« Scribal Culture of the Heart
Main
Pseudo-Archaeological »
December 31, 2008
Scholarly Tablets from the Royal Palace at Ugarit
For a variety of abnormal reasons, I'm building a database of the scholarly tablets from Ugarit. By "scholarly tablets" I mean tablets used by master scribes to teach students or the work of the students themselves on such tablets: lexical lists, abecedaries and certain kinds of literature for example. Master scribes used other material but the closer this material is to the day-to-day output of a working scribe the harder it is to identify it as part of the educational curriculum.
I am using the helpful appendices from van Soldt's paper on scribal education at Ugarit as the starting point for my own database. Like many people with abnormal interests, I'm never quite satisfied with the way data is presented in print. I want to be able to sort it and query it in differing ways. I'll make the database available when it is complete.
For today, I thought it abnormally interesting to focus on the scholarly tablets from the Royal Palace at Ugarit. Here's the raw data organized generally by text type. The order of each entry is text/tablet designation, name and/or description of text, language(s), and find spot within the palace. The names of the students and the teachers who produced these tablets are unknown in every case.
Lexical and Grammatical Texts:
- RS 12.47, multilingual grammatical text, Akkadian/Sumerian west entrance, room 3(?)
- RS 16.364, Ḫarra=ḫubullu 11-12, excerpt, Akkadian, central area, room 65
- RS 17.03, Ḫarra=ḫubullu 18-19, Akkadian, central area, surface find
- RS 16.364, Lú 1, Akkadian with 1 line of Sumerian, central area, room 65
- RS 15.54, Acrographic list of PNs, Alladian, central area
Literary Texts:
- RS 15.10, Wisdom text, Akkadian/Hurrian, eastern area
- RS 15.152, Incantations, Akkadian/Sumerian, central area
- RS 16.346, ???, fragament, Akkadian, central area
- RS 16.416, Incantations, fragment, Sumerian, southern area, room 62
Alphabetic Exercises
- KTU 5.5, abecedary, Ugaritic, west entrance, room 3(?)
- KTU 5.6, abecedary, Ugaritic, west entrance, room 3(?)
- KTU 5.7, list of PNs, Ugaritic, west entrance, room 3
- KTU 5.8, abecedary, Ugaritic, east area, room 45
- KTU 5.9, letter with abecedary, west area, room 73
- KTU 5.13, multiple lines of partial abecedaries, the first in a practiced hand and one complete abecedary, Ugaritic, southwest area room 81
- KTU 5.14, alphabet with syllabic equivalents, Ugaritic, southwest room 81
- KTU 5.25, syllabic legal text with abecedary, Akkadain/Ugaritic, central area, courtyard IV
In several cases, the find spots are not as clear as one might desire. I think those marked central area are from courtyard IV or rooms associated with it. Room 65, for example, opens directly onto this courtyard. Room 62, to the south and east of room 65, is nearby.
We can discern four main areas in the palace where excavators found scholarly tablets: 1) in the rooms near the northwest entrance to the palace; 2) in rooms associated with courtyard IV, more or less in the center of the palace complex; 3) in the rather large room 45 that opened to the east courtyard (III) and 4) in the southwest corner of the palace which includes room 81. Some scholarly texts, like KTU 5.9, were found outside these four clusters but all scholarly texts were found near or directly associated with other archival material, letters in Ugaritic and Akkadian for example. It is a reasonable specialization that some of the actual archives were in second floor rooms and fell to their find spots as the palace collapsed.
One thing is clear. Master scribes (or is it a single master scribe?) worked in several divergent places within the royal palace complex and trained students in those divergent places. Or at least, students did their work in several places around the palace. Other scribal centers within the city of Ugarit, including the House of the High Priest, the house of Rap'anu, the house of the tablets and the Lamaštu archive, produced more scholarly tablets than the Royal Palace.
Who were the students of the master scribes who plied their trade within the Royal Palace of Ugarit and were those students in anyway different from students who studied at the other centers in the city? I wish I knew.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at December 31, 2008 8:20 PM | Read more on Scribal Schools |
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telecomtally.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2738
Comments
Also to be included may be the nine Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform tablets from the House of Rap’anu which provide a Babylonian “table of weights and measures,” apparently school texts written by apprentice scribes.
Posted by: judith weingarten at January 1, 2009 5:01 AM
Judith,
I agree. In fact, I think there are several letters and a few other document types that are rather obviously student texts that I plan to include.
Posted by: Duane at January 1, 2009 8:29 AM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
Send me an email if it is important.