Visible Language: Stories of Decipherment (II)

2017

1. Rediscovery of ancient Mesopotamia in the western world ….. 2 2. Pietro Delle Valle ………………………………………............................... ... 3 3. Ancient Persian: Niebuhr, Grotefend, Rawlinson ……….........…….. 3 4. The discoveries of Layard and Botta in Syria …………………............... 4 5. Deceiphering Babylonian cuneiform …………………………...................… 5 6. The discovery and decipherment of Sumerian …………………............. 5 7. Twentiet-century decipherments: Hittite, Ugaritic, and the Language of Ebla …………..............................…………………………………… 6 8. Is there anything left to be discovered and deciphered? ……......…… 7 9. The discovery of the Royal Archives of Ebla …………………...............… 7

2018

Author(s): Veldhuis, Niek | Abstract: Funding from the Stahl Endowment in 2018 was used for adding more material to the Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Lists (DCCLT). Lexical texts are lists of words and lists of cuneiform signs that were used by ancient Mesopotamian scribes and scholars to teach and document the complex cuneiform writing system. These texts play an important role in the study of the history of education and scholarship, but are also of crucial and foundational importance for the decipherment of cuneiform and the reconstruction of Sumerian vocabulary. Last year's effort added, among other things, important bilingual lists of hides and leather objects and of metal objects. The editions are freely available through the internet; the data can also be downloaded in JSON format for re-use (for instance in Computational Text Analysis).

Alphabet Scribes in the Land of Cuneiform: Sēpiru Professional in Mesopotamia in the Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Periods., 2018

Writing in cuneiform in Mesopotamia existed for over 1000 years before the development of the alphabet around 2000-1800 Bce. Bloch traces the spread of the West Semitic alphabet from Wadi el-Ḫol to Mesopotamia, where as early as the sixteenth century Bce some clay tablets have been found to contain short alphabetic inscriptions (epigraphs) on their edges. After discussing bilingualism and the important status of Aramaic in the Assyrian empire, Bloch then focuses primarily on alphabetic scribes (henceforth sēpirus) in the Babylonian and Achaemenid empires. Bloch discusses the disputed view that sēpirus were so called "interpreter-scribes" (i.e., scribes who could translate from Aramaic to Akkadian and vice versa). He provides sixteen texts that support the view that "of all the professions attested in the Babylonian society of the sixth-fifth centuries Bce, the profession of sēpiru appears to be almost the only one suited for reading and writing in several scripts and languages" (p. 98). One poignant example of this is a court case involving the litigation over ownership of a slave-woman. The slave's arm is inscribed in alphabetic script "to (the goddess) Nanaya." One of the litigants is a cuneiform-scribe in the Eanna temple. The witness list also mentions three other scribes and six judges. However, none of these cuneiform scribes or judges appears to be capable of reading the alphabetic script on her arm, so that a sēpiru has to be summoned, and based on his testimony alone the verdict is rendered. Of particular interest regarding the ability to speak and read multiple languages is a writing exercise in which a student wrote out, in traditional order, the twenty-two letters of the NorthWest Semitic (NWS) alphabet but in phonetic cuneiform script. This demonstrates that the student and (most certainly) the teacher had a working knowledge of Mesopotamian cuneiform (and presumably the Akkadian language) as well as a NWS language and its alphabet. The alphabetic epigraph on this tablet reads ‫מפי‬ mpy ('from/by my mouth'), which suggests that a teacher dictated an exercise orally to a student. All scholars prior to Bloch asserted that the transcribed alphabet here must be Aramaic. However, Bloch points out that in all dialects of Aramaic, the word for 'mouth' is ‫פם\פום‬ pm/pwm instead of py. Furthermore, Bloch notes that even with pronominal suffixes added, the final m is preserved in Aramaic. Therefore, Bloch concludes that, linguistically, the alphabetic epigraph must belong to a NWS language of the Canaanite branch, such as Hebrew or Phoenician rather than Aramaic. It is indeed quite possible that the teacher and student were Israelite or Judean exiles. The earliest mention of a sēpiru working in the state administration for a king probably involves a Judean (or perhaps Israelite) in the service of Nebuchadnezzar II. In Nebuchadnezzar's southern palace a large archive of cuneiform texts was found in a basement storeroom. Many of the tablets were records of state dependents who received regular rations from the court of Nebuchadnezzar. A few of these texts (the so-called Weidner Texts) record King Jehoiachin as receiving one-half pānu of sesame oil a month and his five sons receiving two and a half qû of sesame oil a month. One of these texts states that there were eight other Judeans who received one-half qû each. Still another mentions a few of these Judeans by name, including a sēpiru whose name might be read Dānī-Yāwa, who is responsible for overseeing delivery of oil rations to captives from Cilicia. Bloch writes, "It is reasonable to suppose that Dānī ?-Yama had served at Jehoiachin's court in Jerusalem where he specialized in writing in Aramaic for the purposes of international communication. .. " (p. 230). Bloch states that any attempt to identify the ethnic background of sēpirus must be based entirely on the individual's personal name or the personal name of a first-degree blood relative. He cautions that

