Further reading
5. Notes on Ugaritic poetry
The largest corpus of Ugaritic texts with continuous content consists of poetry. Watson (1999) is a brief but comprehensive presentation of Ugaritic poetry; see also Gordon’s classic UT § 13.107–168. The follow-ing notes apply the notion, discussed in Section 4.6.2, that the imperfect /yaktubu/ describes the background to some main event expressed by the narrative /yaktub/; see also Gianto (2010).
The basic unit of Ugaritic poetry is a two-line poetic structure, the
“bicolon.” This will be illustrated with a passage from the legend of Kirta KTU 1.14 I:26–35, divided into nine parts for convenience. An example of a bicolon is (1)–(2). (1) or (2) alone is therefore a colon. A bicolon can be expanded with a third colon, resulting in a tricolon, as in (3)–(5). Meter and rhythm do not play an important role in Ugaritic poetry; its poetic structure lies instead in the lexical and syntactic parallelism within the bicolon or tricolon. These units can combine among themselves to build larger structures analogous to strophes or stanzas.
In the following bicolon, two of the three elements in (1) have their semantic parallels in (2), thus a b c || b′ c′. The syntactic parallelism is also shown in the analysis.
(1) yʿrb . bḥdrh . ybky a b c Verb Adjunct Verb (2) bt
¯n .ʿgmm . wydmʿ b′ c′ GAP Adjunct Verb
‘He (Kirta) went into (narr. /yaʿrub/) his chamber crying (imperf.
/yabkiyu/, lit. ‘he cries’), || into the inner room and weeping (imperf.
/yidmaʿu/, lit. ‘he weeps’)’.
Lexically the parallelism above is incomplete, since there is no parallel to /yaʿrub/ ‘he went into’. But the absent parallel expression is syntacti-cally significant and can be described as an ellipsis or gap that creates a special effect. Thus, while the main event narrated in (1), Kirta’s enter-ing his chamber, continues to be true in (2), attention now shifts to the inner part of the room t
¯n . ʿgmm and is no longer on Kirta’s movement as in (1).
Gaps and gapping are a normal feature of language use. The state-ment Alex went to Paris and his brother to London would become unneces-sarily heavy if the word went were repeated. Gapping functions precisely to avoid this. On the other hand, instead of the gap one may insert a more meaningful element, such as chose to go, which creates explicit contrast with the previous affirmation. Thus gapping is likely to occur to keep the whole statement more flowing. This also holds in poetry, but its effects still await further appreciation. It is suggested here that gaps and gap-ping significantly contribute to regulate the flow of the narration that builds coherence within the bicolon or tricolon.
The alternation of verbal forms also marks the flow of the narration:
Kirta’s entering his chamber is a main event, expressed by the narrative form /yaktub/, while his crying is given as background, using the imper-fect /yaktubu/. See also other examples of backgrounding discussed in Section 4.6.2 (end).
Immediately after the above passage is this tricolon:
(3) tnkn. ủdmʿth a b Verb Subject (4) km. t
¯qlm. ảrṣh c d GAP Adjunct Adjunct (5) km ḫmšt mṭth c′ d′ GAP Adjunct Adjunct
‘His tears were pouring (imperf. N /tinnatikūna/) || like shekels to the ground, || like five weights onto the couch’.
As in (1)–(2), the use of the imperfect suggests that Kirta’s weeping is still going on. The gaps in this tricolon allow such a setting to linger throughout the rest of the tricolon. Note that, judging from its plural subject, the spelling tnkn must be interpreted as imperfect /tinnatikūna/.
A narrative form would have been written tnk, i.e. 3fem.pl. /tinnakū/, and would serve to indicate a main rather than a background event. This would in turn disturb the flow of narration from the previous bicolon and its continuation to the next bicolon.
The passage continues with the bicolon (6)–(7). It will be observed that here the syntactic parallelism can show more elements than the lexical parallelism:
(6) bm . bkyh . wyšn a b Adjunct Verb
(7) bdmʿh . nhmmt a′ b′ Adjunct GAP Adjunct
‘In his sobbing, he fell asleep (narrative /yišan/), || in his weeping, (he feel asleep in a) slumber’.
