The Lexical Texts from Canaan
School text from Ashkelon. Image © John Huehnergard and Wilfred van Soldt, Israel Exploration Journal 49 (1999), 185
The area of what is now Israel/Palestine has yielded a small but interesting group of cuneiform texts from a variety of sites. The earliest school texts come from Byblos (Ur III sign list) and Hazor (Old Babylonian). Finds from the Middle Babylonian period include this school text from Ashkelon. It represents a fragment of a well-known phrasebook with standard formulas to be used in contracts. Each of the Sumerian words is translated into a local Canaanite dialect.
27 Dec 2019
Further reading
- Horowitz, Wayne, and Takayoshi Oshima 2006 Cuneiform in Canaan: Cuneiform Sources from the Land of Israel in Ancient Times. Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society.
- Huehnergard, John, and Wilfred H. Van Soldt 1999 A Cuneiform Lexical Text from Ashkelon with a Canaanite Column. Israel Exploration Journal 49: 184-92. Download from JSTOR (subscription needed).
- Van der Toorn, Karel 2000 Cuneiform Documents from Syria-Palestine. Texts, Scribes, and Schools. Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins 116: 97-113. Download from JSTOR (subscription needed).
Niek Veldhuis
Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Canaan', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/canaan/]