Manuel d'Ougaritique.

AuthorParker, Simon B.
PositionBook review

Manuel d'Ougaritique. 2 vols. By PIERRE BORDREUIL and DENNIS PARDEE. Paris: GUETHNER, 2004. Pp. 177, 206, CD-ROM. [euro]25.29 (paper).

The introduction to the book states the authors' aim: to produce a handbook that will enable the beginner to learn the rudiments of all aspects of the study of the Ugaritic texts, preferably under the direction of an instructor.

The first volume consists of a short grammar, a bibliography, and hand-copies of fifty-five texts. The grammar begins with an overview of the history and culture of Ugarit, including brief accounts of the discovery and identification of the site, the decipherment of the alphabetic script, the discovery of particular collections of tablets and of the abecedaries and other scripts and languages, the types of Ugaritic texts, the history and geography of the kingdom, and the language and writing system. It then proceeds through phonology (five pages), morphology (forty pages) and syntax (eight pages), and concludes with comments on vocabulary and onomastics and on three characteristics of Ugaritic poetic language. Under "vocabulary" the authors observe that the most common verbs of movement, as well as the para-verbs of existence (the authors write of "quasi-verbs"), are shared only with Hebrew and Phoenician. Most of this section, however, consists of comments on names--personal, divine, and geographical--and here the predominant interest of the authors is in the question of vocalization. The section on the poetic texts identifies the following as the three principal characteristics of the poetic language: use of both the yaqtul and the qatala forms of the verb as perfectives; pervasive use of semantic and syntactic parallelism in distichs (or bicola) and occasionally longer combinations of stichs/cola (several examples of which are analysed); and differences in vocabulary, particularly the occurrence of rare words in collocation with more common synonyms in parallel stichs/cola. (There are unfortunately several typographical errors scattered through the grammar.)

After a fourteen-page bibliography, the volume ends with hand-copies of fifty-five selected texts. These include, in order, seven mythological texts, nine ritual texts, two incantations, two "scientific" texts (one hippiatric and one teratological), fifteen letters, five juridical texts, twelve economic texts, and three abecedaries (actually three tablets, five copies of the alphabet). One might have expected the abecedaries...

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