Reading Ancient Mail.

• Author: Huehnergard, John
• Position: Essay

'T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses Instead of speech, may form a lasting link Of ages ... Lord Byron, Don Juan (1837), Canto 3, stanza 88 I. INTRODUCTION

In preparing for my address, in this 176th year of our Society, I read a good many earlier AOS presidential addresses. There were many illustrious names among those, and so I am keenly aware of the daunting privilege of standing before you this evening. But as I read those earlier addresses, I was at least somewhat relieved to find that many of them began with the problem that prompted me to read some of them in the first place, namely, What can I talk about that will be of interest to such a diverse group of scholars? At the 1972 meeting, for example, the eminent Assyriologist Leo Oppenheim began by saying, "When it comes to after dinner speeches, the philologist... is at a sore disadvantage" (Oppenheim 1973: 259). Even more so, I can attest, when the philologist is one whose research tends to focus on comparative and historical grammar. When I contemplated talking about any of my current research projects--such as Proto-Semitic morphology or Hebrew etymology--I worried that some of you, who for some bizarre reason are not passionate about Semitic historical linguistics, might be asleep in moments. And as Stephanie Jamison pointed out in her wonderful address to the 2010 meeting, putting the audience to sleep is not the kind of "institutional immortality" one should strive for (Jamison 2011: 1).

So I decided to talk instead about my favorite type of text, the letter. We all have our individual reasons for getting into these fields of study. I have always been interested in languages and ancient history; in high school, I had the opportunity to study Latin, and then, at my small college, not only Greek but also Hebrew and even Aramaic. Ancient languages grabbed me, and have never let go. And the texts that bring those languages most vividly to life for me are letters. We all learn in high school about Hammurapi and his famous laws. But I still remember discovering, in college, that we can read letters of Hammurapi. (1) To me, this was, and still is, amazing. When I retired from teaching in the spring of 2017,1 started trying to get my Latin back in shape, something I had long wanted to do. And the first Latin texts I want to read are letters. In fact, the year before I retired, at the 2016 AOS meeting, when I visited some of Boston's used bookstores, I bought only one book: a volume of Cicero's letters.

I have to issue a disclaimer: there is a rich and burgeoning scholarship on epistolography in the ancient Near East, (2) as there is in the Society's other philological traditions in which there is a large corpus of texts. For example, 2015 saw the publication of the monumental History of Chinese Letters and Epistolary Culture, edited by our colleague Antje Richter (Richter 2015). (3) But I myself am not a scholar of epistolography. I have, however, read a lot of ancient letters. It was my great fortune to teach courses in most of the ancient Semitic languages, and every year or two I had a graduate seminar devoted specifically to Old Babylonian letters, or Old Assyrian letters, or Aramaic letters. In my other courses, too, it wasn't long before the students were aware that, in any language, letters are my favorite type of text, (4) and why they are: I really want to know how they talked, these ancient people we study, to understand the grammar of their languages as deeply as possible; and letters, which are usually unedited, are the closest we can get to real, everyday speech. Indeed, among the many definitions of the genre of letters that I have read, one of my favorites is that letters are "conversation at a distance" (Sweeney 2001: 1).

As is true of letters in other ancient cultures, some ancient Near Eastern letters are official, while others are private, although it's usually not possible to draw a sharp line between the two. Many of the letters I will talk about are private letters, concerned with family matters or other aspects of daily life. Private letters presumably reflect less formal speech, and that also makes us linguists happy. They are also more fun: they provide glimpses of everyday life, of the thoughts and concerns of mostly otherwise unknown, unremarkable individuals. (5) So what follows is a personal tour through two millennia of ancient Near Eastern letters in a variety of languages on a variety of media, a small selection of favorites from among the many that I have enjoyed reading over the past four decades. Some of these letters are well known within each guild, but most are not, I believe, known across even the various branches of ancient Near Eastern studies, let alone more broadly. And since many of the cultures studied by members of the Society have preserved corpora of letters, I hope it will be of some interest to most. Indeed, letters, letter-writing, and epistolography might make a good topic for a plenary session.

