Ugaritic and South Arabic

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Ugaritic and Old(-South)-Arabic: Two WS Dialects?

Gregorio del Olmo Lete – University of Barcelona-I.P.O.A., Spain The relationship between the Ugaritic and the Arabic languages has been pointed out for many years

and at different levels: phonological (and more recently graphemic, morphological, and lexical. But before developing the parallels quoted, we must define the precise range of the extremes to be compared. Ugarit and its language is a well-established magnitude in time and space, but the Arabic language and the Arabic people of the end of the second century BC are more diffuse. We do not have a significant corpus of Arabic texts for this period, so we are obliged to rely on much later testimonies, applying all the necessary reserve that the historical décalage imposes. Similar caution must be exercised in relation to the Arabic people of the moment. Who were these Arabs, and where did they live? We have very few data at our disposal to answer these questions. There is no political unit that can be defined as “Arabic”; we have to piece together the dispersed sources that the documentation of the Late Bronze archaeology has uncovered.

All these sources point to the eastern fringe of Syria as the habitat of the Arabs, from the Yazirah and the Habour sources in the north down the Syrian desert and the Bishri massif and through Palmyra, Bosra and Petra, and finally to the Gulf of Aqaba, as is certified by the testimonies of the second half of the first century BC; as early as the ninth century BC Assyrian sources point to the north of the Arabic Peninsula as the habitat of these people, whom they had met and fought there.1 For the late Bronze period we have a main source of information from the north-eastern fringe of Syria in the town of Meskene/Emar.2 Its archive is contemporary to those from Ugarit. This allows us to trace a parallel between homogeneous magnitudes and to ascertain the linguistic and cultural peculiarities that define the two political units.

In this paper we review all the testimonies and clues which we find in the two text corpora and which may help to identify the presence of an ethnic stratum whose peculiarities, cultural as well as linguistic, can be linked with the one known and defined as “Arabic” in the first Millennium in the neighboring areas. In fact the first mention of the noun “Arab” appears in the Neo-Assyrian texts of the ninth century BC,3 leaving aside the biblical testimonies whose chronology and reliability is controversial.4

We will proceed from the most general to the most particular: from the “historical” connection, witnessed in mythology, to the linguistic traces in the different strata: phonological-graphemic, morphological and lexical.

1. See Ephcal 1982:21ff.; Retsö 2003:119ff. and the new material in Cavigneaux-Khalil Ismail 1990:321-456; for the

testimony of the presence of Arabs in Syria in earlier times according to Egyptian sources, see later in this paper. In any case, the confusion between Arabs and nomads is to be avoided; see Teixidor in Lozachmer 1995:14.

2. Its ‘Arabic’ features have been stressed for many years; see Arnaud 1995:19ff. In between we must make space for the Arameans whose documentation for this period is highly controversial; see Lipiński 2000; see below.

3. See Ephcal 1982:75f., Retsö 2003:126. 4. See Rouillard-Bonraisin 1995:23-35. For the mention of “Arab/Arabic” in other later north-Semitic sources, see Israel

2006:20-23.

GREGORIO DEL OLMO LETE

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The mythological connection

1. The god cAthtar Inside the clearcut structure and development of the Baal (Baclu) myth, there is an almost comical

episode that functions as an interlude, a kind of transitional scene, devised to defuse the tension created by Baal’s death and absence. His substitute, who will also be his antagonist, must be not only intelligent and cunning, but above all powerful enough to compete with Baal. The mother-goddess, Ashera (’Aṯiratu), whose task is to designate the candidate5 and who obviously knows all her sons well, proposed for the role the god cAthtar (cAṯtaru), defined as “terrible” (crẓ).6 But he proves to be completely unfit for the task.7

This also seems to be the motif developed in KTU 1.2 III, although the broken state of the text does not allow any definitive conclusion. Apparently, cAthtar also puts forward his claim to be the king of the gods here, this time instead of Yam, El (’Ilu)’s beloved son who has been chosen by his father for this office. Following Shapash (Šapšu)’s advice, cAthtar withdraws his claim.8 In Ugaritic mythology, cAthtar is pictured as the perennially frustrated candidate for divine kingship.

Why did this god promote himself, or why was he proposed as a candidate for the throne of the gods? He belongs to the Ugaritic pantheon (KTU 1.118:17), albeit in a secondary position, in spite of his presence in the myth. But he does not normally receive offerings in the ritual texts,9 which is a clear hint of his foreign origin in the Ugaritic mythological and cultic system. Nevertheless, a certain capacity to mediate before Baal is acknowledged to him in Yarhu’s claim of Nikkal (�ikkalu)’s hand (KTU 24:28), this time again with no actual result.10

This deity has no place11 in the eastern Semitic mythological system, where Ishtar, his female linguistic counterpart, has superseded him completely. So cAthtar is a divine male western Semitic character. But even here his presence is secondary, not only in the Ugaritic pantheon, but in the Canaanite one as well.12 His presence in the Old Aramaic of the first Millennium BC is very significant13, but his role as the god of (artificial) irrigation is insignificant in Syria-Palestine.14 Some years ago (1992/1999) I expressed my opinion on this issue as follows: “Perhaps it is more suitable to consider him as an “astral” deity linked to the nomadic religion of the desert, peculiar to an ethnic group assimilated and yet alien to

5. See Del Olmo Lete 1983:69. 6. See Del Olmo Lete-Sanmartín 2004:185. 7. In view of this secondary role in Ugaritic mythology, it may be preferable to translate KTU 1.6 I 63-65: “cAttaru the

Terrible came down from the throne of Baclu, the Victorious. Could he perhaps rule a land, all of which belongs to one god?”; see Del Olmo Lete 1998:.113, n.50. This would avoid the inconsistency of declaring him “king of the land”, a Baalic title, at the very moment when his inability to usurp Baclu is recognized, although Baclu has not yet reappeared. See Del Olmo Lete 1999/2004:53 n. 33. For the state of the art on cAthtar at Ugarit see the good summary by Page 1996.9-3451-59, although I do not agree at all with his interpretation of a “Cosmic Rebellion” led by this god and its reflections in the Biblical tradition; see Del Olmo Lete 1988:141-142; 2001:125-132; also Smith 1995; Höfner 1983.

8. See G. del Olmo Lete 1981:106-108; 2008:73f. 9. The only reliable text in this regard is KTU 1.148:30. 10. Curiously this is also a text that shows the foreign pressure on the Ugaritic mythological system; see Del Olmo Lete

1991:67-75. 11. See Sanmartín 1993:301f. 12. See Ribichini 2008:295.302 13. See in this regard Martínez Borobio 2008:397, 439. The great significance of this area emerges above all when the Arabs

enter (Palmyra, the Nabateans). 14. This is the interpretation put forward by Gaster and Driver; see Del Olmo Lete 1981:66, n. 109 (with bibliography), 147;

2008:61; also Smith 1995:635-636; Höfner 1983:165f. for this god’s role as irrigation deity in South-Arabian mythology.

