Ugaritic pwt

The -Ugaritic noun pwt has attracted attention during recent years because of its possible bearing on the question of the origins of the ethnic terms Punic and Phoenician. 1 In published texts the term is found only in PRU II, text 138 (= UT 1106:10) and PRU V, text 66 (= UT 2051: 6). The first text records allocations of clothing and the second the desiderata of a guild (the yshm).2 In both texts pwt is found in the company of terms for materials of the dyeing industry: linen (pttm),8 blue-purple (iqni),4 glaze (spsg),5 * It gives me great pleasure to express my indebtedness here to Professors William W. Hallo of Yale University and W. von Soden of Minster for the general guidance and specific information which they generously contributed to this short study. They are not to be held accountable for every viewpoint proposed herein, for the author has taken the liberty to disagree with his counselors at certain points. 1 Aside from the purely lexical observations of Virolleaud (PRU III, p. 137), Gordon (UT, p. 467, entry no. 467 no. 2031), and Aistleitner (WUS, p. 254), the term has been subjected to study by M. Astour in Hellenosemitica (Leiden, 1965), p. 146. Astour proposes that pwt via the gentilic form pan! is the source of both Latin Punicus and Greek solder and coNPKeS. [Cf. also JNES 24 (1965) 348f. ED.] 2 UT, p. 274 and 282-3. s On the signification linen rather than flax for pttm see Dietrich & Loretz, WdO III (1966), 224 f. 4On the signification dark, blue (vs. pom bright, red purple ) for iqnu see WdO III (1966), 220, 227 f., 231. 6 Not much can be added to the many observations on spsg (Ginsberg, BASOR 98, 21 ff.; Albright, BASOR 98, 24; Goetze, JOS 1, 1947, 311-15), including the latest ones by E. M. Good (JBL 77, 1958, 72-4), M. Lee (UT, p. 543), and W. W. Hallo (BiOr 20, 1963, 140, n. 66). The term has been restored in the passage from the royal

Composite material · Dyeing · Physics · Term (time) · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Linguistics and language evolution · Materials Science