Detecting word boundaries in an undeciphered script: The Byblos syllabary

The Byblos writing system (ca. 1500 BC) comprises 15 inscriptions, with the largest one containing 461 clearly discernible signs. Some further 28 unassigned fragments found in the Levante and in Italy are tentatively assigned to the Byblos corpus too. We have created a Unicode letter for each sign variant found in these inscriptions and transcribed the corpus. Feeding the corpus into our RegEx- based deciphering tool, we established a preliminary (dynamic) syllabary laying a foundation for computer-assisted deciphering efforts of the Byblos script. A first sequence analysis allows to detect morphemes and word boundaries, so that even without knowing the sound values, we gain some insight into the syntax of the language depicted by these beautiful graphemes

The Hittite Notion of Border. A practical view

The Hittite cuneiform texts (16th-12th cent. BCE) contain a number of detailed descriptions of borders of various countries and territories. Such fragments, mainly found in the international treaties as well as the annals of the kings, clearly reflect the particular formal interest on the part of the Hittite rulers in specific delimitation of political territories. Although the Hittite listings of the topographical points, which make up a frontier can extend over many lines of texts, one never finds any use of cardinal directions which would indicate the position of these points. Instead, the Hittite scribes applied a peculiar internal reference system that combines the position of the speaker and another point of reference in order to locate a specific part of the border. The talk will briefly review the corpus of the Hittite border descriptions and discuss how such fragments were conceptualized. It will also tackle the question, whether they reflect a ‘bird’s eye’, cartographic view of the land, or rather a ground-level, hodological perspective

Onomastic interferences in Lycia: Greek reinterpretation of Lycian personal names

As is well known, Lycia, located on the south-western coast of Asia Minor, was a multicultural and polyglossian area, especially during the second half of the Ist millennium B.C. From the 4th century B.C. onwards — that is before Alexander’s conquests — Greek writing and language became more and more predominant in that region, as a language of prestige, to the detriment of Lycian, which is an Anatolian language related to Luwian and Hittite. Although most of the indigenous personal names persisted in Lycia until the first centuries A.D., as evidenced by their large number found in Greek inscriptions from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, some of them underwent a little transformation in order to look like Greek names. This process, which is common in a context of language contact, consists in adopting a homophonic or phonetically similar name or element of the name, called “cover name” or, in French, “nom d’assonance” (see Dondin-Payre and Raepsaet-Charlier 2001; Coşkun and Zeidler 2005). One famous example of this type of onomastic adaptation from one language to another is the name of the Mede general who invaded Asia Minor, known in the Greek sources as Ἅρπαγος (Harpagos): the underlying Iranian name is derived from the adjective arba- “small, young” (cf. Sanskrit arbha-) with the hypocoristic suffix -ka-, but it has been slightly modified in its Greek adaptation in order to get it closer to the Greek substantive ἁρπαγή (harpagē) “pillaging”, so the enemy conqueror is reduced to a simple plunderer. I intend to present and discuss some Lycian names adapted as cover names in Greek, like Purihimeti ⁓ Πυριβάτης, with a second element -βάτης (-batēs), cf. verb βαίνω (bainō) “to walk”, and well attested in typical Greek personal names (Bechtel 1917: 92). The other names that will be interpreted are Kuprlle/i- ⁓ Κοπριλις (Koprilis), cf. Κοπρύλος (Koprulos), but also Κύβερνις (Kubernis), Mizu- ⁓ Μεσος (Mesos), cf. μέσος (mesos) “middle”, and Xddazada- ⁓ Κτασασας (Ktasadas), cf. Κτᾱσι- / Κτησι- (Ktāsi- / Ktēsi-)