UGARITIC AND OLD(-SOUTH)-ARABIC: TWO WS DIALECTS?

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western Syrian (“Canaanite”) urban society: the desert remains distant and is a marginal “enemy” or region”.15

He is certainly at home as the principal figure, or as one of the principal figures, in the pantheon of South Arabian gods in the first Millennium BC. According to epigraphic Qatabanian material published by A. Avanzini, “there was at least the cult of god Athtar which was common to all over South Arabia. The idea in Haḍramawi mythology that this god was perceived as the father of the national god (s1īn ḏ-’lm w cṯtr ’b-s1), is helpful for understanding the mechanisms that linked the identity within a kingdom to the ASA community at large”.16 In fact we know that from period B of the Qatabanian inscriptions onwards (that is, from the fifth century BC onwards) the god cAthar is always at the head of the five fixed deities of the pantheon: cṯtr, cm, ’nby, ḏt Ṣntm, ḏt Ẓhrn; but he was already venerated in period A (seventh - fifth centuries BC), the oldest period of the documentation, in which “cṯtr was the god connected with regality”.17

Do we have a similar testimony for the second half of the second Millennium B.C.? In this connection the texts from Emar come to our aid. In fact the editor of those texts is categorical in this regard: “Il faut rappeler que le grand dieu du pantheon émariote est ‘Athtar-l’étoile’”, whose “staurophany” (uṣurtu) is the ‘gazelle’ (arwu) (one of the almost two hundred lexemes that demonstrate that the Emar language had its own lexicon, which we will discuss later on) and which “en est le symbole chez les Arabes préislamiques”18. The problem is that the name of this god is not written in syllabic notation, though Arnaud nevertheless finds it under the logogram NIN.URTA, an opinion that not is universally accepted; other identifications are suggested: cAnat (cAnatu), Rašap (Rašpu)/Nergal, Ḥoron (Ḥorānu), deified Emar, the “God of the country”, “Lord of Kumar” …19 Its scarce use in the Emariote onomastics is also surprising, compared with other DNN like El, Bacal, Dagan (Dagānu), etc.20

In any case we can assume that cAthtar is a deity of the eastern Syrian people, probably semi-nomads or steppe dwellers who have tried to insert him into the western (Ugaritic) mythological system, but only with limited success. This points to a minority presence of eastern Syrian people (may we call them “north-eastern Semites” as opposed to the north-western Semites of the coast?) in Ugarit, along with other minorities like the Hurrians who also affirmed themselves at Ugarit, but with more success: they not only introduced their gods in the Ugaritic Pantheon, but more importantly still they entered the cult on a massive scale, with their own pantheon and cultic texts. It is then quite reasonable, both for territorial and socio-cultural reasons, to link the people of this Athtar to the people of the first Millennium who lived in this and adjacent areas and had the same god as one of his major deities. Theology is a clear socio-linguistic criterion of ethnic membership.

15. See G. del Olmo Lete 1999/2004:53, n. 33. See in this regard Smith 1995:639: “The historical cult of Athtar may have

been generally restricted to inland areas. Apart from the Ugaritic texts, there is no clear evidence for the cult of Athtar on the coast”.

16. See Avanzini 2008: 625f.. 17. See Avanzini 2004:26, 28, 41, 42. See also Höfner 1965:497-501. For a more detailed characterization of the god see

Höfner 1883. 18. The support for this identification is found in the equivalence suggested by the Ugaritic god lists: NIN.URTA = Aštabi =

cAṯtar. See Arnaud 1987-88:175; 1995:19-22 (20); Westenholz 1999:155 n. 31. On the other hand the “seal of NIN.URTA” depicts the deity carrying a shield, “one of the epithets of the planet Venus” (see ibdm. p. 163). On the “Gazelle … ein speziell dem cAṯtar heiliges Tier” see Höfner 1983:165.

19. See Fleming 1992:65 n. 42; 1992a:248-252; Westenholz 1999:152ff.; Durand 2005; Beckman 2008:6. - The DN Aštar is rather a variant for E:Ištar; see Beckman 2002:41; Arnaud 1991:25 n. 8, AŠ-DIR corresponds to Aš-tar (cAthtar). The Syrian notation may have been assumed in order to avoid confusion with its counterpart, the Mesopotamian female deity Ishtar, and at the same time to enhance the heroic features of the patron god of the town.

20. See Pruzsinszky 2003:103, 117, 192. On the contrary “Im altsabäischen Onomastikon werden nur drei Gottheiten namenlich genannt: cṯtr, Smc und Šhr”; see Sima 2002:199.


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Apart from Shapash, the “Lantern of the gods”, cAttar, already discussed, and Shaḥar-Shalim (Šaúru-Šalimu) (on which see later) in Ugaritic mythology there are a few other clearly “astral” deities, like Yaraḥ-Nikkal (Yar≠u-�ikkalu), ilm kbkbm, and so on. However, this aspect does not have the same systemic relevance as in other mythologies, e.g. South Arabic, where cAthtar is dominant.21 So these are different mythological systems which had contact with each other but did not integrate fully.

2. The Canaanite Elysian Fields We have another even more significant testimony to the relationship of Ugarit and the eastern Syrian

border in this period, the mytho-ritual text KTU 1.108 (a hymn?) which, in my opinion22 celebrates and commemorates the “deification of the king”. The kings (mlkm) are in fact present as deified in the Ugaritic pantheon, meaning that this is a text of profound ethnic and ancestral bearing. According to the text the Ugaritic kings acquire the status of rapa’u/rāpi’u and milku calāmi, “King of Eternity” being enthroned and incorporated into Baal’s functions in a place called cṯtrt (cAthtar(ā)tu) and hdrcy (Hidracayu),23 toponyms that designated the “Elysian Fields” of the dynasty and would not have attracted particular attention were it not for the reference made in the Hebrew Bible, centuries later. In fact these places, ’Edrēcî and cAštārôt are named in Dt 1:4 and Jos 12:4; 13:12, 31 as the dwelling places of the mythical King cÔg, of the race of the refā’îm.24

As can easily be seen, the Hebrew tradition has preserved the basic elements of the Ugaritic royal ideology (status, function and place), naturally in a demythologized form. But the most surprising thing is that these places are located in Transjordan, namely, at the south-eastern border of the Syrian area of the second half of the second Millennium B.C., the time period under consideration here, far away from Ugarit. This time the Ugaritians or their kings are not the supposed dwellers of this area that claims a position in Ugarit for them and their god; now they look to the border of that area as the most sacred and desired site of their destiny in the afterlife: their sacred land. Inevitably, an ancestral connection of at least the ruling society of Ugarit with this remote eastern sun–rising region must be presumed; it may have been their original homeland, from which they later emigrated. Let us leave the issue here as a mere possibility.

