Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2023 / Across Cultures, Across Languages. Interconnectivity in the Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Across Cultures, Across Languages. Interconnectivity in the Late Bronze Age Ugarit

Paper · 2023 · Jana Mynářová

Summary

This is a philological study, not an NLP paper. It asks how cuneiform writing and Akkadian scribal conventions changed as they spread from Mesopotamia to the western periphery, using cultural transfer as the lens. Mynářová argues that peripheral centres were not passive receivers. Imported elements were reshaped locally and blended with native habits. The Amarna letters show this well: the archive spans Mesopotamia to Egypt yet dates to a narrow window, and its Akkadian varies at every linguistic level. Loanwords, especially Egyptian administrative and military terms, and region-specific phrasing reveal where a scribe came from. The case study is an unusual idiom in EA 47, one of the letters sent from Ugarit, roughly "loyalty of my heart." Akkadian sources offer only a remote parallel, so the author compares it with Ugaritic material. She proposes that the phrase merges an Akkadian legal notion with a Ugaritic expression for royal will, making it a likely Ugaritism. The result shows how a shared written lingua franca can still carry local conceptual imprints.

Key points

  • The Amarna archive has close to 400 cuneiform documents, all written within at most 20–25 years. They come from senders across Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Cyprus, the Levant and Egypt.
  • The letters from Ugarit form a small group, EA 45–49. The idiom under study sits in EA 47, line 21: [ú-ul ki-]ma ˹ki˺-it UZU ŠÀ-bi-ia.
  • Huehnergard read the short form ki-it as most likely a scribal slip. The CAD gives only one other pairing of kittu and libbu, in Esarhaddon's vassal treaties, which are far removed in time and place.
  • Ugaritic normally expresses a legal obligation with mṣmt (DUL). However, KTU 7.63: 8 contains "in accordance with the king's heart," meaning the king's decision or wish.
  • Egyptian loans such as ṣābē piṭāti (from pḏ.tyw, "archers"/regular troops) also turn up in letters not written in Egypt. Terms for materials and precious goods are better clues to a scribe's origin.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Text written in a learned lingua franca can be compared against a sample of the writer's native language to expose interference at each level, from words to idioms.
  • I2. Loans tied to everyday culture (materials, goods) reveal origin better than widely shared political or military vocabulary, because the latter travels freely.
  • I3. An unexplained form gets several competing readings: copying slip, short bound form, or a calque from another language, each weighed rather than silently normalized.
  • I4. A dictionary parallel that is far away in time and place is treated as independent coinage, not as a source. Parallels count only when they are close in context.
  • I5. The idiom's meaning is modelled as a blend of two sources, binding legal duty plus ruler's will, rather than forced into a single sense.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (tree): Non-native English input could be parsed against reference treebanks of the writer's L1, so that unusual dependency patterns are flagged as transfer rather than errors.
  • I2 (world): When inferring the provenance or dialect of a text, the knowledge layer should weight domain-specific vocabulary over terms that circulate widely.
  • I3 (learn): Repair rules could keep "typo" and "dialectal construction" as rival explainable hypotheses, and accept a fix only when the evidence for one clearly outweighs the other.
  • I4 (frames): Idiom and frame matching from FrameNet or corpus examples should prefer attestations near in genre and period before borrowing their semantic roles.
  • I5 (frames): Speech-act and implicature analysis could allow composite readings, such as an obligation claim combined with an expectation claim, when one frame alone underfits the context.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Charles UniversityPrague · Czechia108 works · 20,329 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksReligious studies · 209 worksArcheology · 53 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Semitic languages · 1,484 works

Cite

Cite as Jana Mynářová. 2023. Across Cultures, Across Languages. Interconnectivity in the Late Bronze Age Ugarit. Diacrítica 37.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{mynarova2023across,
  title = {{Across Cultures, Across Languages. Interconnectivity in the Late Bronze Age Ugarit}},
  author = {Jana Mynářová},
  booktitle = {Diacrítica 37},
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.21814/diacritica.4770},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.21814/diacritica.4770}
}