The spelling wyšn is best understood as the conjunction /wa-/ and narra-tive /yišan/ ‘he fell asleep’, so that his falling asleep is accordingly part of the main event in this episode. (Note that wyšn should not be com-pared to the much later Hebrew converted imperfect, because this spe-cial construction is an innovation within Hebrew prose.) The gapping in (7) has the same effect as in (1)–(2): while the description of Kirta’s falling asleep continues, the attention of the reader now shifts to the unconscious state he was in, i.e., nhmmt ‘slumber’.
Alternatively, the spelling wyšn can be interpreted as the conjunc-tion /wa-/ and suffix-conjugaconjunc-tion /yašina/ ‘he was asleep’. This reading describes Kirta’s being asleep rather than his falling asleep. In this case (6) has the same backgrounding effect as (3)–(7) as opposed to highlight-ing his fallhighlight-ing asleep as somethhighlight-ing new. In all likelihood the ancient readers themselves would interpret the spelling wyšn now as a narrative form, now as a suffix-conjugation. This kind of graphic ambiguity is part and parcel of Ugaritic texts. Either reading makes good sense, revealing the richness of Ugaritic poetry.
Another bicolon, (8)–(9), closes the episode about Kirta’s weeping that begins at (1):
(8) šnt . tlủản . wyškb a b c Subject Verb Verb (9) nhmmt . wyqmṣ a′ c′ Subject GAP Verb
‘While sleep was overpowering him (3fem.sg.imperf. D energic + 3masc.sg.suffix /tulaʾʾu-nnannu/) and he lay down (narr. /yiškab/),
|| slumber (was overpowering him) and he curled up (narr.
/yaqmuṣ/)’.
The gap in (9) allows the idea that the sleep that was overpowering him still lingers and in precisely that situation he curled up, affirming once again his lying down in (8).
The use of parallel words in a bicolon or tricolon is very common in Ugaritic poetry, though complete parallelism as in (6)–(7) is not very fre-quent. Ugaritic possesses a rich inventory of stock parallel “word pairs”
used in poetry; see Watson (1999:181–183) and the lists of Ugaritic and Hebrew word-pairs compiled and commented on by Dahood in RSP 1:
71–382, 2: 1–39, 3: 1–206. Generally the first word or expression in the pair is a more common word than the second, which in this case is more specific in sense. Thus ydmʿ in (2) is more specific than the general men-tion of weeping ybky in (1); see also their use in (6)–(7). The metaphoric description that Kirta’s tears were flowing like ‘five weights’ (5) is more vivid than the imagery of shekels falling down in (4). Likewise the word nhmmt ‘slumber’ in (9) has a more specific sense than the more common word for ‘sleep’ šnt in (8). Again, ‘curling up’ (9) is stronger than ‘lying down’ (8). The examples show that the second part of a parallel contains something more than the first and gives more meaning to the whole bicolon or tricolon.
The more specific word or expression in the second part is sometimes longer than its parallel, e.g., bt
¯n . ʿgmm in (2) vs. bḥdrh in (1) and, simi-larly, nhmmt in (9) vs. šnt in (8). The longer expressions often occur with gapping and serve as “ballast variants” to compensate for the gaps.
A combination of several bicola or tricola as found in (1)–(9) forms a larger unit having a common theme, i.e., Kirta going into his room while weeping and in that situation falling asleep, lying curled up.
Such a thematic unit is similar to a strophe or stanza having a separate thematic unit, as is clear from the previous context (Kirta’s losing his seven wives in KTU 1.14 I:1–25) and the subsequent passage (the ap-parition of the god El in Kirta’s dream addressing his protégé in KTU 1.14 I:35 etc.).
Bibliography
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CTA = Herdner 1963.