3. Dawn and Dusk Still within this mythical sphere, at Ugarit we have the mytheme of the “Gracious gods”, Shahar

(Šaḥaru) and Shalim (Šalimu), Dawn and Dusk. These gods are born through a free love affair of the main god El (’Ilu), but this does not concern us; it simply means that they are not offspring of Ashera (’Aṯiratu), El’s consort and mother of the gods, the “seventy sons of Ashera” of the large Ugaritic pantheon.25 The point is that just after their birth these deities are put under Shapash (Šapšu)’s care, because of their manifest character as “astral gods”26 linked to her (“Dawn and Dusk”) and sent to the “desert”;27 from

21. See in this regard Höfner 1983:164 for the close relationship between cAthtar and the Sun Goddess and also his

“Beiname” ḏ-Smwy. The Moabites, in the most south-eastern fringe of the Syrian region, had as patron god the syncretistic figure cAthtar-Kemosh; see in this connection Merlo 2009:131. Kemosh is a west-Semitic deity known also at Ugarit (kmṯ).

22. See Del Olmo Lete 1999/2004:184ff. for a discussion of this opinion. 23. For this vocalization see Del Olmo Lete 2010a: 207-231. 24. The pioneer identification of these TNN was made by B. Margulis (Margalit) 1970:292; see also Dietrich-Loretz

1980:172; 1990:55-56. This god Milku of cAṯtartu/ātu had assigned his own horses (see KTU 1.86:6; 9.790:17) probably as the team of horses of his processional chariot.

25. See Del Olmo Lete 1999/2004:43-86 (51). For a recent interpretation of this Ugaritic mytheme see Smith 2006; Del Olmo Lete 2007b.

26. See Del Olmo Lete 1981:437f. (Venus?); see also Kuntzmann 1983:137ff.


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there, when they grow up, they are expected to try to reach the sown land. Now, at Ugarit there is no desert, so the myth once again has the appearance of an integrated hieròs lógos of astral deities from outside, similar to cAthtar’s story (according to KTU 1.100:52, their abode is in Heaven, šmm), absent nevertheless from the Ugaritic pantheon as a pair (only KTU 1.47 accepts šlm in the last place, as a newcomer) and from the cult, but involved along with Shapash in incantation texts (1.100; 1.123; and in the curious scribal exercise of coupled deities!, KTU 1.123) against snakes, typically found in deserts.

On the other hand this pair of astral/desert deities has a fine parallel in the Old Arabic pair of dioscuroi Arṣu and Azizu.28 These deities have a very significant role in the Palmyrene and Nabatean religion as twin astral deities and also appear in the pagan Arabic Edessa and even in the famous atonement rite of the Old Testament scapegoat cAzaz’el, sent into the desert. Their antecedents are traced back by Hvidberg-Hansen to the Old North Arabian god Ruḍâ and the Old South Arabian cAthtar, “sometimes … called ‘the cAthtar of the East’ and ‘cAthtar of the West’, … in an age when Venus was still viewed as two astral powers, the morning star and the evening star”,29 as is the case in Ugarit. Again a mythological story links Ugarit with the eastern edge of Syria and naturally with its inhabitants through a surviving mytheme which is exclusive, as far as we know, to the two religions: Ugaritic and ancient Arabian.30

The significance of these mythological links has to be asserted in their whole ethnic and ancestral value that represents the Syrian area as an open zone of exchange between East and West and the society of Ugarit as highly receptive to eastern elements.

The linguistic connection

Starting from this “ideological” situation, we may ask whether there are other pieces of evidence that

connect the two parts of the Syrian area – the western sea coast and the eastern desert steppe – and bear witness to their mutual interaction. Given that we are lucky enough to have significant corpora of texts from both, we can take language as the object of our inquiry, and focus on the relationship between the Ugaritic and the Emariote31 languages. However, although we have direct testimony of the Ugaritic language in its consonantal texts, for Emariote we have only the indirect and very limited testimony available from its syllabic texts and mostly from onomastics. Like the Ugaritians, the Emariotes made use of this linguistic system, syllabic Akkadian, the language of culture and international communication (although both were under Hittite rule!); not only, however, for their administrative and political affairs as in the case of the Ugaritians, but also for their religious and cultic traditions. This means that we have no Emariote literature. Again, as in the ancient, well-known case of the Mari archives of the early second Millennium BC, which did not leave Amorite texts, the language can be studied only from the testimony offered by PNN. Both societies reveal themselves as witnesses of the same sociological, and in this case also geographical, pattern: that of a semi-nomadic society which has recently become sedentary and urban, but which lacks a script tradition of its own. In this respect the Emariotes are the Amorites of the late second Millennium BC, who have abandoned the Syrian steppe and the Bishri massif to develop a

27. On the mythical overtones of the idea of “desert” in the context of the oriental fertility ideology and ritual, see Haldar

1950; Hvidberg-Hansen 1983:64ff. In this context Haldar also quotes the Ugaritic text KTU 1.12 that mention some divine beings, offspring of Yarḫu (possibly of the same El), that is to say, “astral”, and born in the desert. Baal will confront them and will fall in their attack. On the meaning of this mytheme, see Del Olmo Lete 1981:478ff.; Dietrich-Loretz 2000:1-141; Del Olmo Lete 2007a:156-162.

28. See Hvidberg-Hansen 2007. 29. See Hvidberg-Hansen 2007:95. 30. See Xella 1973:106-119. 31. On the definition and geographical range of this denomination, see Arnaud 1991:23 n. 4.


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sedentary, urban society in the Middle Euphrates valley, in the aḫ puratim, under the Hittite Empire which controls the town in its own political interest.

As a consequence we will have to resort to a complementary tool, the support offered by the linguistic tradition of the people which occupied the area some centuries later and thus carried on its linguistic development. And this people were the ancient Arabs, according to cuneiform and north-western Semitic sources, more specifically the ancient North- and South-Arabians whom the Assyrians and later the Neo-Babylonians fought until the 6th century, as far as the Teyma’ oasis in the heart of Arabia.

In fact, the editor of the Emar texts is very explicit in this regard: “Réaffirmons ce qui a été déjà depuis longtemps écrit: que l’émariote appartient au groupe de langues ouest-sémitiques, mais plus particulièrement à celles du Sud, et plus précisément encore: aux dialectes sudarabiques épigraphiques, et mieux: à ceux de ces dialectes qui ont leur possessif en chuintante et non pas en *-hu et *-ha, comme l’arabe classique, ça veut dire le sabée …, pas l’épigraphique nord-arabique …”.32

We need to establish how far this thesis is verifiable according to the linguistic data at our disposal, clearly distinguishing between the different layers of the Arabic evidence, and taking into account its profound conservatism. The relationship between Ugaritic and Arabic as a whole has already been noted many times and the common lexicon has also been analysed for many years now33. We are going to single out the phenomena that may support the presumption that Ugaritic and Emariote are representative of the language of the steppe dwellers, and in this sense are the “ancient or proto-(South)Arabic” of the second Millennium BC, both dialectal forms of the same linguistic continuum.

