Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters.

• Author: Baranowski, Krzysztof J.
• Position: Book review

Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters. By JUAN-PABLO VITA. Alter Orient und Altes Testament, vol. 406. Munster: UGARIT-VERLAG, 2015. Pp. xii + 179. 78 plates. [euro]97.

Vita's book presents his long-time effort to group the Amarna letters (EA) from Canaan according to the individual scribes who wrote them. In pursuit of this goal, he relies heavily on petrographic analysis (Goren, Finkelstein, and Na'aman 2004), considerations based on the content of the letters, and various proposals made in the literature with which he has excellent familiarity. Vita's own contribution consists in the paleographic identification of the groups of tablets written by individual scribes. He bases his conclusions on perceived similarities of the general ductus and the characteristic shapes of certain signs.

The main part of the book discusses the epistolary corpora of individual cities. For each city, Vita provides a detailed bibliography and an updated discussion of the difficulties inherent in assigning letters to a particular city. He then assesses the similarity of the script of the individual letters and, based on "scribal hands," he assigns the letters to a scribe or scribes from each city. This procedure results in the distinction between the historical corpus of the city (based on the data in the heading of the letters and their content) and the linguistic corpus (based on the scribes' identification).

The discrepancies between the two groups are in some cases significant. For example, the historical corpus of Gezer counts fourteen letters while the linguistic one has twenty or twenty-one. Similarly expanded is the corpus from Ashkelon: from fifteen to twenty-one letters. More importantly, the linguistic corpora of some cities disappear, as they seem to have been written by scribes from other localities. These are Iqrata and Ardatu (letters written by the Amurru scribes), Hasabu (by the Beqa (c) Alliance scribe), Siri-Basani, Qanu, Tubu, Nasiba, and Sas (c)Imu (single letters, all written by the Musihuna scribe), Taanach (the letter assigned to the Megiddo scribe), and Sapuma (two letters written by scribe no. 1 from Gezer). I must stress the usefulness of this part of the book as it provides updated summaries of the scholarly proposals on the origin of the individual letters with their critical evaluation as well as an exhaustive bibliography.

The last part of the book contains tables which summarize the results of the study and several case studies...