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Dietrich, Manfried, and Oswald Loretz. 1988. Die Keilalphabete: Die phönizisch‑kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit. Münster: Ugarit Verlag.
Dietrich, Manfried, Oswald Loretz, and Joaquín Sanmartín. 1995. Cuneiform Alphabetic Texts from Ugarit, Ras Ibn Hani and Other Places (KTU), 2nd ed. Münster: Ugarit Verlag.
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Holger Gzella
1. Introduction
“Phoenician” is a generic term applied to a number of mutually intelligi-ble Canaanite dialects which were mainly used in the ancient city-states of Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon and their surroundings on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The original speech area coincides more or less with the present state of Lebanon. Speakers of Semitic languages settled in that area as early as the third millennium bce; during the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1500–1200 bce), it was subject to Egyptian and Hittite rule. The Akkadian language and its syllabic cuneiform writing domi-nated administration, law, and diplomatic correspondence during this period. After the major political and socioeconomic upheavals on the threshold of the Early Iron Age, however, Byblos became the foremost center of alphabetic writing. The power vacuum between ca. 1200 and 900 bce enabled public life to grow once again in some of the old cities and in several newly emerging chiefdoms. Those were the days when in Phoenicia, Israel, the Aramaean kingdoms, and Transjordan local dia-lects were promoted to chancery languages, perhaps indicating a novel cultural self-awareness of the ruling elites, and the Phoenician variant of the alphabet came to serve as the standard medium of writing. Due to Phoenician colonization and trade connections, this versatile script spread across the entire Mediterranean and was eventually adapted and modified by the Greeks.
The dialect of Tyre and Sidon soon became a kind of “Standard Phoenician” which replaced or influenced others. Its impact on later Byblian can still be observed, as some original forms of this dialect then seem to have given way to their Tyro-Sidonian counterparts.
Texts from Cyprus and, from the fifth century bce on, from the west-ern Mediterranean too, exhibit certain peculiarities. As a language of local prestige, Phoenician remained in use on the mainland during the Achaemenid and Hellenistic ages beside Aramaic and Greek, presum-ably until the first century bce. For the same reason, Phoenician in-fluences have been suggested for some biblical books (e.g. Qohelet).
Between the eighth and seventh centuries bce it was also employed in monumental inscriptions for public display in several kingdoms in Asia Minor. Punic, a North African offshoot of Phoenician, continued to be spoken after the destruction of Carthage (146 bce), once a colony of Tyre but then the metropolis of the Punic empire, until at least the fifth century ce.
Ongoing discoveries of inscriptions and coins permitted a reliable decipherment of Phoenician and Punic. This process was initiated by the French polymath Jean-Jacques Barthélemy in 1758 and completed in the first half of the nineteenth century by the German theologian and Hebraist Wilhelm Gesenius, who, in 1837, also published the first comprehensive manual of the language with an edition of all the texts available to him. Since then, Phoenician and Punic studies has become a discipline in its own right. An estimated 10,000 Phoenician-Punic royal, funerary, and dedicatory inscriptions are known today, to which a few papyri and ostraca as well as certain passages in the Latin comedy Poenulus by Plautus may be added.
However, these texts, especially the late ones from Carthage and its surroundings, which constitute the lion’s share of the evidence, are extremely formulaic. Only a fraction of the witnesses antedate the Punic period; many of them can be easily accessed in KAI 1–60, 280–
294 (this added group without translation and commentary in the fifth edition of the first volume). Gibson (1982) provides an edition of the most important Phoenician inscriptions with translation and com-mentary in English, but the philological notes in Cooke 1903 can still be used with profit, too. The focus of the present survey rests on the texts from the mainland. Friedrich and Röllig (31999) provide more detailed information; the lexicon of Phoenician and Punic, together with comprehensive bibliographical references, is also included in Hoftijzer and Jongeling 1995. Eight tenth-century inscriptions from Byblos (KAI 1–8) mark the beginning of the textual record. Despite a number of archaisms and idiosyncrasies, they are conventionally in-cluded in the Phoenician corpus under the label “Old Byblian.” Some traditional personal names on arrowheads, assembled and discussed by Hess (2007), survive from an even earlier period but say very lit-tle about the language itself. Predecessors of the Phoenician dialects which did not yet serve as written idioms may have left some traces in texts composed during the Late Bronze Age in Akkadian and per-haps also in Ugaritic. Scientific, mythological, and historical works in Phoenician were celebrated in Antiquity; unfortunately, they have all been lost.