1.- The first well-known datum is the unique coincidence in the phonological system of 29/28 stops and three vocalic modulations, integrally maintained through the centuries in opposition to eastern Semitic and even the north-western Semitic of the first Millennium., which lost some stops and also gave up the ternary vocalic system, on the one hand developing a more complex and “anaptytic” one, and on the other dropping the vocalic inflection. In fact this phonological system goes back to the Amorite of Mari34 and further on to proto-Semitic. But the retention of the original Semitic phonological system by Ugaritic and South-Arabian, languages so distant in place and time, must be in some way explained by the persistence of the same phonological system at Emar, as far as one is able to ascertain from the Akkadian notation.35 This means that the original Semitic phonological system was still alive in northern and eastern Syria during the second half of the second Millennium BC, while in the south-west this system was already weakened, as reflected in a drastic reduction in the Canaanite and Aramaic of the first half of the first Millennium36. In contrast, Emar becomes the link between the two extremes and certifies the maintenance of the original phonological situation in the East and South-East, as we find it in South-Arabian and later on in classic Arabic.

32. See Arnaud 1995:20; and formerly 1985-1986:266, 270. 33. See Al-Yasin 1950; Renfroe 1992; also formerly Gray 1955:1-14 (Heb.); Kienast 1999:59-68; Segert:2000. 34. See Streck 2000:194ff.; and the review by Tropper 2000a:237-241. On the peculiarities of the Emariote syllabic notation,

see Arnaud 1991:26-30. 35. See Arnaud 1985-1986:266-267; Pentiuc 2001:217-227. 36. And it is in this “reductionist” zone where the linear “Canaanite” alphabet was born, following the Egyptian model; there

are no archaeological traces of a linear alphabet of twenty-seven/nine elements. So it is unlikely that the Ugaritic long cuneiform alphabet started from it. This hypothesis is weakened still further if a later origin for the cuneiform alphabet is presumed. The argument that, otherwise, the extra signs would have been added at the end, as was the case with the three added in this way to the twenty-seven sign alphabet, is paralogical: to add elements to a closed list in order to represent alien texts and phonemes better (even against the pure consonantal principle that inspired the original model) is clearly at odds with the setting up of a language’s own list following a previous though incomplete model, filled in by graphic or phonologic criteria; see Garbini 2006:43-60. On the other hand, if the Ugaritians knew and used a linear alphabet before the introduction of the cuneiform system, which is possible, it is to be assumed that this alphabet already had the twenty-seven characters in their order.


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2.- This datum goes together with the graphematic system that reproduces it. Here the great revolution was the assumption of the “Canaanite” alphabetic notation by the Ugaritians, generating among them an authentic alphabetical fever apparent in its multiple reproduction. The corresponding testimony from Emar is lacking since, as we noted above, no Emariote texts have been preserved (or possibly none were ever written down). But here archaeology has offered us a great surprise with the unearthing of a tablet that bears the Ugarit cuneiform alphabet according to the south-Arabic ordering.37 But in contrast to the case of the bilingual Ugaritic-Akkadian that offers the equivalences of both languages, this “south-Arabic” alphabet is “monolingual”,38 thus certifying on one hand the complete correspondence between the Ugaritic and south-Arabic phonological systems, and on the other the possible use by another group (we know it as ‘south-Arabian’, the same group whose principal god was cAthtar) of the same “Canaanite” cuneiform alphabet to write their texts. This people obviously could have reached Ugarit only from the East, where this alphabetic order would have originated, as the documentation of the early first century will certify. This raises the hope that one day texts will be found written in their language, with the cuneiform characters of this alphabet.

The southern alphabet from Ugarit follows the strict Sabean order, not one of the ENA orders.39 Namely, a group of the same people who developed their culture and inscriptions in Southern Arabia from the tenth century BC40 onwards was already present in some way at Ugarit in the fourteenth to twelfth centuries BC, without claiming that the Ugaritians as a whole were “Arabs”.41 This confirms my previous and independent insight which suggested the derivation of ESA from Central Amorite before and independently from that of the ENA,42 and also corroborates Arnaud’s opinion on the ESA nature of the Emariote.

One surprising point about this “old south-Arabic” alphabet from Ugarit is that it offers a cuneiform character for the grapheme/phoneme /ḍ/ which is lacking in Ugaritic but present in the old south-Arabic and classic Arabic alphabets; in fact it belongs to the old Amorite phonological stock.43 What does this imply? The Ugaritians had already lost this phoneme – that is, it had been “Canaanized” in this regard (cf. arṣ/*’rḍ) – while the “new-comer outsiders” kept it. In contrast, both systems seem to have lost the clearcut use of the three “sibilant” /s1-2-3/ phonemes, which are rather blurred in the Ugaritic alphabet, where the phoneme /s2/ appears at its end like an addition from outside and used mainly to transcribe

37. See Bordreuil-Pardee 2001:341ff. Later on another one appears in the South: Bet-Shemesh, dated to the thirteenth century

BC; see Bordreuil-Pardee, art. cit., n. 3 (bibliography); also Dietrich-Loretz 1988:277-296; Bron 1995:81; Del Olmo Lete 2010b:180ff. Other Late Bronze materials (from Deir cAlla, Kāmid el-Lōz) turn out to be suspected as far their ‘south-Arabic’ character is concerned.

38. The Aramaic alphabet will also be transcribed in syllabic characters in late Babylonian times; see Cross-Huehnergard 2003.

39. See MacDonald 1986:101-168; 2004:494 for the different order of the Old North/South-Arabic alphabet. 40. Archaeology now certifies the presence of this type of script in the tenth century in Yemen (Yela), while in Mesopotamia

there are abundant testimonies of it; see Israel 2006:37; Bron 1995:81-91; Sass 2005:96-100, 122-123. 41. See in this regard Dietrich-Loretz 1988:309-311; 1988a:61-85. These authors did not yet know of the Old South-Arabic

alphabet discovered at Ugarit; nevertheless they arrived at a conclusion very close to the one defended in this paper, although their notion of “Arab/Arabic”, or “Pre-Arabic” lacks precision both historically and geographically.

42. See Del Olmo Lete 1999:45; Kienast 1999:59-60, 67. 43. See Streck 2000:229-230; but also Tropper 2000:738. The question of the short cuneiform alphabet (maybe pluriphone in

some of its characters) and its large diffusion in the zone will not interest us at this point; see Dietrich-Loretz 1988a:145-179. As for the script direction of south-Arabic, Bordeuil-Pardee’s (2001:347) assertion must be nuanced: the oldest south-Arabic inscriptions show many examples of rightward script, leaving aside the boustrophedon inscriptions and the Ethiopic tradition; see Naveh 1982:49f.


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foreign words.44 So this seems to be a mere dialectal differentiation. In both cases, the Ugaritian “south-Arabic” scribe was able to design new cuneiform characters that were not extant in the Ugaritic “model”.

