The Amarna Scholarly Tablets.

• Author: SOLDT, WILFRED VAN
• Position: Review

The Amarna Scholarly Tablets. By SHLOMO IZRE'EL. Cuneiform Monographs, vol. 9. Groningen: STYX PUBLICATIONS, 1997. Pp. xii + 160, 51 pits. HFI 125.

After the English translation of the Amarna letters by W.A. Moran, The Amarna Letters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), a new critical edition of the school texts from Amarna had become a desideratum. Despite a number of recent articles on the subject, especially by P. Artzi (see the bibliography on pp. 101f. of the book under review), the scholarly texts had not yet been treated as a group. This new book fills the gap. Some texts are published here in copy for the first time (EA 343 and 349). The new edition of the tablets is preceded by a short introduction in which the author discusses the findspots of the tablets and adds a few pages on scribal education at Akhetaton (Amarna). As to the findspots, the large majority of the tablets were recovered from two rubbish pits in the so-called Records Office (p. 6). However, which tablets had been found where and the exact relationship to the walls and the rubbish pits remain unclear. Nevertheless, it appears likely that both the letters and the s chool texts were stored in this building (pp. 8-9).

As for scribal training (pp. 9-13), the author does not go into a detailed discussion of the curriculum taught in the local school. (A reference to A. Demsky's interesting article on the education of Canaanite scribes, in Bar-Ilan Studies in Assyriology Dedicated to Pinhas Artzi, ed. J. Klein and A. Skaist [Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1990], 157-70, would have been appropriate.) This is understandable, but it should be added that more can be said than is written on pp. 11f. on the literary texts. In Ugarit, for example, the curriculum can be reconstructed with some certainty (see my "Babylonian Lexical, Religious and Literary Texts and Scribal Education at Ugarit," Ugarit: Ein ostmediterranes Kulturzentrum im Alten Orient [M[ddot{u}]nster: Ugarit-Verlag, 1995], 171-212). The order probably was: Tu-ta-ti--Silbenalphabet/Vokabular A--Sa Syllabary/Vocabulary--(paradigms)--Weidner God List--(?)--Har-ra hubullu-Lu-Izi--Diri. Unclear is the place of E a, the Table of Measures, the Grammatical Texts, Nigga, and Erimhu[check{s}]. The school texts found in Amarna are part of the same curriculum that we find at Emar (M. Civil, "The Texts from Meskene-Emar," Aula Orientalis 7 [1989]: 5-35, and the edition by Arnaud [1987], cited p. 101). The...