line 2 extends well onto the otherwise blank reverse. Without a high quality picture or better an examination of the tablets themselves, it is not possible to say if they are in the same hand but I'd bet on it. The text and my translation is as follows.

1) b[d] gt ilštmʿ
2) bt unbnyn šh . d ytn . ṣtqn
3) ṯut ṭbḫ ṣtqn
4) b bz ʿzm ḥbḫ (read ṭbḫ) šh
5) b kl ygz ḥḫ (read ṭbḫ) šh

1) On the plantation of Ilishtami,
2) at the house of Ubbinniyana was his ram, that Ṣitqānu gave.
3) Ṣitqānu slaughtered a ewe.
4) When the goats were plundered, he slaughtered his ram.
5) Throughout the shearing season, he slaughtered his ram.

Notes:

Here again, we have a tablet that shows signs that it is not the work of a professional scribe: the use (misuse) of the area of the tablet, the wrap around line, the errors in the construction of or confusion about the ṭ. Here again we have a report from a rural community of certain sacrifices seemingly made in response to specific situations. Again, I wonder if this report was at the request of someone in the big city. In any case, KTU 1.80 too ends up being in an archive, but perhaps not the same archive as KTU 1.79, in the central palace.

Like the neo-Assyrian letter from Sin-na'di that I discussed in December, these two documents were not written by professional scribes or their active students. What is not so clear to me is whether a literate professional like Sin-na'di or a semi-literate wrote them. I tend to think they were the work of a semi-literate. They both seem to be reports of events in farming communities. But they really don't seem to have the kind of formal structure that I would expect. I think that such a report would have some elements of the structure of a letter. I'll provide support for this assertion in a forthcoming post. Of course, KTU 1.48 appears to be a similar, if longer, report. Over the next week or two, I will be looking at a couple of other Ugaritic tablets, including KTU 1.48, that semi-literates or literate professionals may have written.

References

Update March 1, 2008:
Added PDQ label and fixed a few stupid typos.

Posted by Duane Smith at January 26, 2008 3:11 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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