Both cuneiform alphabets from Ugarit imply two parallel but independent attempts45 departing from two different linear models: one from the “Canaanite” alphabet, already in its fixed order, into which the Ugaritians fitted and added the supplementary graphemes of their longer phonological system, and the other from a linear “south Arabic” alphabet, which also derived in the long run from the Canaanite, but in its own order; both are nevertheless reduced in the same degree and characters (see below). This order, the south-Arabic, was born either in a random manner, when the alphabetical sequence was not yet “canonically” fixed, or was otherwise determined by idiosyncratic motifs that were unable to create a fixed canonicity46 as in the case of “Canaanite”. In any case the Ugaritic “south-Arabian” both follow the same model (which was kept, and probably born, in a Ugaritic scriptorium) and recreated their own forms; it is impossible to know whether it did so on its own or following a previous model. In any case, both alphabets witness the presence in Ugarit of people coming from the East with a large phonological system (27 characters) into a WS zone whose inhabitants had already reduced it to 22. Further south-east, the same people would keep the original (proto-Semitic, still ascertainable at Mari; see later) set of 29 characters and its original order up to the first centuries BC.

3.- The dialectal character of the relationship between the two languages can only be guessed (within the large coincidence in the common morphological north-west Semitic patterns) through some isoglosses which distinguish them, Ugaritic and Emariote, from other languages of the group, while on the other hand we have some specific morphological elements that certify, as far as the limited data on this language allow, the “south-Arabic” character of both languages (to a lesser extent in Ugaritic than in Emariote).

As noted above, we should bear in mind at all times the differences in the situations of the two languages. For Ugaritic (the north-western Semitic of the late Bronze Age) we have full, diversified linguistic testimony, while for north-eastern Semitic, apart from the indirect testimony from Emar, in the north and from the late Bronze Age also, we have had until recently only the limited Assyrian references of the early first Millennium in central Syria, and the peripheral North and South Arabic inscriptions – which number in their thousands but are not particularly significant linguistically – in the South and South-East from the same early first Millennium onwards.

In fact, as it was pointed out above, the term “Arab” appears for the first time only in the ninth century in the annals of Tiglat Pileser III, to be followed later on by references in the Hebrew Bible, in the Ahiqar story and in the papyrus Amherst 63 (fourth century BC).47 But a language of Arabic type seems to be certified already by the onomastics of the Egyptian name lists. We have at least a dozen PNN handed down by the onomastic lists of the New Empire (Dynasties XVIII-XX), ranging from Thutmose III (1504-1452) to Ramses IX (1139-1120), encompassing in this way the Late Bronze Age under consideration here, and even further on up to the epoch of the Pharaoh Sheshonq of the tenth century of the first

44. Nevertheless, the reading of the seventh sign of Ugaritic south-Arabic as /ṯ/ instead of /ś:s2/, /s3/ is highly controversial;

see Bordreuil-Pardee 2001:342. In ENA we already have a clear and systematic reduction of sibilant fricatives, as in Aramaic (cf. MacDonald 2004:499); also the phoneme /ḍ/ is blurred (ibdm. p. 500).

45. Seventeen characters coincide in the two languages; Bordeuil-Pardee 2001:344. These authors sum up their view of the subject in a similar way: “Ce système (the Ugaritic South-Arabic) ne pouvait pas être tout simplement le sud-arabique, car le nouvel abécédaire aurait alors indiqué vingt-neuf graphèmes. Par conséquent, il est nécessaire d’envisager un système phonéto-graphique comportant vingt-sept signes. Plus proche phonétiquement du sud-arabique que de l’ougaritique, dont les signes suivaient essentiellement l’ordre sud-arabique, mais qui représentait une évolution par rapport au proto-système de vingt-neuf phonèmes consonantiques qui est encore visible dans l’alphabet sud-arabique” (p. 345).

46. On the order of the Old (South-)Arabic alphabets, see Macdonald 2004:494; Bordreuil-Pardee 2001:342, n. 2 (with biblio-graphy).

47. See Retsö 2003:126, 129ff.; Israel 2001:20-23.


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Millennium.48 These names reveal not only a clear Arab-type linguistic pattern (Wortname), but even literal correspondences in the later epigraphic North and South-Arabic onomastics. In this way, the certified presence of this Arab type language is already pushed back between three and five centuries in this part of Syria. Evidently the contact of the Egyptians with the Arabs could only have taken place in the Egyptian province of Upe, with its capital in Kumidi, south-east of Syria/north-west of Arabia. Specifically these names are, as selected by Felice Israel, following Schneider, from a list of more than 500 “früharabisch” names:49

c-r-f-jЗ (Saf. crf, crfn, clf ), wЗ-n-r (Saf. wl/wly/w’l); m-p-wЗ-r (Hadr. m’br), m-n-ht:З (Sab. mnhtm), m-g-З-y-r (Saf. mgyr), h.З-r-n-З-y (Saf. hrn), ḥ.-m-sЗ (Sab. Saf., Lihy. hmš [?]), sЗ-.r-c (Qat. src, Sab. srcm), sЗ-hЗ-r (Qat., Saf. shl), q-З-h-З-d-n (Saf. ghdt), kЗ-h/kЗ.h:ty (Saf., Tham. kht). The mixing of North- and South-Arabian names is completely in accordance with what is known

through Old Arabic epigraphy of the paleographic, commercial and cultural inter-relationship of those peoples. Half of them show North-Arabic cognates, which is completely in keeping with the geo-political situation, but the other half have South-Arabian ones (Sab., Hadr., Qat.), which can only be understood if we accept the presence of this layer of population established in some way in the Syrian region, since contact between Egyptians and Arabs in the remote South Arabia is impossible. And this is precisely what the Emariote seems to reveal, as Arnaud suggests. He points out the following linguistic proof of the presence of this Arab type language in Emariote,50 besides the onomastic type mentioned above which we will deal with more extensively later on:

-Preservation in Emariote of the initial w-, a generic Arabic feature in opposition to NWS.51 -Both languages, Ugaritic and Emariote, belong to a stage in which determination is not yet carried

out by an article; in fact South Arabian, like Ugaritic, also lacks this morph. But in Ugaritic there are some hints of what later on will be the prefixed pattern /h-/, present in north-Arabic article /ha(n)/52 (in contrast to the Aramaic option of a postponed pattern), thus witnessing again the different time origin and linguistic kinship of the two languages.

-The most significant contrastive element in the pronoun system is the different 3rd p.p. suf. –šu of South Arabian type (Minaean and Qatabanian); along with Eblaite, Emariote is the only language in the Western area that preserves this Semitic morph in contrast to North-Arabic, Sabaean and NWS in general, as was said above.53 This morph, however, can be envisaged as a proto-Semitic alternative, to be found also in Akkadian and in Amorite. The determinative pron. /ḏ/ can also be considered as distinctive in accordance with its meaning (“this of”) which is so typical of the south-Arabic.54

-Nominal patterns aqtal and qutayil, also a generic trait, as elative and diminutive patterns, in Arabic and South Semitic in general.55 Other nominal patterns belong to the general Semitic stock.