Hemp! Thread, cloth and a calendar

Hemp cultivation and hempen cloth is the main theme of this paper. Iron Age textile fragments from the Southern Levant indicate that most textiles were made of some kind of plant fiber. Traditionally this region was regarded as linen territory, and indeed most textile finds were registered as such. The difference between linen and hemp is difficult to tell even with a regular microscope. But when using a scanning electron microscope, the difference becomes visible. This technique sheds new light on the use of bast fibers in the region. A piece of fabric from Tell Deir Alla in the Jordan Valley was the first item that could be registered as hempen cloth from the Southern Levant. The textile fragment was found amidst the loom weights of the loom on which it was woven, which raises new questions. Was the textile made of local hemp grown in the Jordan Valley? To answer this question, the cultivation of hemp will be discussed in relation to soil and climatic conditions of the central Jordan Valley. To investigate if growing hemp would fit into the farmers year course a ‘Deir Alla Agricultural Calendar’ was designed, based on the Gezer Calendar, a Hebrew inscription on limestone dated to ca. 925 BCE. Finally stalks of fiber hemp and examples of hempen thread and fabric will reveal how the material looks and… feels

The “poisonous water” (mê rʾōš) in Jer 8:14 and the “bewitched water” (mê kaššāpūti) in Maqlû i 103-104: witchcraft in the book of Jeremiah

Some scholars consider the biblical phrase mê rʾōš (“poisonous water”) a metaphor for the venom of a snake, others interpret it as a poisonous substance produced by pressing herbs and still, others believe it to be a metaphor for the destruction of the people Israel and their land. In the book of Jeremiah in particular, the phrase mê rʾōš appears three times (8:14, 9:15, and 23:15) and in all cases, it appears in execratory contexts. Numerous studies have put this phrase in relation to the trial ordeal in Numbers 5:11-31, and have therefore recognized its execratory nature, yet, to my knowledge, no one has ever studied it against the background of the Neo-Assyrian magical tradition. Accordingly, the expression “poisonous water” may have magical nuances attached to it. For example, the ancient Mesopotamians believed that curses could be passed to the victim by means of food or drink. In this analysis, I argue that the expression mê rʾōš may have the function that the Akkadian phrase mê kaššāpūti (“bewitched water”) has in Assyrian anti-witchcraft rituals where the administration of a poisonous drink symbolized the nullification of a curse as it was believed that the bewitched potion given to the evildoer returned to him the evil he had intended for his victim. In my talk, I will analyze the theme of the transfer of the curse through liquids and food in select Assyrian literature. I will then show how the book of Jeremiah redeployed this Assyrian theme to articulate its theological offensive against the harmful effects of the oracular utterances of illegitimate Prophets

Ionians and Carians in an Aramaic Letter from Saqqâra: Notes for a Tentative Interpretation of NSaqPap 26

This paper aims to present preliminary textual and historical observations towards a more comprehensive interpretation of a late 5th-4th cent. BC fragmentary letter of a Persian official from the corpus of Aramaic papyri of Saqqâra (NSaqPap 26). The understanding of this document, which deals with some situation of turbulence arisen between the Persian administration at Memphis/Saqqâra and the Ionians and Carians who lived and worked on the spot, is rendered complicated by the poor conditions of preservation of the papyrus, whose top and right portions are lost. Apart from the editio princeps by J.B. Segal (Aramaic Texts from North Saqqâra, London 1983, no. 26) and few additional notes in the reviews of it by J. Teixidor (JAOS1985) and S. Shaked (Orientalia1987), specific contributions on the piece are lacking. More in particular, despite its relevance to the study of the long-established communities of Greeks and Carians in Egypt, the letter has not received yet an adequate treatment from the historical point of view.   Following a lexical and syntactical revision, I provide a new tentative translation of the text, with the aim to reach as thorough and coherent an interpretation of the document as possible, and to shed further light on the living conditions of the communities of Ionians and Carians in Egypt under the Persian rule. By further contextualizing the events described in the letter with the aid of external sources, I argue for a mercenary revolt that affected the storehouses at the port of Memphis as the situation that prompted the response of the local Persian administration