References

62 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Agnetta, M., & Cercel, L. (Eds.). (2021). Text performances and cultural transfer. Textperformances und Kulturtransfer. Zeta Books. find
  2. Albright, W. F. (1946). Cuneiform material for Egyptian prosopography. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 5, 7–25. https://doi.org/10.1086/370767 ↗
  3. Cochavi-Rainey, Z. (1990). Egyptian influence in the Akkadian texts written by Egyptian scribes in the 14 th and 13 th centuries BCE. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 49, 57–65. find
  4. Cochavi-Rainey, Z. (1997). Egyptian influence in the Amarna texts. Ugarit-Forschungen, 29, 95– 114. find
  5. Cochavi-Rainey, Z. (1998). Some grammatical notes on EA 14. Israel Oriental Studies, 18, 207– 228. find
  6. Cochavi-Rainey, Z. (2011). The Akkadian dialect of Egyptian scribes in the 14 th and 13 th centuries BCE: Vol. 347. Alter Orient und Altes Testament. Ugarit-Verlag. find
  7. Cohen, Y. (2019). Cuneiform writing in Bronze Age Canaan. In A. Yasur-Landau, E. H. Cline, & Y. Rowan (Eds.), The social archaeology of the Levant: From prehistory to present (pp. 245–264). Cambridge University Press. ↗
  8. De Moor, E., Zwartjes, O., & van Gelder, G. J. H. (1996). Poetry, politics and polemics. Cultural transfer between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa: Vol. 4. Orientations. Rodopi. ↗
  9. Du Mesnil du Buisson, R. C. (1935). Les noms et signes égyptiens désignants des vases ou objects similaires. Librarire orientaliste Paul Geuthner. find
  10. Dick, J. K. (2012). Transmissibility and cultural transfer. Dimensions of translation in the humanities. Ibidem. find
  11. Edel, E. (1987). Zur Deutung der Glosse ma-aḫ-da in dem Amarna-Brief 14 (Geschenkliste Amenophis’ IV. für den Babylonierkönig Burraburiaš). Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 14, 43–47. find
  12. Edel, E. (1989). Ägyptische Glossen in den Geschenklisten des Amarnabriefes Nr. 14. Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur, 16, 27–33. find
  13. Edzard, D. O. (1969). Les tablettes cunéiformes de Kāmid el-Lōz. Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth, 22, 85–91. ACROSS CULTURES, ACROSS LANGUAGES. find
  14. INTERCONNECTIVITY IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE UGARIT Edzard, D. O. (1970). Die Tontafeln von Kāmid el-Lōz. In D. O. Edzard, R. Hachmann, P. Maiberger, & G. Mansfel (Eds.), Kamid el-Loz – Kumidi. Schriftdokumente aus Kamid el-Loz: Vol. 7. Saarbrücker Beiträge zur Altertumskunde (pp. 55–62). Rudolf Habelt Verlag. find
  15. Espagne, M. (1999). Les transferts culturels franco-allemands. Presses Universitaires de France. ↗
  16. Eyre, C. (1976). An Egyptianism in the Amarna letters? Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 62, 183–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/030751337606200125 ↗
  17. Goren, Y., I. Finkelstein, & N. Na’man (2004). Inscribed in clay. Provenance study of the Amarna tablets and other ancient Near Eastern texts: Vol. 23. Monograph series. Tel Aviv University; Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology. find
  18. Grave, C. (1980). On the use of an Egyptian idiom in an Amarna letter from Tyre and in a hymn to the Aten. Oriens Antiquus, 19, 205–218. find
  19. Hoch, J. E. (1994). Semitic words in Egyptian texts of the New Kingdom and Third Intermediate period. Princeton University Press. ↗
  20. Horowitz, W., Oshima, T., & Sanders, S. L. (2018). Cuneiform in Canaan. The next generation (2 nd ed.). Eisenbrauns. find
  21. Huehnergard, J. (1987). Ugaritic vocabulary in syllabic transcription: Vol. 32. Harvard Semitic studies. Scholars Press. find
  22. Huehnergard, J. (1989). The Akkadian of Ugarit: Vol. 34. Harvard Semitic studies. Scholars Press. find
  23. Huehnergard, J., & Van Soldt, W. H. (1999). A cuneiform lexical text from Ashkelon with a Canaanite column. Israel Exploration Journal, 49, 184–192. find