48. See Israel 2006:20-23, 33-36. 49. See Israel 2006:35-36; Schneider 1992:15ff., 449ff. For the Old (South-)Arabian PNN see the essential work of Harding

1971; also the on-line onomastic data-base Corpus of South Arabian Inscription (CSAI) by A. Avanzini; also Shatnawi 2002, for Thamudic onomastics.

50. See Arnaud 1985-1986:264-271. 51. See Arnaud 1985-1986:267; 1991:27; 1995:21. 52. See Israel 2006:20, 39. For the same morpheme already in Ugaritic see Tropper 2000:232-234. A hint of the presence of

the art. /h-/ appears also in an inscription of Pharaoh Sheshonq of the XXII dynasty of the 1st millennium BC; see Israel 2006:30. 53. See Arnaud 1985-1986:267; 1991:39; 1995:20. Other pron. (pers. naḥnu, interr. mah, mahma) are not so significant and

are shared with other NWS languages; see Bron 1975-1976; Israel 2006:38. 54. See Arnaud 1991:39; 1995:20; but contrast Avanzini 2004:35f. 55. See Arnaud 1985-1986:267; 1991:38; 1995:21. More extensively in Arnaud 1991:30-39, on Emariote onomastics types.


14

-Unfortunately we cannot verify the presence of the internal plural in Emariote, such a typical morph of the Arab type language.56 Arnaud quotes, however, a couple of cases which point in this direction: /ḥi:uẓār/ “en face du pluriel (externe) /ḥuẓurāni/ …, /nāš/ en face de /nīšāna/” and the possible plural /’imlikū/ of /mal(i)k/57. Perhaps this is an innovation of South-West and South Semitic in general, at least as far as its systematic development as a territorial linguistic phenomenon. Its presence in East and North-West Semitic is rather limited and ambiguous.

-Another typical feature of the Arab type language in verbal morphology is the variety of maṣdar patterns compared again with the uniformity of its formation in the East and Nort-West Semitic branches, even in Sabaean. Emariote witnesses a similar variety of patterns (/qatal/, /qatalat/, /maqtal/, /maqtul/, /taqtal/ …),58 when the lexical lists gloss the Sumerian verb, uniformly interpreted by the fixed Akkadian infinitive.

-Furthermore the verbal system in Ugaritic, as in the “Canaanite” of El-Amarna, shows some prefixed conjugation forms, pointed out by F. Israel, which later on will appear as characteristic of classic Arabic: for instance 3.p.p.masc. and 2.p.p.masc. yaqtuluna/taqtuluna.59

-The Ugaritic-Arabic lexical related lexicon was already studied by Al-Yasin in 195060 and later

revised by Renfroe in 1992,61 who drastically reduced the number of lexical isoglosses common and exclusive to both languages. Naturally, the coincidence with Old South-Arabic is even smaller. Hayes, in his analysis of the relationship of the Ugaritic and South Arabic as against the template of the “lexical stock” of the Swadesh’ brief list and after realizing that the coincidence of ESA/Ug. amounts to 73%, higher than that of ESA/Arabic (60%) and ESA/Akkad (58%), concludes: “That is, with this limited base of core vocabulary, ESA actually has its most cognates with Ugaritic, instead of Akkadian or Arabic”;62 but “because the absolute numbers of samples are so small, one hesitates to make vast claims about the lexical relationship of ESA and Ugarit, yet it may not be insignificant that ESA and Ugaritic, both at the peripheries of the Semitic-speaking world, should share so much vocabulary in common”.

In this regard Emariote may offer itself as the missing link that can explain or at least confirm such a relationship, in spite of the limited amount of lexical material at our disposal. To the elements quoted above we can add the lexical coincidence of ESA with the preserved Emariote lexicon. To the examples put forward by Arnaud:63 arwu, ‘gazelle’, the idolatrous and astrological symbol of cAthtar (see above; against NWS *ary); ta’tamum, ‘delivering assembly (des Anciens)’ (< ESA/MSA *’tm, “to gather (together)”, “to reach an agreement”; mirātu, “clay plain”, as in Arabic and Ethiopic (corresponding to Akk. ḫurru, “depression”), unknown in NWS; *’nw/’ny, “glass” as against “vessel” in NWS. Some other items, taken from Pentiuc64 and others (like Renfroe, Huehnergard, Clemens, Hayes, Pruzsinszky, etc.), can be added, leaving aside those items belonging to common Semitic, of a total of some 150 NWS lexemes that can be obtained from the Akkadian texts from Emar. The analysis of the “root” and the

56. See Corriente 1971. 57. See Arnaud 1995:21. But this lexeme could represent the verbal form /yamlikū/; see Pentiuc 2003:84 (30: /’abluṣ-/?). 58. See Arnaud 1965-1986:269; 1991:44-45; 1995:21-22. 59. See (Israel 38), but also sporadically in Hebrew; see Joüon-Muraoka 1993:136f.; Meyer 1966-1972 II:97-101. 60. See Al-Yasin 1950. 61. See Renfroe 1992. 62. See Hayes 1991:609-626 (619-620). For a slightly different quantification see Del Olmo Lete 1999:24-27. In turn, only 57

lexemes would be common to Ugaritic and Emariote (4.4% of the Ugaritic lexicon); see Halayqa, 2002:471-472, 475. According to this author’s lexicographical inquiry Ugaritic is not a “Canaanite” language, although the “Ugaritic lexemes without cognates in epigraphic Canaanite according to DUL” are not very conclusive in this regard, nor are those with cognates. The epigraphic Canaanite record is too small.

63. See Arnaud 1995:20-2, although some of those lexical items are controversial. 64. See Pentiuc:2001.


15

phonetic development is not always easy and reliable. In any case the majority of those lexemes belong to either the common or the NW Semitic lexical stock and it is also present in the Ugaritic lexicon. This supports the idea of mutual comprehension throughout the whole Syrian area, at least at the level of the higher or written language, allowing for a possible dialectal diglossia. Here we show some of the most significant lexemes with cognates in ESA and in Ugaritic:65

