A Hurrian Affricate or Sibilant in Ras Shamra

In their valuable article Semitized Hurrians in Syria and Palestine, ' H. L. Ginsberg and B. Maisler discuss the name 'iwrzr from a recently found Ras Shamra tablet.2 They note that the sign here transcribed z is not the usual S of the Ras Shamra alphabet, and suggest that it is a Hurrian sibilant, transcribing it Z. This is a most excellent suggestion, well borne out by the evidence, and the following remarks are intended merely to offer additional material. The character under discussion is a two-edged sign, similar in construction to the three-wedged S. It occurs but rarely and is generally regarded as a mere variant of the s sign 3; it is not even mentioned in the tables of the Ras Shamra alphabet as constructed by various scholars. It is by no means certain, however, that variants existed at all in this script, and before discussing the evidence for this sign it might be best to review what is known of the script in general. For the writing in itself presents certain problems. In the Tablets it is often unwieldy, and there are actual variations in form in certain of the letters. Some tablets exhibit these variations consistently: in T 3, obverse, the letter r is usually written with 6 or 7 wedges instead of 5, while m and g are also peculiar; in T 9 n has 4 wedges instead of 3, r 7; in T 12 h and n each have 4 wedges. In many of the other tablets similar variant forms occur exceptionally. It is true that the writing is in general bad in some of these tablets, especially in the obverse of T 3. The variations are sufficiently consistent, however, to give the impression that the script had but recently become fixed and that in some cases the exact arrangement of wedges had not yet been settled in the scribal school of Ugarit. We may, therefore, have here an indication that

Linguistics · Speech recognition · Ancient Egypt and Archaeology · Ancient Near East History · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Computer Science · Philosophy

• Zellig Sabbettai Harris

  E F Konrad Koerner•Historiographia Linguistica•1993

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