  24. Izre’el, Sh. (1997). The Amarna scholarly tablets: Vol. 9. Cuneiform monographs. Styx Publications. find
  25. Kilani, M. (2020). Naming practices and identity in the Early Late Bronze Age Levant: A linguistic and geographical analysis of local rulers’ names attested in the Amarna letters. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 27, 70–93. find
  26. Knudtzon, J. A. (1964. Die El-Amarna-Tafeln mit Einleitung und Erläuterungen (2nd Ed) (Vols. 1–2). Otto Zeller Verlagsbuchhandlung. (Original work published 1915) find
  27. Lambdin, T. O. (1953). Egyptian words in Tell El Amarna Letter No. 14. Orientalia. Nova series, 22(4), 362–369. find
  28. Liverani, M. (1971). Le lettere del faraone a Rib-Adda. Oriens Antiquus, 10, 253–268. find
  29. Liverani, M. (1980). Stereotipi dell lingua “altra” nell’Asia anteriore antica. Vicino Oriente, 3, 15–31. find
  30. Liverani, M. (1998). Le lettere di el-Amarna. 1. Le lettere dei «Piccoli Re»: Vol. 2.3/1. Testi del Vicino Oriente Antico. Paideia Editrice. find
  31. Madreiter, I. (2016). Antiochos the Great and the Robe of Nebuchadnezzar: Intercultural transfer between Orientalism and Hellenocentrism. In S. Svärd & R. Rollinger (Eds.), Cross-Cultural studies in Near Eastern history and literature: Vol. 2. The Intellectual Heritage of the ancient and medieval Near East (pp. 111–136). Ugarit-Verlag. find
  32. Márquez-Rowe, I. (2006). The royal deeds of Ugarit. A study of ancient Near Eastern diplomatics: Vol. 335. Alter Orient und Altes Testament. Ugarit-Verlag. find
  33. Middell, M. (2016, 28 January). Kulturtransfer, Transferts culturels, Version 1.0. Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte. https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok.2.702.v1 ↗
  34. Momrak, K. (2005). The phoenicians in the Mediterranean: Trade, interaction and cultural transfer. Altorientalische Forschungen, 32, 168–181. https://doi.org/10.1524/aofo.2005.32.1.168 ↗
  35. Moran, W. L. (1992). The Amarna letters. The Johns Hopkins University Press. find
  36. Müller, M. (2010). Akkadisch in Keilschrifttexten aus Ägypten. Deskriptive Grammatik einer Interlanguage des späten zweiten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends anhand der Ramses-Briefe: Vol. 373. Alter Orient und Altes Testament. Ugarit-Verlag. find
  37. Mynářová, J. (2014). The scribes of Amarna – A family affair? In L. Marti (Ed.), La famille dans le Proche-Orient ancien: Réalités, symbolisms et images. Proceedings of the 55th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, Paris, July 6–9, 2009 (pp. 375–381). Eisenbrauns. ↗
  38. Mynářová, J. (2022). Liminal people(s) in the Late Bronze Age Levant? A new light on Sherden (šerdanu). Journal of Ancient Near Eastern History, 9(2), 285–304. https://doi.org/10.1515/janeh-2021-0010 ↗
  39. Pardee, D. (2010). RS 15.117 et l’origine de l’alphabet cunéiforme d’Ougarit: Rapport de collation. Orientalia. Nova Series, 79(1), 55–73. find
  40. Peterson, J. (2006). Direct interconnections between the lexical traditions of Kassite Babylonia and the periphery. Ugarit-Forschungen, 38, 577–592. find
  41. Pongratz-Leisten, B. (2002). “Lying King” and “False Prophet”: The intercultural transfer of a rhetorical device within ancient Near Eastern ideologies. In A. Panaino & G. Pettinato (Eds.), Ideologies as intercultural phenomena. Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium of the Assyrian and Babylonian Intellectual Heritage Project Held in Chicago, USA, October 27–31, 2000: Vol. 3. Melammu symposia (pp. 215–243). Università di Bologna. find
  42. Rainey, A. F. (1996). Canaanite in the Amarna tablets. A linguistic analysis of the mixed dialect used by scribes from Canaan: Vol. 25. Handbuch der Orientalistik I (Vols. 1–4). Brill. find
  43. Rainey, A. F. (2015). The El-Amarna correspondence. A new edition of the cuneiform letters from the site of El-Amarna based on collations of all extant tablets: Vol. 110. Handbuch der Orientalistik I (Vols. 1–2). Brill. find
