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March 6, 2009
Friday Culture Word: tnr oven
And I really do mean culture word. It was not only an ancient culture word, it is a culture word in many modern languages too.
Take a look at these words in their respective languages.
Sumerian: diruna/dilina
Akkadian: tinūru
Egyptian: 
or
(trr)
Ugaritic: tnrr
Aramaic: תַּנּוּרָא (tannūrā)
Arabic: تنور (tannūr)
Hebrew: תַּנּוּר (tannūr)
If that not enough, consider this list of ancient and modern languages.
Avestan: tanūra
Armenian: t'onir
Urdu: tanūr
Hindi: tannūr
Panjabi: tandoor
Georgian: toren
Turkish: tandir
Azeri: təndir
All words in their respective languages mean "oven" in generally or some specific kind of oven, often a clay oven for making flat bread. We even sometimes refer to cooking in a cylindrical clay oven tandoori cooking in English. Ancient versions of this kind of oven tended to be more beehive shaped than cylindrical.
Hock, 359, reproduces this ditty from an Egyptian text,
The baker stands baking, tossing loaves of bread into the fire with his head in the oven
The image seems delightful. But the reality was likely the same or even worse in antiquity then as it is today in that part of the world that still uses this kind of oven for cooking or baking. Tandir burns are common and can be devastating, often deadly.
All these words are related. How? No one is sure. No doubt there has been borrowing but in what direction and under what circumstances is a question. I'm not going to try to untie this knot here. I will say that the strange and varied Sumerian representations make a Sumerian origin unlikely. And as Mankowski, 150, says, "The word lacks a plausible Semitic etymology and a recognizable Semitic noun pattern." If Ugaritic tnrr is really the word for oven, and there some question about this, then the West Semitic reflexes were likely not Akkadian loans. They may not have been anyway. Mankowski, 150-151 and Heck, 359 have the details if you need them.
Below is a rather bad picture that I took of the remains of a tannūr. Under the direction of Bill Dever, I excavated this one in field VI at Gezer in 1971.
Only the lowest parts of the oven remain. This over has the typical clay interior but at least this bottom part was reinforced with stones and even potsherds. The inside diameter is about 30 inches. Some ovens were larger, others were smaller. If you look inside, you can see where we sectioned the material at the bottom of the tannūr. That white stripe is a layer of ash, likely from the last couple of times the oven was used. We uncovered this particular oven outside of but in association with the so called Philistine house. That would place it in the Iron IB period that Dever and company date from the 12th century BCE to the mid-11th. Other archaeologists might place it somewhat later but by less than 100 years. Archeologists often call this kind of an oven a tabūn but in modern usage, this is quite a different kind of oven. A tabūn is fired from the outside while a tannūr has its fire inside.
Here's a picture of a fragment of the wall of a tannūr.
I discovered this fragment in one of our closets. How it got there I'm not completely sure. My guess is that it is from the 1971 Gezer excavation but I'm not sure. Could it be from the tannūr pictured above? Perhaps but perhaps not.
Reference:
Mankowski, Paul V., Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, Harvard Semitic Studies, 47, Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2000
Posted by Duane Smith at March 6, 2009 1:43 PM | Read more on Hebrew Bible |
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Comments
I always suspected that the Tandoor, best known to me in the phrase Tandoori Chicken, was somehow related to the Hebrew word for "oven". Thanks for filling us in.
Posted by: Alan Lenzi at March 8, 2009 11:46 PM
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