I Nomi di luogo dei testi di Ebla (ARET I-IV, VII-X e' altri documenti editi e inediti).

• Author: Astour, Michael C.

I Nomi di luogo...., when used in tandem with Marco Bonechi's I Nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla, provides the student of Eblean toponymy and topography with a valuable tool for the study of third-millennium Syria. Considerable scholarly caution, however, must still be exercised in the analysis of place names from this time and region.

The archives of Ebla, besides providing other invaluable information on the society and culture of the earliest known state of northern Syria, contain an extraordinary number of its place names. The exact figure cannot be established for two reasons: not all of the Ebla tablets have been, so far, published or excerpted; and it is not always possible to be certain whether some assonant names are mere variants or represent different entities. Still, my earlier rough estimate ("Toponymy of Ebla and Ethnohistory of Northern Syria: A Preliminary Survey," JAOS 108 [1988]: 547, n. 15) of "perhaps... two thousand" seems to be not very far from reality. But the piecemeal publication, with laudable speed, of the tablets, in volumes of two series and in numerous articles, created problems for the toponymist. He did not have a general picture at his disposal; he had to search in several books and periodicals for every occurrence of a particular place name; his lists, files, and notes were subject to changes as new evidence became available; and he was not protected from omissions and errors of transliteration, especially in early publications. Now these difficulties have been, to a very great extent, remedied by the simultaneous publication of two independent works in the same field - the volume reviewed here, and Marco Bonechi, I nomi geografici dei testi di Ebla, Repertoires geographiques 12.1 (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1993; hereafter, Rep. geogr. 12.1). I am not reviewing Bonechi's book, but I find it useful to start by briefly comparing and contrasting the scope and organization of the two works.

First of all, neither of them is complete, i.e., not all Ebla tablets have been utilized in compiling the toponymic catalogues. This is regrettable, though I fully understand that, with limited personnel and resources, it takes time to transliterate, let alone hand-copy, every last tablet at the disposal of the team of the Missione Archeologica Italiana in Siria. ARES II (as the volume under review will be referred to henceforth) excerpts the tablets published in ARET I-IV, VII-X, in MEE II and X that had not also appeared in the ARET volumes, and those tablets published in separate articles, a list of which is given on pp. 9-10. In addition, sixty-six unpublished "great annual reports of disbursements in silver" (their inventory numbers are listed on p. 15) were used in the compilation. On the other hand, those entries in G. Pettinato's catalogue of Ebla texts (MEE I) whose toponyms he cited, were left aside, unless they were published elsewhere or coincided with some of the sixty-six "great annual reports." The transliterations in MEE I, rapidly made from photographs, are not always reliable (as shown, in some cases, by subsequent collations), but they include a few interesting items, and it would have been worthwhile to check and process them. On the other hand, Bonechi used only the published material, but he also included a large number of the names in unpublished tablets as reported in MEE I, with the note "cit." and sometimes with the remark "to be collated." Thus, to an extent, the two works complement each other. Transliteration and printing errors that could be detected in previous publications have been corrected - in ARES II in the entries themselves, without special notice, in Rep. geogr. 12.1 in the entries and also in an appended list.

In the second place (after somewhat different coverage), there is a difference in the format. Rep. geogr. 12.1 follows the general pattern of that series: occurrences, in their various forms and spellings, are grouped under normalized entries, which the compiler considers to be typical and which reflects his preferred phonetics. A long list of correspondences between normalized and syllabic writings is placed at the end of the volume. This method is called prescriptive or normative and is, by its nature, often subjective. Notes following the entries, wherever they are found, are in general shorter than in other volumes of Rep. geogr. and often provide no useful information, but they contain references to publications which deal, in one way or another, with Eblean places and their names.(1) ARES II, on the other hand, chose the descriptive method by listing separately every spelling or formative variant, however slight, and limiting the editor's interference to cross-references to other similar looking items (which also involves a degree of subjectivity). How this method works in practice will be discussed later in this review. The explanatory notes to some of the entries are, in fact, detailed historical and geographical excursus. But all this does not touch upon the uniqueness of the conception and execution of ARES II, and it is the innovative character of the work that calls for most attentive consideration.

The leading idea, certainly to be credited to Alfonso Archi, was to provide the researcher in the virgin field of Eblaitica not only with a list of place names and their occurrences but also with guidelines and tools for comprehending the nature of Eblean toponymy and for extracting from the epigraphic data as much information as possible on the political, administrative, economic, cultic, and human conditions of as many settlements as possible in the orbit of Ebla. And so, the actual index of the toponyms is preceded, after the necessary technical remarks, by an introduction (pp. 15-29) of seven sections: (1) documentation; (2) literary texts and the "list of geographical names" (excluded as originating in southern Mesopotamia and irrelevant to the geography of Ebla); (3) graphic problems; (4) phonetic values; (5) case endings; (6) the suffixes; (7) toponyms and anthroponyms (a long list of place names which coincide, fully or at least significantly, with personal names found in Ebla texts). There follows a list of names of functions associated with toponyms and an index of toponyms by their consonantal skeletons, which facilitates finding different writings of the same name as well as cognate or assonant names. I shall return presently to some problems with the introduction.

The principal part of the book - the catalogue of place names - differs in its construction from all other works in toponymy known to me. The items of information associated with the place names are grouped into six categories: (1) NP: personal names; (2) NF: names of function; (3) TA: administrative terms; (4) ND: divine names; (5) NG: geographical names; (6) C: other. Only the most frequently attested entries contain data from all of the five informative categories, the rest have some or none of them. But whichever of these are available, they are extremely useful. The prosopographic evidence of category (1) can lead to equating...