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February 27, 2008

Another Ugaritic Ritual Text By A Semiliterate?

KTU 1.48 was among the earliest Ugaritic tablets excavated. In 1929, shortly after Claude Schaeffer excavated it from the royal palace at Ugarit, Charles Virolleaud published a picture and a drawing of the fragmentary tablet. At that time, Virolleaud and others recognized that the cuneiform writing on some of the tablets from Ugarit was alphabetic but it wasn't until the next year, 1930, that Virolleaud, Bauer and Dhrome, working independently, largely deciphered the Ugaritic alphabet and were able to begin the process of reading and understanding these tablets. The most complete study of KTU 1.48 I know of is Pardee's 1988 paper. More accessible, if limited, treatments can be found in Pardee's 2002 book, Ritual and Cult at Ugarit (117-119) and del Olmo Lete's, 2004, Canaanite Religion According to the Liturgical Texts of Ugarit (88-90).

This tablet has a number of peculiarities, some of which I will discuss here and others I will discuss in the notes following my translation. Every line of text appears to have an underlying shallowly inscribed horizontal line more or less in the middle of the written line. Clearly, the scribe drew these lines before writing the overlying text. In several cases, the horizontal lines extend well beyond the text. One might think that their purpose was to help the scribe keep his or her lines of text straight and evenly spaced. But these lines themselves are not straight in every case and have a tendency to curve slightly upward from left to right in the top several lines of text (line 5 shows this tendency in the extreme) and slightly downward in the bottom few lines of text. The result is that the text on several lines is neither straight nor evenly spaced. I would note that the tendency of the lines on this tablet to curve upward at the top of the tablet matches the same tendency one sees in the far more recent neo-Assyrian letter, K 652, crafted by a literate professional but not a scribe. I discussed this tablet some time ago.

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

Also, vertical wedges often don't extend downward. For example, the l and the n often look very much alike. The same is true for the ṣ and the a. As Pardee, 1988, 175, noted, this is particularly exasperating when the text is broken. When the lower part of a sign is missing it is easy to confuse signs with three vertical wedges like d, l and u with n and signs with two vertical wedges like b and ṣ with a.

Another "error" is the writing of ṯ for š at the beginning of a couple of words that normally begin švp- ("v" is a placeholder for a vowel). See line 2, ṯpḥ for špḥ, (šapḥu, "family") and line 7, ṯpš for špš, ("Šapšu"?). Is this the result of phonetic confusion on the part of whomever wrote this tablet?

Transliteration

I follow Pardee's, 1988, 184 and 2002, 118, reconstruction, with a little help from Dietrich et al, 84 and a photograph.

1) [      ] ʿṣrm
2) [dbḥ] ṯpḥ bʿl
3) [ṯ]˹l˺ṯ . ʿṣrm
4) [š] ˹l˺ bʿlt bbtm
5) ˹ṯlṯ˺ [.] ˹aš˺n . l . dgn
6) [ . . . ] p i˹pdm˺
7) ṯpš . šnʿ˹t˺ [.]˹y˺qš
8) ṯr . biš˹t˺
9) bʿlh . št
10) ḫqr˹n . pr˺ [aṯ]rt
11) ṯn [. ʿṣrm] l r˹d˺[-]
12) aḥt . ḫ˹m˺[nh] ˹. ṯ ˺ [n] ˹ṯ ˺[l ṯ]
13) b ym . dbḥ . ṯpḥ [ . . . ]
14) aḥt . l . mzy . bn[ . . . ]
15) aḥt . l . mkt . ģ˹r˺ [ . . . ]
16) aḥt . l . ʿṯttrt ˹. š ˺[d]
17) arbʿ . ʿṣrm
Lower Edge
18) gt . ṯrmn
19) aḥt slḫu

There appears to have been writing on the reverse and upper edge of this tablet but only a few letters at the end of a few lines are readable.

Translation

1) [? ? ? ? ?] birds
2) [as a sacrifice (?)] of the stock of the Master;
3) three birds
4) (and) a ram for the Lady in the Mansion;
5) Three (pairs ?) of sandals for Dagon;
6) [something or some number (?)] of a pair of IPD garments;
7) for Šapšu(?); a fowler's net (?) (and ?)
8) a bull placed in the fire
9) for his Master;
10) a ḪQRN and a young bull for Aṯiratu;
11) two [birds(?)] for RD?
12) one (bird?) for his (?)ḤMN; two or three (birds ?)
13) one (bird?) the day of sacrifice for the family of [some god (?)]
14) one (bird?) for MZY son of [ ? ]
15) one (bird?) for MKT (Makedon?, offering? nkt) of the mountain (?);
16) one (bird?) for ʿAṯtartu of the field;
17) four (birds?) for
18) the plantation of Ṯamumani;
19) one (bird?) for Salḫû.

Notes

Comments

Pradee, 2002, 117, raises the very reasonable question about the genre of this tablet. Is it a descriptive ritual, a prescriptive ritual, an administrative text, or a "record" as del Olmo Lete, 89, would have us think? The answer to this question is not so important to my purposes here.

What is important to me is 1) that the text appears to be from a rural setting and 2) it does not appear to be the work of a fully trained scribe. I point to the "spelling" errors, the uneven lines of text, the truncated vertical wedges in support of the second point. In fact, the strange vertical wedges argue for someone other than a student scribe executing this tablet. A student sufficiently advanced to take on a text of this complexity would have formed all of his or her vertical wedges in a more orthodox manner. For these reasons, I think this tablet is another example of a tablet written by a semiliterate or a literate professional. If this opinion is correct, then it joins KTU 1.79 and KTU 1.80 as a further example that non-scribes wrote in Ugaritic.

References:

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

Posted by Duane Smith at February 27, 2008 1:02 PM | Read more on Ugarit |

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Posted by: Jim Getz at February 27, 2008 6:15 PM

Posted by: Duane at February 27, 2008 7:58 PM

Posted by: Jim Getz at March 3, 2008 7:35 AM

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