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April 4, 2008
Where Is It Now?
Over there on the left is a picture of a cast of a small cuneiform tablet. The original is almost certainly from Ugarit. The actual tablet is black. The picture is very near actual size: 3.4 cm by 1.6 cm. The tablet has three lines of text some of which wrap around the right hand edge. The text, in Akkadian, reads,
68 UDU.NIM.MA
mÌli-ia-na DUMU Ba-ri-ya
URUÌli-iš-tam-i
68 spring lambs
(via) Iliyana, son of Bariya,
(from) Ilishtam'i
When first published by Astour, 27, in 1971, it was designated RS 1957.4. It is part of a collection of six tablets, four Akkadian, two Ugaritic, known as The Claremont Ras Shamra Tablets. They were published together in a single small volume edited by Loren Fisher. These tablets are the only tablets from Ugarit I have ever held in my own hands. I've written on them before. As I said then,
The full story of how these tablets came to Claremont has yet to be told. Perhaps someday it will be possible to tell it. The official story, true but not complete, is that the tablets were taken illegally from Ras Shamra in 1957 and found their way onto the antiquities market where Loren Fisher, my teacher, saw them in 1969 in a Swiss bank safety deposit box. Loren put together the consortium and arranged for them to be delivered to Claremont, California, in two groups; one arriving somewhere between February 6 and 9 of 1970 and the other group arriving on June 10 of the same year. Although I had opportunity to examine the tablets in the first shipment, I was actually in Loren's kitchen when he opened the second shipment. What exciting times.
The two most important tablets, RS 1957.1 in Akkadian and RS 1957.702 (KTU 3.9) in Ugaritic, are now in the private Schøyen Collection. The Board of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity who had custodianship of the tablets sold them to Martin Schøyen in c. 1994. To his credit, Schøyen has made them available for study.
But where are the other four tablets? Where is RS 1957.4? I can't find them in the Schøyen Collection and they sure aren't on display in Claremont. I've asked those who I thought might know where they were and they didn't know.
What is the value of RS 1957.4? There can be little doubt that it came from Ugarit. In the case of the Akkadian tablet from Ugarit in the Schøyen Collection, we can be quite certain, within a meter or so, of its archaeological provenance. That tablet is part of a group of letters and documents, dealing with the same subject matter, which Schaeffer found in rather close proximity. The exact provenance of RS 1957.4 at Ugarit is unclear. There is little "news" in this administrative text: what is normally written UDU.NIM (ḫurāpu, "spring lamb") is here written UDU.NIM.MA; the personal name Iliyana is attested in other texts from Ugarit, both Akkadain and Ugraitic; more than one person had this name; the name of this particular Iliyana's father, Bariya (Mariya?), is otherwise unattested; the town Ilishtam'i is well known. So there isn't a lot of linguistic or historical value in this tablet. So in one way, RS 1957.4 contributes almost nothing to our understanding. In addition, it was looted and its all-important context is unrecoverable. But still, I'm upset that it now seems to be lost.
Over the next week or so, I'll comment on the three other texts that are now nowhere to be found. They are a little more interesting than the subject text of this post.
References:
Fisher, Loren R., ed., The Claremont Ras Shamra Tablets, Analecta Orientalia 48, Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1971
Posted by Duane Smith at April 4, 2008 8:44 AM | Read more on Ugarit |
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Comments
Very interesting. I don't play with the administrative texts much, but it is alway fascinating where some of these things wind up.
Posted by: Jim Getz at April 5, 2008 10:23 AM
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