Em. /’ny/, ‘to mourn’ // Ug. // ESA (also Heb.); Em. /’sr/ > ma-sa-ru, ‘belt’ // Ug. // ESA; Em. /’yl/, e-lu, ‘ram’ // Ug. // ESA /’yl/ (also Heb.); Em. Ka-ša-ra-tu, “divine women” // Ug. (also Heb.); Em. /mdr/, ma-da-ru, ‘field’ // ESA; Em. /mrr/ ‘to confirm’ // Ug. (mrmr); Em. /nḥl/ na-aḫ-la-tu, “possession” // Ug. // ESA (also Heb.) ; Em. /qṭn/ qa-ṭi-nu “a tool/weapon” // Ug. // ESA (also Heb.); Em /qw:yn/ qa-PI-nu, “an official” // ESA ”an official” (see Heb.); Em. /rqq/ ra-qu, “r. bread” // Ug. (also Heb.); Em. /rzḥ/ mar-za-ḫu, “guild” // Ug. // ESA *rzḥ (also Heb.); Em. /skn/ sà-kin, “prefect” // Ug. (also Heb.); Em. /skn/ si-kà-na, “stela” // Ug.; Em. /šgr/ ša-ag-ga-ru, ‚ DN, “offspring” // Ug. (also Heb.); Em. /šḥr/ Ša-aḫ-ru, DN “dawn”) // Ug. (also Heb.); Em. /ṣwc/ ṣa-tù, “a vessel” // Ug. // ESA?.66 Of other lexemes we lack the Emariote bridge linking Ugaritic with south-Arabian:67 Ug. /c-d-b/, “to prepare, arrange” // ESA *cḏb;68 Ug. cnn, “servant” // ESA *cwn; Ug. ġr?, “invader, raider” // ESA *ġwr; Ug. ġz, “warrior, raider” // ESA *ġzy; Ug. /h-b-ṭ/, “to knock down” // ESA *hbṭ; Ug. ḥẓt, “fate, fortune” // ESA ḥẓy; Ug. mcrb, “a tribute” // ESA; Ug. /n-r(-)/, “to burn (sacrifice)” // ESA; Ug. /š-’-l/, “to order a cultic reply” // ESA; Ug. šbm?, “heights” // ESA;69 Ug. šd, “open field, mountain” // ESA śdw (CS) Ug. šiy?, “assassin” // ESA *šw’. Ug /ṯ-k-ḥ/?, ‘to uncover’ /ESA;70

65. For two of the lexemes quoted by Arnaud above: Em. /’nw:y/, duga-na-ti, a-n,, “utensil, glass” // CSem. “vessel”,

“utensil”; Em. “glass”; and Em. ar-yu, ‘gazelle’ // Ug. /ary/ // ESA /’rw/ (vd. supra); see also Pentiuc 2001:25f. 32f.. For the whole list of west Semitic roots and forms in the Emar texts, see ibdm. pp. 199-204; for the forms in the PNN see Pruzsinszky 2003:297-299.

66. See also Watson 2002: no 9 and 16: ma-i-tu, “garden“ (see Pentiuc 2001:19f.) // Ug. mhyt, “garden” ; Em. pa-a-lu, “a kind of flour“ // Ug. pil; Em. ša-a-i, “falcon” // Ug. šiy (?); šu-ur-me, “meat” (?) Ug. ṯrmt (?).

67. See Clemens 2001:1403; Hayes 1914ff.; for other more debatable lexemes see Arnaud 1991:27, 30-31, 43. 68. See Renfroe 1992:20-21, for other lexemes, witnessed also in Arabic, see p. 190. 69. See Mazzini 2003; 2004 (in onomastics). 70. See De Moor 1964: 371-372. *’nw/’ny, ‘glass’ as against “vessel” in NWS


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Ug. ṯc, ṯcy, “an offering”, “to offer” // ESA71; Ug. ẓrw, “balsalm” // ḍrw (also CS).72 -Finally, onomastics may be the most important linguistic field for identifying a certain old Arab type

of PN pattern in the whole Syrian area of the middle and late Bronze periods. Around 80% of these PNN are “Einwortname” and the equivalent types “Genitiv- verbindungsnamen” and “hypokoristische Namen”, as can been ascertained in Thamudic and south-Arabian onomastics,73 compared with the “Verbal- and Nominalsatzname” types, usual among late Aramean PNN (Palmyra, Nabateans, Hatra).74 We mentioned above the presence of this Arab type PNN in the Egyptian inscriptions of the second Millennium BC.

But besides this rather generic criterion, in Emar onomastics we find the particular pattern /Zū-DN/, “the one of/belonging to”,75 infrequent anywhere else. Its linguistic composition is clearly Northwest Semitic (Em. zū = Ar. ḏū, ESA ḏ, Ug. d …).76 This determinative use is frequent in ESA for the formation of patronymics77, unrevealing the tribal background of this society. The Emariote usage could be a reflex thereof.

Onomastics can be also a “political” weapon. In this regard the KTU 1.102:15-28, the list of dynastic names of the Ugaritic kings,78 can be taken as an attempt by the Palace to “legitimate” the insertion of the Dynasty in the Amorite/Canaanite tradition through the adoption of PNN of that stock, while the empirical or throne name is overwhelming of the “Einwortnamen” or “Genitivverbindungsnamen” according to RS 94.2518 (ugarana, camqūna, rap’āna, niqmepac(a), maphi, ’ibbirāna, niqmaddi …, with some exceptions like cammiṯtamri), while the Baalic mythological cycle tried to limit precisely the place of the god cAthtar, the parvenu, in it.

Conclusions

All those linguistic features suggest the presence of a language from the Middle Bronze period in the

Middle Euphrates valley and the Eastern edge of the Syrian steppe79 which began adumbrating a linguistic type that will become fully developed in the South Arabian of the inscriptions of the first Millennium BC. We will call it Old (South-)Arabic so as not to confuse it with Pre-Islamic Arabic.80 And it is here probably that the peculiar adaptation of the Old Syrian (“Canaanite”) alphabet took place (order and shape

71. See Huehnergard 1987:188; the base also appears in Qatababic and Minaic PNN: yṯc’l and others, even as a royal name;

see Avanzini’s database quoted infra n. 75. 72. See Huehnergard1987:131, for the following p. 371. 73. See Shatnawi 2002:766; Harding 1971 (general estimation); see also Avanzini’s index <http://www.csai.humnet. unipi.it>;

for this nominal type, among others, Stamm 1939:242ff.; Huffmon 1965:141-152: Gröndahl 1967:24-34; Noth 1966:12-143; Streck 2000:347f. Tairan’s 1992 does not offer a linguistic analysis of the Sabaean PNN.

74. See Israel 2006:23f.; this author has identified many Arab type PNN (w- initial, theme qutayl, lexic. -w and masc. –t endings) in the early Palestinian inscriptions (Arad, Beer Sheba, Khirbet el-Qom); 2006:25-29; see also Gröndahl 1967:24ff.; Pruzsinzsky 2003:72-107. But the “Amorite” “Satzname” (/yqtl/) is also quite frequent in Old South-Arabian PNN, as can be seen in Avanzini’s index quoted in the previous n.; see Bron 1991; Sima 2002:195-198. For the situation in Old Aramaic, see M. Maraqten 1988:105ff. This verbal name type is also found in Arabic, although isolated without an explicit subject; see Weninger 2002:209-226.

75. See Pruzsinszky 2003:185-187: in this regard the PN ḏ-cṯtr recorded by Avanzini is significant. 76. See DUL 2004:254. 77. See Avanzini 2004:320 (“Onomastics”). For the same pattern in Ebla and Mari see Fronzaroli 1987:274; Pagan 1988: 75,

302f.; Gelb 1980:652; Huffmon 1965:121f., 186. 78. See del Olmo Lete 1999/2004:170ff. 79. See Arnaud 1995:22 on the probable spread of this language in time and space; also Arnaudd 1991:23 n. 4. 80. See Israel 2006:39.