  44. Roche, C. (2008). Jeux de mots, jeux de signes en Ougarit ou de l’influence des textes lexicaus sur les scribes de péripherie. In C. Roche (Ed.), D’Ougarit à Jérusalem. Recueils d’études épigraphiques et archéologiques offert à Pierre Bordreuil ; Vol. 2. Orient & Méditerranée (pp. 205–214). De Boccard. find
  45. Scheuchner, T. (2012). The transmission and functional context of the lexical lists from Hattuša and from the contemporaneous traditions in Late-Bronze-Age Syria [Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, University of Leiden]. find
  46. Schneider, T. (2008). Fremdwörter in der ägyptischen Militärsprache des Neuen Reiches und ein Bravourstück des Elitesoldaten (Papyrus Anastasi I 23, 2–7). Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities, 35, 181–205. find
  47. Siddall, L. R. (2010). The Amarna letters from Tyre as a source for understanding Atemism and imperial administration. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 2(1), 24–35. find
  48. Singer, I. (1983). Takuḫlinu and Ḫaya: Two governors in the Ugarit letter from Tel Aphek. Tel Aviv, 10(1), 3–25. ↗
  49. Stockhorst, S. (2010). Cultural transfer through translation: The circulation of enlightened thought in Europe by means of translation: Vol. 131. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft. Rodopi. find
  50. Süel, A., & Soysal, O. (2003). A practical vocabulary from Ortaköy. In G. Beckman, R. Beal & G. McMahon (Eds.), Hittite studies in honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the occasion of his 65 th birthday (pp. 349–365). Eisenbrauns. ↗
  51. van den Hout, T. (2009). A century of Hittite dating and the origins of the Hittite cuneiform script. Incontri Linguistici, 32, 1000–1025. find
  52. van der Toorn, K. (2000). Cuneiform documents from Syria-Palestine. Texts, scribes, and schools. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins, 116, 97–113. find
  53. van Koppen, F., & Lehmann, M. (2012). A cuneiform sealing from Tell el-Dabՙa and its historical context. Ägypten und Levante, 22, 91–94. find
  54. van Koppen, F., & Radner, K. (2009). Ein Tontafelfragment aus der diplomatischen Korrespondenz der Hyksosherrscher mit Babylonien. In M. Bietak, & I. Forstner-Müller, Der Hyksos-Palast bei Tell el-Dabՙa. Zweite und dritte Grabungskampagne (Frühling 2008 und Frühling 2009), Ägypten und Levante, 19, 115–118. find
  55. Veldhuis, N. (2015). History of the cuneiform lexical traditions: Vol. 6. Guides to the Mesopotamian textual record. Ugarit-Verlag. find
  56. Viano, M. (2015). Writing Sumerian in the West. In A. Archi, in collaboration with A. Bramanti (Eds.), Tradition and innovation in the ancient Near East. Proceedings of the 57th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at Rome, 4–8 July 2011 (pp. 381–392). Eisenbrauns. ACROSS CULTURES, ACROSS LANGUAGES. ↗
  57. INTERCONNECTIVITY IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE UGARIT Viano, M. (2016). The reception of Sumerian literature in the Western periphery: Vol. 9. Antichistica / Vol. 4. Studi orientali. Edizioni Caʾ Foscari. http://doi.org/10.14277/978-88-6969-076-1 ↗
  58. Weeden, M. (2011). Hittite logograms and Hittite scholarship: Vol. 54. Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten. Harrassowitz Verlag. find
  59. Wiseman, D. J. (1958). The Vassal-Treaties of Esarhaddon. IRAQ, 20(1) i–ii, 1–99. ↗
  60. Zangani, F. (2022). Textual evidence for the diplomatic role of the Egyptian official Tutu from Amarna. Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, 33, 45–56. ↗
  61. Zorn, J. (1991). LÚ.PA-MA-ḪA-A in EA 162:74 and the role of the MHR in Egypt and Ugarit. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 50(2), 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1086/373486 ↗
  62. [recebido em 31 de janeiro de 2023 e aceite para publicação em 14 de junho de 2023] find

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/mynarova-2023-across-cultures-across-languages-interconnectivity/