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Eva Von Dassow, 'Canaanite in Cuneiform' Canaanite in Cuneiform Author(s): Eva von Dassow Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 124, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2004), pp. 641- 674 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132111 Accessed: 28/01/2010 05:01 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=aos. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Oriental Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Oriental Society. http://www.jstor.org Canaanite in Cuneiform EVA VON DASSOW UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA It has become a truism that Akkadian, the principal Semitic language of ancient Mesopo- tamia, was the lingua franca of the Near East during the second millennium B.C.E. This is stated, more or less in so many words, in any number of works on the ancient Near East, which usually offer the Amarnaletters, the trove of correspondencebetween Egypt and other states that was found at the site of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna), as the parade example of Akkadian as lingua franca.1 But is the truism true? The idea that Akkadianwas in common use as a written language throughoutthe ancient Near East, Egypt included, tacitly assumes the exact identity of writing with language: it assumes, that is, that what people write representsat face value the language in which they mean to communicate. According to this theory, if a scribe in Hatti or Egypt, Canaan or Cyprus, writes in cuneiform using sign sequences that spell Akkadian words, he means to write in the Akkadian language, regardless of whether what he writes exhibits features of his own or another language as well as errors in Akkadian. But this idea conflates the mo- dality of encoding linguistic expression with linguistic expression itself. It need not be the case that the signs with which a text is written directly represent the language in which it is written, and to assume that this is the case is inherently problematic when the writing system in question is one such as cuneiform, which tends to employ a variety of frozen graphic sequences (e.g., logograms) dissociated from language-specificreferents. When such a writing system is borrowed from one language community into another, the assumption that the language of a text is directly representedby the writing of the text becomes so prob- lematic that it should be treatedas a propositionrequiring demonstration rather than an axiom to be taken for granted. The hypothesis developed in this article owes its original inspirationto my study of A. E Rainey's work, Ca- naanite in the AmarnaTablets: A Linguistic Analysis of the Mixed Dialect Used by the Scribesfrom Canaan, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1996; hereafterCAT), in preparationfor reviewing it, and is adumbratedat the close of my article re- viewing that work, "Whatthe CanaaniteCuneiformists Wrote," IEJ 53.2 (2003): 196-217. The inquiryI have under- taken in the presentarticle is beholden to Rainey's magnumopus both for inspiringthe questions raised here and for making available the data necessary to address them, and I herewith acknowledge my debt to his work. This article is based on a paper that I gave, under the same title as my article reviewing Rainey, CAT,at the 213th meeting of the AmericanOriental Society, in Nashville, Tennessee, on April 6, 2003. I subsequentlygave a re- vised and expandedversion, titled "Alloglottographyin the CanaaniteAmarna Letters," at the 49th RencontreAssyr- iologique Internationalein London, on July 11, 2003. On each of those occasions several colleagues offered helpful comments, many of which were accompanied by bibliographic references. I especially wish to thank Jerrold S. Cooper, Irving Finkel, Piotr Michalowski, and Matthew W. Stolper for their suggestions. In addition, I am grateful to the readerswho reviewed this article on behalf of JAOSfor their criticisms and their recommendations.Needless to say, any errorsof fact or concept that may be found herein are my own. 1. To give just a few sample citations from recent secondary literature, such a statement is made by Nadav Na'aman, in his entry on the Amarna letters in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 1: 175; by Aml61ieKuhrt, The Ancient Near East c. 3000-330 B.C.E.(London: Routledge, 1995), 1: 346-47; and by several contributorsto Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, ed. Jack M. Sasson (New York: Scribners, 1995), the index of which helpfully includes an entry under "languages"for "linguafranca, Akkadian as" (to the referencesindexed, add H. Vanstiphout'smention of the internationaluse of the Babylonianlanguage as well as cuneiform, in "Memoryand Literacy in Ancient Western Asia," 4: 2186). Journal of the American Oriental Society 124.4 (2004) 641 642 Journal of the American Oriental Society 124.4 (2004) With regardto the ostensible use of the Akkadianlanguage, writtenin cuneiform,outside of Mesopotamia, in many instances the evidence offers reason to jettison the assumption that writing is a face-value representationof language, and to consider alternativepossibili- ties. The present article develops an alternative hypothesis concerning one such instance, which involves a subset of the Amarnaletters that are usually cited to illustrate Akkadian- as-lingua-franca, namely the use of cuneiform by Canaanitescribes during the Late Bronze Age (c. fifteenth-thirteenth centuries B.C.E.). The language that Canaanitescribes used for correspondencein cuneiformduring the Late Bronze Age has been an object of scholarly attention since the discovery of the Amarna tablets over a century ago. This language, that is, what the Canaanitescribes wrote, appears to be a hybrid producedby graftingthe scribes' native Canaaniteonto their borrowedAkka- dian. The resulting Canaano-Akkadianhybrid, which was initially thought to incorporate proto-Hebrewforms into a barbarizedAkkadian dialect, is consideredin currentscholarship to be an autonomousdialect with its own linguistic system and its own rules of morphology and grammar.2Recently, many featuresof this dialect have been cataloguedand analyzedby Anson Rainey in his four-volume work Canaanite in the Amarna Tablets.The description of Canaano-Akkadianthat can be abstracted from Rainey's work reveals a strange com- posite: in texts written in this hybrid, sentences composed of Akkadianwords are arranged in Canaanite syntax; Akkadian words are made to function according to the rules of Ca- naanite grammar;Akkadian words are providedwith Canaaniteaffixes; Akkadianwords and morphemes are recombined to produce otherwise nonexistent forms; and Canaanitewords, besides being deployed as glosses, are used alongside Akkadianones. Such a peculiar array of features(detailed in specific termsbelow) promptsasking whatkind of language saladwas this; who used it with whom, and how? In this article, I propose that the hybrid of Canaaniteand Akkadian in which Canaanite scribes wrote was not a language of any kind, but an artifactof these scribes' use of cunei- form, and furthermore,that the language underlying their communicationin cuneiform was not Akkadian but Canaanite.The Canaaniteuse of cuneiform would then be an instance of alloglottography,to borrow a term from Ilya Gershevitch, who defined it as "the use of one writable language for the purpose of writing anotherlanguage": the Canaanitescribes used Akkadian words, spelled in cuneiform, to write Canaanite.3In order to elucidate the basis 2. A lucidand theoretically well-grounded statement of sucha view is A. Gianto'sexplanation of Canaanized Akkadianas an "interlanguage,"a product of the language-learningprocess which, instead of beingsuperseded throughcontinued learning, became fossilized; see Gianto,"Amarna Akkadian as a ContactLanguage," in Lan- guagesand Culturesin Contact,ed. K. VanLerberghe and G. Voet(Leuven: Peeters, 1999), 123-32, esp. 127and 131.Another theory of the Canaano-Akkadianhybrid as an autonomousdialect is propoundedby S. Izre'el,"The AmarnaGlosses: Who Wrote What for Whom?Some Sociolinguistic Considerations," in Language and Culture in the NearEast, ed. S. Izre'eland R. Drory(Leiden: Brill, 1995),esp. 101-5; "VocalizedCanaanite: Cuneiform- writtenCanaanite Words in the AmarnaLetters: Some Methodological Remarks," Dutch Studies-Near Eastern Languagesand Literatures5.1-2 (2003):esp. 13-15 (repeatedalmost verbatim from "Amarna Glosses") and 28- 30; and"Canaano-Akkadian: Some Methodological Requisites for the Studyof the AmarnaLetters from Canaan," forthcomingin In the Footsteps of the Hyksos, ed. M.
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