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April 6, 2008
Another Missing Tablet: RS 1957.3
The other day I discussed a missing administrative tablet from Ugarit and mentioned that three other tablets are now lost. Today I'll discuss another one of those missing tablets. It too is an administrative tablet written in Akkadian and from Ugarit. Its designation is RS 1957.3.
[If you see squares, rectangles or something else that doesn't look right, please install the Charis SIL font.]
Obverse and bottom edge:
1 me-at 64 GUR ŠE.[M]EŠ
62 GUR ZÍZ.AN.NA. MEŠ
URUA-ga-na-a
--------------------------
52 GUR ŠE.MEŠ
53 GUR ZÍZ.AN.NA. MEŠ
URUSÍG miš-te-lu
164 kurs of barley
62 kurs of emmer
(from) Agana
--------------------------
52 kurs of barley
53 kurs of emmer
(from) Šaʿartu (through the offices of) Ištelu
While Astour, pl V, tells us that the reverse is blank, I think it better to say it is unreadable. A careful look at the published photo shows traces of a few signs and of a horizontal line much like the one on the obverse. For reasons I do not recall, I don't have a cast of the reverse. [I need to try to get hold of a cast of the reverse or a better picture.]
The text on this tablet is an example of a rather common genre of administrative text. Many examples are known from all over the Near East. Ugarit has yielded similar administrative tablets written in both Akkadian and Ugaritic. The also lost Ugaritic tablet RS 1957.701 (KTU 4.709), which I will discuss in a day or so, is representative of the genre.
The towns of Agana and Šaʿartu are both well known. One interesting thing about them that Astour, 26-27, pointed out, is that they are not very near each other. Another tablet, RS 18.101A, tells us that a certain Ištelu took 3 kurs of some kind of grain to Arutu(?). If that is indeed Arutu, the text is broken, it is a town somewhat larger than but near Agana. It would be nice to know what if anything was on the reverse of RS 1957.3. Astour, 27, suggested that even though Agana and Šaʿartu are some distance from each other the agent (Astour called him "collector" presumably on the assumption that he was a tax collector), Ištelu, worked brought grain from various places around the kingdom of Ugarit. And that accounts for the tablet recording grain from both towns. I have no better suggestion.
A kur is a unit of capacity.
Administrative texts like this make me think of passages like I Kings 5:2 (in Hebrew ), I Kings 4:22 (in most translations).
And Solomon's provision for one day was thirty kôrs of fine flour and sixty kôrs of meal . . .
The parallel is not as strong as it might appear on the surface. The kurru at Ugaritc and the kôr in Hebrew were likely not exactly the same and the Hebrew text refers to grades of milled grain while our Akkadian text refers to raw barley and emmer. But the parallel does remind one that the scribes who recorded the account of Solomon's daily provisions were likely also well schooled in the form of Hebrew administrative texts which no doubt paralleled similar Akkadian administrative texts in many ways.
Long ago, Dahood, 176, 237, suggested a few rather benign associations between Ugaritic ksm (emmer) // šʿr (barley) along with ḥṭt (wheat) and the equivalent words in the Hebrew Bible. His most notable Hebrew example is the list of crops in Isaiah 28:25. While Dahood did not look at the Akkadian administrative texts from Ugarit, I thought I'd discuss these parallels here. But the more I considered the issue the more I wondered if something not so benign might be going on. I am wondering about the ordering of the mentioned crops. Before I can say anything about this I need to spend some quality time with the school vocabulary text Ḫarra=Ḫubullu and several other such things that I don't have here in my home library. When I have time to check these texts out I may have something interesting to say about Isaiah 28:25 and perhaps RS 1957.3 also. Until then, assume that any parallels are not particularly instructive.
References:
Dahood, Mitchell with Tadeusz Penar, "Ugaritic-Hebrew Parallel Pairs," Loren Fisher, editor, Ras Shamra Parallels, Volume I, Analecta Orientalia 49, Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1971, 71-382
Posted by Duane Smith at April 6, 2008 12:40 PM | Read more on Ugarit |
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