2. Phonology
Phoenician orthography remained purely consonantal for many centu-ries. Only in Punic did vowel letters (matres lectionis) become widespread for denoting long vowels as in the earliest Aramaic texts, and even in Late Phoenician they occur at most only in a few names. As a consequence, the phonology of the older forms of the language has to be reconstructed on the basis of names and loanwords principally in cuneiform, Greek, and Latin transcriptions on the one hand and comparative philology on the other. This information leads to a rough approximation at best, since other scripts cannot render all the characteristic sounds, and names in particular frequently reflect a more archaic linguistic stage. In addition, such transcriptions do not follow a consistent standard; hence it is often difficult to distinguish between phonemes and allophones.
2.1. Consonants
Each of the 22 letter-signs of the Phoenician alphabet corresponds to one consonantal phoneme. The underlying sounds can be grouped according to place and manner of articulation (voiced or unvoiced): the laryngeals / ʾ/ (glottal stop) and /h/; the fricative pharyngeals / ʿ/ (glottalic pressure sound) and /ḥ/ (between ch in German Bach or Scottish loch and simple h);
the velars /g/ and /k/; the sibilants /z/ and /s/; the dentals /d/ and /t/; the bilabials /b/ and /p/; the unvoiced palatovelar /š/ (as in sh). The unvoiced velar, sibilant, and dental have “emphatic” counterparts /q/, /ṣ/, and /ṭ/.
Their exact pronunciation in Phoenician is debated, but the lowering of the following vowel found in some transcriptions may indicate that they were velarized. The liquids /l/ and /r/, too, are phonemes (they can al-ternate and, at least in later stages, both can disappear at the end of a syllable); likewise the nasals /m/ and /n/ and the semivowels /y/ (palatal) and /w/ (bilabial). Additional phonemes preserved in some Semitic lan-guages like Ugaritic or Arabic can no longer be traced, not even in the most ancient sources of Phoenician, and, as throughout later Canaanite, have merged with other consonants: */θ/ > /š/; */ð/ > /z/; */θ̣/ (Arabic /ẓ/) and */ṣ́/ (Arabic /ḍ/) > /ṣ/; */ḫ/ > /ḥ/ and */ġ/ > / ʿ/ also occurred in Ara-maic. The old lateral */ś/ seems to have shifted to /š/ but was pronounced differently, depending on region and period. All consonants could be lengthened (e.g., /mm/ or /tt/, as in Italian mamma or fatto), but, because they were articulated only once, appear as simple (non-geminated) consonants in writing (with a few late exceptions).
As in the rest of Canaanite and in Aramaic, /n/ assimilates to an immediately following consonant (e.g., ŠT /šatt/ ‘year’ from */šant-/, KT /kattī/ ‘I was’ instead of */kantī/). This could also happen across word boundaries, but in that case it is not always reflected in writing (BYḤMLK
‘son of Yaḥūmilk’ in KAI 7:3, but BN MLK ‘son of the king’ in KAI 14:2).
Occasional spellings of etymological /n/ before dentals and sibilants may point to a dissimilation of long consonants by way of nasalization in some areas. Such instances occur more frequently in Late Punic (cf.
YTNTY ‘I gave’, KAI 145:6; but with a laryngeal already in TNḤL ‘you inherit’, KAI 3:4). In some morphemes, intervocalic /h/ is regularly lost,
YTNTY ‘I gave’, KAI 145:6; but with a laryngeal already in TNḤL ‘you inherit’, KAI 3:4). In some morphemes, intervocalic /h/ is regularly lost,