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Possible Ugaritic Influences on the Hurrian of Ras Shamra-Ugarit in Alphabetic Script

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Possible Ugaritic Influences on the Hurrian of Ras Shamra-Ugarit in Alphabetic Script Possible Ugaritic Influences on the Hurrian of Ras Shamra-Ugarit in Alphabetic Script Joseph Lam The interaction between Ugaritic and Hurrian in the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra in Syria) represents a fascinating example of lan- guage contact from the ancient Near East. Ugaritic and Akkadian are the two languages that dominate the textual record at the site, with Ugaritic (approxi- mately 2000 texts) being the primary spoken vernacular of the ancient city and Akkadian (approximately 2500 texts) functioning as the diplomatic lin- gua franca of the period (Bordreuil and Pardee 2009: 8). However, among the remaining six languages that are known from the Late Bronze Age at Ras Shamra (Sumerian, Hittite, Hurrian, Luwian, Cypro-Minoan, and Egyptian), Hurrian stands out as the one most likely to have represented a spoken lan- guage for a significant minority segment of Ugaritic society.1 A number of factors point in this direction. First, Hurrian is the only language other than Ugaritic (and Akkadian) to have been inscribed in the locally-invented alpha- betic cuneiform script.2 In fact, unlike Ugaritic (mostly alphabetic cuneiform) and Akkadian (mostly logosyllabic cuneiform), Hurrian is more evenly attested in the two major scripts used at the site, with texts in each of the scripts num- bering in the dozens; their distribution reflects the particular importance of Hurrian in hymnic and ritual contexts.3 In addition, a significant number 1 For a useful survey of languages and scripts attested at Ugarit, see Malbran-Labat (1999). 2 As Juan-Pablo Vita (1999: 457) observes, “the only successful adaptation of the Ugaritic alpha- bet to another language, in a significant way, was to Hurrian,” notwithstanding the several isolated examples of Akkadian written in alphabetic script. On the invention of the Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform system, see Pardee (2007). 3 The syllabic material includes the multilingual vocabulary (Sa) texts that contain a Hurrian column (Huehnergard 1987: 22–23; van Soldt 1990: 728–729; André-Salvini and Salvini 1998; 1999), one Akkado-Hurrian “wisdom” text (RS 15.010), two letters (RS 11.853, RS 23.031 [unpub- lished]), and about twenty examples (counting the numerous fragments of RS 19.164 as a single text) of the so-called “musical” texts, which contain religious lyrics accompanied by notations for musical performance. The alphabetic Hurrian material consists of between one and two dozen texts of a ritual nature (the numerical uncertainty deriving from the difficulty of language identification for small fragments), plus five other ritual texts in mixed Ugaritic and Hurrian (see discussion to follow). For overviews of the Hurrian material from Ugarit, see Dietrich and Mayer (1999: 58–61) and Vita (2009: 219–220). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004300�56_0�5 268 Lam of Hurrian proper names4 and loanwords5 are known in the Ugaritic texts. These facts, along with evidence of Hurrian linguistic influence at nearby sites such as Alalakh, Emar, and Qatna, reflect the existence of a Hurrian cultural- linguistic element in northern Syria in the latter part of the 2nd millennium BCE (Salvini 1995; Richter 2005). Last but not least, among the alphabetic material are five bilingual Ugaritic and Hurrian tablets,6 all of them ritual in nature, attesting to priest-scribes that were at least functionally bilingual and capable of inscribing Hurrian when a specific part of a ritual necessitated it. However, the contact situation between Ugaritic and Hurrian in Late Bronze Ras Shamra has been explored only to a limited extent. On the one hand, since the influence of Hurrian on Ugaritic seems restricted entirely to lexical bor- rowings, the most detailed study to date is the series of four articles by Wilfred Watson on “Non-Semitic Words in the Ugaritic Lexicon” (1995; 1996; 1998; 1999) in which he identifies approximately 80 possible Hurrian loanwords in Ugaritic. On the other hand, the nature of Ugaritic influence on Hurrian at Ras Shamra remains difficult to characterize, because of the general difficulty and paucity of the Hurrian texts from Ras Shamra.7 Limited observations have been made on the topic, though invariably as part of broader grammatical overviews, such as those of Bush (1964), Laroche (1968), and Dietrich and Mayer (1999). Most notably, Laroche (1968: 533) gave a brief paragraph describing the “style” of the 4 According to Hess (1999: 509), about 23% of the personal names from Ugarit (both syllabic and alphabetic) are Hurrian. Similarly, van Soldt (2003: 702), in a more focused study of select groups of persons at Ugarit, observed that Hurrian names comprise between 5 and 30% of the various lists. While acknowledging that the language of one’s name does not necessarily correspond to the language that one speaks, the numbers nonetheless confirm the impor- tance of the Hurrian linguistic-cultural element at Late Bronze Ugarit. Earlier studies analyz- ing the Hurrian names at Ugarit include Gröndahl (1967) and Kinlaw (1967). 5 See Watson (1995; 1996; 1998; 1999) and discussion to follow. 6 RS 24.254, RS 24.255, RS 24.261, RS 24.291, and RS 24.643 (Ugaritic with a five-line Hurrian sec- tion); see Pardee 1996; Lam 2006. 7 Notwithstanding the considerable progress made in the study of Hurrian in the last two or three decades, especially after the discovery of the Hurro-Hittite bilingual materials at Boğazköy in the 1980’s, it remains one of the more poorly-understood languages of the ancient Near East. The Hurrian texts inscribed in the alphabetic cuneiform script pose unique chal- lenges for interpretation. While consonantal writing is well suited to syllabic structure and the derivational patterns of a Semitic language (based on triliteral roots), it seems rather maladapted for Hurrian, with its agglutinative structure and great number of morphemes that differ only by a vowel or by the gemination of a consonant. The result is that much of the alphabetic Hurrian corpus remains difficult to interpret if not impenetrable to modern scholars..
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