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February 20, 2009
Friday Culture Word: h(y)kl/palace, temple
But perhaps this culture word has a more limited linguistic and geographic range than some we have seen.
All the words in the following list of languages and words mean palace or temple (a god's palace). Yes, there are a few other related secondary meanings but let's not bother ourselves with them here.
Sumerian: é.gal
Akkadian: ekallu
Ugaritic: hkl
Hebrew: הֵיכָל
Aramaic: הֵיכְלָא
Nearly every Aramaic dialect from Imperial Aramaic to Late Syrian has this lexeme in it's vocabulary. Mankowski, 51, notes the form άειχάλας on an inscription dated October 15, 245 CE from Admedera, Syria.
There can be no reasonable doubt that this lexeme came into the ancient Semitic languages from Sumerian e.gal. The Sumerian means palace (é, house, + gal, great or big). But what is the relationship between the Akkadian reflex and the West Semitic reflexes? And what is the relationship between the reflexes in the West Semitic languages?
When written syllabically, not all that common, the Akkadian generally reads e-kal-lu. There is no evidence for the lengthening of the /e/ in Akkadian.
Both the Hebrew and the Aramaic forms are not native unless one wants to take them to be some strange ה formative nouns as was sometimes thought by earlier scholars. Ugaritic hkl makes this all but impossible.
According to Blau, 49-50, who thinks the West Semitic forms came from the Akkadian,
Aramaic hêkəlâ etc., Ugaritic hkl, Hebrew hêkhâl Akkadian ekallum, stemming ultimately from Sumerian e-gal may exhibit hyper-correction (false regression); since Akkadian ê could, in these languages, correspond to hê, it was, by over self-assertion, also employed in this case. Nevertheless, one wonders why h occurs in all these languages, though it is possible that it was introduced to one of them and spread to the others. But account must be taken of the possibility that the initial onset of Sumerian and Akkadian vowels contained laryngeals or pharyngeals.
Mankowski, 52, correctly questions Blau's suggestion that , "Akkadian ê could, in these languages, correspond to hê." As far as Mankowski or I can tell, no cognate pairs exhibit such a phenomenon. And as already noted there is no evidence that the Akkadian e was long in ekallu. It seems unlikely that West Semitic coulkd have adopted the Akkadian much later than the Old Akkadian period. The reason that I put a time qualification on this statement is that Gelb, 25-26, has shown, as Mankowski, 52, puts it, "that the Sumerogram é could have the OAkk value of ’à, often continuing Semitic *ḥa, and, presumably, representing a comparable laryngeal or pharyngeal articulation in Sumerian." Gelb, 25-26, specifically mentions Sumerian é.gal, Akkadian ekallu and its Aramaic and Hebrew counterparts.
All this suggests that hkl/hykl came into West Semitic during or very shortly after the Old Akkadian period, if it came by way of Akkadian at all. On the current evidence, I think it best to consider hkl/hykl a culture word within the West Semitic family.
References:
Gelb, Ignace J., Old Akkadian Writing and Grammar, 2nd ed., Materials for the Assyrian Dictionary, 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1961 (online)
Mankowski, Paul V., Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, Harvard Semitic Studies, 47, Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000
Posted by Duane Smith at February 20, 2009 8:16 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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