The Dawn of Writing Systems: Cuneiform and Egyptian Hieroglyphs Through the Behistun Inscription and the Rosetta Stone (ed. G. Kim and H. Kim), 2025

Babylonian cuneiform, the writing system that was in use in ancient Mesopotamia for more than three millennia, poses some serious challenges. Most cuneiform signs can be understood in more than one way – and for some, ancient dictionaries and sign lists provide up to two hundred different readings. Unsurprisingly, this complexity made the task of the pioneering scholars who deciphered cuneiform writing in the mid-nineteenth century very difficult. Even today, one can still ask why the scribes and scholars of Mesopotamia never systematically simplified their writing system. In this paper, it is argued that the multivalence of the signs was actually seen as a strength by these scholars rather than a liability. Assyrian and Babylonian literati believed that both written and spoken words denoted their objects by nature rather than by convention, and that by drawing on the various meanings of cuneiform signs they could find out how everything in the world was connected. The commentary tradition that emerged in first millennium BCE Mesopotamia illustrates this ancient “grammatology” better than any other genre.

The cuneiform script, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia, was witness to one of the world's oldest literate cultures. For over three millennia, it was the vehicle of communication from (at its greatest extent) Iran to the Mediterranean, Anatolia to Egypt. The Oxford Handbook of Cuneiform Culture examines the Ancient Middle East through the lens of cuneiform writing. The contributors, a mix of scholars from across the disciplines, explore, define, and to some extent look beyond the boundaries of the written word, using Mesopotamia's clay tablets and stone inscriptions not just as 'texts' but also as material artefacts that offer much additional information about their creators, readers, users and owners.

Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin (CDLB), 2024

This article features the Groton School cuneiform-text collection, including a discussion on its provenance as well as photographs, transliterations, translations, notes, and commentaries on the three texts in the collection. Two of the texts are from the Ur III period (ca. 2110-2003 B.C.E.), whereas one is from the Late Babylonian period (ca. 5th century B.C.E. through 1st century C.E.). The Ur III texts are an expense report from Puzriš-Dagān and a sealed receipt from an unknown provenience. Their commentaries focus on key terminology such as the term šu-gid 2 in the former and the phrase apin-la 2-ta ba-a in the latter. The Late Babylonian text is a loan document from Sippar concerning silver for a house sale. It is utilized for a detailed reconstruction of the provenance of the Maštuk archive, first postulated by Caroline Waerzeggers (2002). The commentaries for all three texts also highlight prosopographical observations, especially for the Late Babylonian text.

The purpose of my paper is to discuss cuneiform learning and writing as a reflection of literacy in Bronze Age Canaan. I will show what cuneiform inscribed artifacts can tell us about the way cuneiform literacy was achieved in Canaan. The conclusion of the chapter will evaluate the spread of literacy and the scope of cuneiform writing in Canaan. To begin with, I state that, unlike what sometimes is claimed, the use of cuneiform in Canaan was long and continuous. It is to be viewed as starting from the Middle Bronze Age and continuing into the Late Bronze Age, with all modifications. During the MBA the Old Babylonian dialect of Akkadian was the standard mode of expression in written communication; and in the LBA, the Akkadian was much influenced by Syrian and Hurrian scribal traditions. As much as it is realized today that we cannot speak of a clear break between the Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age in Canaan, so we must acknowledge some continuity in the use of cuneiform during the two phases. Although we lack the evidence, it is self-evident that cuneiform writing never fell out of use, because otherwise it would not have been employed by the Egyptian administration in Canaan during the Late Bronze Age.