The Goddess on the Vezirhan Stele

The stele from Vezirhan (Istanbul Archaeological Museum, inv. 6219+71.27) is best known for its Old Phrygian and Greek inscriptions (B-05). However, its reliefs also pose an interesting challenge. They include a boar hunt, a ritual banquet scene, and a human figure, commonly identified as a goddess, with lions, birds, and a palmette-like motif “sprouting” from her head. The stele is dated to the late 5th–early 4th century BC. The hunt and banquet scenes clearly belong to this time (and find many parallels on votive and funerary reliefs and seals of Hellespontine Phrygia). The image of the goddess, however, continues a different tradition, one that possibly stems from an earlier period. The Vezirhan goddess doesn’t have a singular prototype, but displays connections to a wide variety of iconographical schemes and details. Most are found in the 7th–6th centuries BC arts of Anatolia and the Aegean. By examining this corpus, with special focus on the Potnia theron iconographic type, we understand that the Vezirhan goddess is related to other deities attested in Anatolia (in fact, her name might have been a variation of Artemis, according to line 3 of the Phrygian inscription). Yet, she cannot be identified with any of them directly. For all matches, there are also differences. A certain creative effort was made to distinguish the goddess from her peers, possibly to reflect her local cult. In my talk, I would like to unfold this synthetic image, examine its components, and try to put them back together – and hopefully gain some insight into how the Vezirhan goddess’ iconographic scheme came to be

Identifying Intentional Ambiguity

Identifying Intentional Ambiguity   It is widely acknowledged that certain genres in ancient Near Eastern literature including the Hebrew Bible are characterized by intense ambiguity. In particular, divination, Wisdom literature and erotic poetry thrive on a special type of ambiguity—“double-edged words”—in which a single graphic or phonetic sequence is employed to convey a message and its precise opposite, at one and the same time. However, it is often difficult to demonstrate that a specific case of “double-edged wording” is in fact intentional rather than a product of an eager reader’s over-interpretation. The proposed paper offers three criteria for identifying intentionality in the formulation of ambiguous texts, based on examples from Biblical and other ancient Near Eastern divinatory, Wisdom and poetic texts: (1) Ungrammaticality: Sometimes an author is forced to use an ungrammatical form in order to preserve two opposite meanings. This happens when smoothing the grammar would have been achieved only at the price of losing the ambiguity; (2) Multiple representation: At times the same exact ambiguity is evidenced in identical contexts, but in different words and by means of different sentence-structures (occasionally even in different languages, e.g., Hebrew and Aramaic); when it can be demonstrated that coincidence is highly unlikely, the argument for intentional crafting is strong; (3) Straussian “Art of Writing”: When the author addresses an issue that was demonstrably contentious (from the author’s perspective), potentially-subversive formulations are particularly suspect. The intersection of two or three of these criteria in a single text strongly suggests intentionalit

The Nature of Geographical Knowledge in Hittite Anatolia in the 18th to 12th Centuries BCE in the Light of Cuneiform Sources

The talk will discuss a new, three-year project that is about to start at the University of Warsaw. It's aim is to investigate selected aspects of the –broadly speaking – Hittite perception of the world on the basis of the original Hittite cuneiform texts. It is organized into five subsequent partial (sub)investigations: Understanding Hittite space and place. Distribution and function of Hittite geographical determinatives. The structure and function of borders and border descriptions. Itineraries and the problem of distance. Geographical horizon and the role of space and territorial expansion in the royal ideology. Geography in Hittite epic and myth

Mirroring the god: topic, images and word-order in the hieroglyphic Luwian inscription ALEPPO 6

The presentation provides a short introduction to the Aleppo Temple and the inscriptions discovered during its excavations -ALEPPO 4, 5, 6, 7- (or that are supposed to have come from the Storm-God Temple -BABYLON 1, 2, 3-). Then an analysis of BABYLON 1 and ALEPPO 6 is provided. Both the inscriptions deal with the topic of reciprocity and mutual favours between the king (or the ruler) and the god. This topic is well expected in temple inscriptions. However, in ALEPPO 6 inscription this topic seems to have been developed on three different levels: 1) topic of the inscription; 2) iconography of the god’s and king’s images; 3) unusual word-order in the first clause of the text (name and titles). In my opinion there is a close connection between these three levels: in this case not only texts and images were meant to convey the same message, but even the linguistic level (word-order) is affected by the attempt of creating an integrated way of communication