2. AKKADIAN LETTERS (1): OLD BABYLONIAN

   I mentioned how amazed I was to learn that we have letters of Hammurapi. The first letter I will present is not one of Hammurapi's, but it is from the time of his reign, nearly 3,800 years ago (in the so-called Middle Chronology, which places his reign at 1792-1750 BCE). It is probably my favorite letter. (6) A young man named Iddin-Sin, who is away at school, writes to his mother Zinu. After the customary "may the gods sustain you forever for my sake" ([DN.sub.1] [DN.sub.2] [DN.sub.3] assumi-ya ana dariatim liballitu-ki, 11. 4-6)--the equivalent of our starting an email with "hope this finds you well"--Iddin-Sin launches into his reason for writing:

   (7) Subat awlle (8) sattam ana sattim (9) idammiqu; (10) atti subat-i (11) sattam ana sattim (12) tuqallali. (13) Ina subati-ya (14) qullulim u kussi (15) tastari. (16) Ina sipatum ina biti-ni (17) kima akalim innakkala,(18) atti subat-i tuqallili. (7-9) The gentlemen's clothing gets better from year to year; (10-12) you decrease my clothing from year to year. (13-15) You have become rich by decreasing and skimping or? my clothing. (16-18) While wool is consumed like bread in our house, you have decreased my clothing. So this is a schoolboy's complaint that could be heard today: "everyone else at school has better clothes than I do!" Iddin-Sin isn't done complaining:

   (19) Mar Adad-iddinam, (20) sa abu-su suhar abi-ya, (21) sina? subate essutim (22) [lab]is; atti ana subati-ya (23) [is]ten tattana?dari. (19-20) The son of Adad-iddinam, whose father is an employee of my father, (21-22) is [wea]ring two? new garments; (22-23) you keep worrying about my [o]ne garment. And in fact, Iddin-Sin's father was one of Hammurapi's high officials, Samas-hazir, so his schoolmate's father could very well have worked for his father. And still Iddin-Sin isn't done:

   (24) Kima atti yati (25) tuldi-nni, (26) sati umma-su (27) ana leqitim (28) [ilq]e-su. (29) U kima sati (30) umma-su ram-u-su, (31) atti [y]ati ul (32) tarammi-nni. (24-25) While you gave birth to me, (26-28) his mother [ad]opted him. (29-30) And though his mother loved him, (31-32) you do not love me. Many people were adopted in ancient Mesopotamia, (7) but our entitled young letter-writer obviously felt that not being adopted gave him better claim to parental care. Iddin-Sin was probably well advanced in his studies when he wrote this letter; the signs are well formed, the grammar is very good, and the style is nicely done, with several refrains of "while my colleagues get X, I get the opposite." But Iddin-Sin still had a few things to learn; as can be seen in the drawing of the tablet in Figure 1, what he had to say did not quite fit properly on the tablet: He got to the bottom of the reverse and then wrote two short columns of text on the left edge; writing on the left edge is not so unusual, but even that wasn't enough room, so the last line (1. 32) spills over to the lower edge between the obverse and the reverse, which is quite unusual. Well, he was upset...

   The time of Hammurapi and his dynasty is referred to as the Old Babylonian period. The textual record of this period is very rich, including, according to the online French website Archibab, over six thousand letters from a wide range of sites. (8) In fact, enough Old Babylonian letters come from different cities that we can often tell where a letter was written just by the minor dialectal variations in the grammar. And since I am a grammarian, I can't resist a brief digression to demonstrate how remarkably complex the grammar of a letter can be. The following sentence, from a different letter, (9) contains a subject-less passive verb, which governs both a noun phrase with a relative clause and also an infinitive phrase, embedded in which is another subordinate clause:

   Ana awil-e sut pihatim, sa ina Saga wasb-u, to man-PL REL.PL duty REL in Saga dwell-3MP assum, inuma ta-sappar-a-sunusim, babbil-i ana mahri-kun[u about when 2-send.lPRF-PL-DAT.3MP bearer-PL.ACC to presence-2MP sapar-im] i-t-ta-spa[r]. send.INF-GEN 3-PASS-PRF-send A written order has been sent to the men responsible, who live in Saga, about [sending] bearers to you, as soon as you write to them. This is by no means unusual, and parsing out such grammatical details for myself is one of the reasons I so enjoy reading letters.

3. AKKADIAN LETTERS (2): OLD ASSYRIAN

   From a century or so before the time of Hammurapi come Akkadian texts in a dialect called Old Assyrian. There are thousands of these, too, mostly letters between members of merchant families based in the ancient capital city of Assur in northern Mesopotamia who had extensive business dealings in and around the site of Kanesh, in Anatolia, present-day central Turkey. Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system; some signs serve as logograms, representing whole words, while others are phonetic, representing syllables or part-syllables. In these Old Assyrian texts, however, the...