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of the characters).81 It is the adaptation of this Old Eastern Syrian alphabet to the cuneiform alphabet which the archaeology has unearthed in the Ugarit diggings and that in its turn witnesses the presence of some people which made use of it if only to read “Ugaritic” without translation.

And the best model of this language is the one that can be gathered from the text of Emar. Talking about it, Arnaud concludes: “L’émariote est une langue sémitique (différente de l’accadien) … une langue sémitique occidentale … plus précisément … une langue sémitique du sud, appartenant au même sous-groupe que les différents árabes … dans ce sous-groupe même, le vernaculaire a les plus grandes affinités avec certains dialectes sud-arabiques épigraphiques …”82

That confirms the hypothesis put forward by myself some years ago, independently from the Emariote evidence, according to which the early Old South Arabian language departed from the central or ‘Amorite’ Semitic stock in the first half/third of the second Millennium BC, carrying the alphabet with it, some time before the time when the derivation of the Old North Arabian from the same stock took place in the second half/third of that Millennium83.

On the other hand, the cultural and linguistic data support the existence of a wave of eastern population moving to the west (bringing with them their god and their alphabet). As noted above, its presence in Ugarit is certified by myth and royal ideology, although this layer of people integrated socially and linguistically into the mytho-religious and linguistic western system, whose elements were not unknown to them. In fact the pervasive Canaanite pantheon (Dagan, Bacal, cAshtart, etc.) was worshipped at Emar, as were many Hittite deities.

But these two societies appear not only to have had similar religious conceptions and beliefs, but also show a strong exchange of economic interests. The recently discovered texts in the “Maison d’Ourtenou” (1992-2002) are of outstanding significance. Although still to be edited in full, an abundant dossier of economic texts and letters reveals the connection at the highest level between the two societies. Ourtenou seems to have been, if not the ḫazinu of Ugarit, certainly an outstanding personality of the kingdom in direct contact with the royal palace84.

On the linguistic level the Syrian area generated in this way can be organized into three north-south strips: costal, central and steppe. The first, or Syro-Canaanite, is clearcut both geographically (from Ugarit to Akko) and temporally (second-first millennia BC). The second, or Aramean, appears well defined after the breakdown of the Hittite Empire, from Bet Bahiani thorough Bet Agusi, Bet Edin and Hama, to Damascus85, ending with the mixed Transjordan (Cannaite-Aramean, later on Arab cities: Palmyra, Petra) cities (Deir Alla) and states (Ammon, Moab, Edom). The third eastern strip or Old Arabic (from the Habur plain, Mari and Emar to the Syrian steppe) bordered Transjordan and Arabia. The linguistic permeability of this area can be ascertained even in the early first Millennium BC by the presence of Phoenician in the northern Aramean zone (Karatepe), and by the interaction of Aramaic and Arabic at the end of the Millennium, with Hebrew acting as a wedge, but also as a bridge, between Canaanite and Aramaic. Those

81. The derivation of the ESA alphabet from the “Canaanite” is clear; see in this regard Naveh 1982:43ff., and Sass 2005:113ff..

82. See Arnaud 1991:46 83. See Del Olmo Lete 1999:45. Amorite flooded the whole of the Fertile Crescent at the beginning of the second millennium;

took root at Mari and finally made himself hegemonic in Babylonia, maintaining nevertheless the Babylonian culture. The whole of the East became “Amorite” – Western. The Amorites who came from or rather lived in the steppe, were semi-nomads who lived in peaceful coexistence with the sedentary tribes, but were always ready to take control of the situation as soon as the urban civilization collapsed, as did both those of the first (Mari) and those of the second (Emar) wave. Until then, beyond the Syrian steppe there was no life. But under new and better circumstances (with the domestication of the camel) and possibly under external pressure (for instance, Mesopotamian expansions), from there the march towards the south-east took place. Emar, even more so than Ugarit, bears the linguistic icons of this march.

84. See Malbran-Labat/Roche 2008. 85. See Dion 1997:26ff.; Lipiński 2000:77ff.


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three linguistic areas maintained a strong, constant process of differentiation starting from the early second Millennium, with varying fortunes.

Can we deduce from all the data, last but not least the appearance of a south-Arabic alphabet in an Ugaritic scriptorium, that the Ugaritic and east-south-prospective-Arabic languages86 were at the moment mutually comprehensible, that this is implied by the same graphematic notation, offered with no specification of any sort?87 In this regard we must point out a curious situation that obtains at Ugarit. Texts written in at least six different languages and graphemic systems (Ug., Akk. [syll. and cons.], Hitt. (hier. and syll.), Egyp., Hurr., Cyp.-Min.) have been found there, but we have neither Phoenician88, Aramaic nor Emariote (not to mention “Arabic”) texts, only an alphabet in different order. It would be natural to conclude that those were, at this early stage of their development, mutually comprehensible “dialects”, according to the linguistic definition of “dialect”, which in turn implies that they were genetically related and belonged to the same linguistic group89. This, for the time being, is only a hypothesis that needs to be substantiated by new and more cogent linguistic findings.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Al-Yasin, I. 1950. The Lexical Relations between Ugaritic and Arabic, Diss. Univ. Ann Arbor MI. Arnaud, D. 1985-8. “Religion Assyro-Babylonienne”, AEPHE Ve Section. Résumés des conférences et

travaux 94:261-272 (“3. De l’émariote ou de la grammaire à la religion”, p. 264-271) Arnaud, D. 1987-88. “Religion Assyro-Babylonienne”, AEPHE Ve Section. Résumés des conferences et

travaux 96:174-177. Arnaud, D., 1991. “Contribution de l’onomastique du Moyen-Euphrate à la connaissance de l’Émariote”,

SEL 8:23-46. Arnaud, D. 1995. “Les traces des ‘Arabes’ dans les textes syriens du début du IIe millénaire à l’époque

néo-assyrienne: esquisse de quelques thèmes”, in Lozachmeur, ed., Présence arabe, pp. 19-22. Avanzini, A. 1989. Glossaire des inscriptions de l’Arabie du Sud 1950-1975 (Quaderni di Semitistica,

3/2), Firenze 1989, pp. 114-115. Avanzini, A. 2004. Corpus of South Arabian Inscriptions I-III. Qatabanic, Marginal Qatabanic Awsanite

Inscriptions (Arabia Antica, 2), Pisa.

86. As pointed out above, we are not presupposing that Ugaritic depends on Arabic/south-Arabic languages as we know them

from the first millennium. We are referring to their proto-parents dwelling in the eastern zone of Syria and moving freely throughout the area. In this regard I share the criticism of Mendenhall’s thesis put forward by Rendsburg-Rubin-Huehnergard 2008, although in fact their benevolent concession seems excessive to me: “The notion that Arabic could be the language of Bronze Age Syria, transported by émigrés to the Arabian peninsula is by itself not an impossibility” (p. 540). The point is that we simply cannot speak of “Arabic” in Bronze Age Syria.

87. See Bordeuil-Pardee 2001:347: “Le nouvel abécédiare, qui est essentiellement identique à celui de Bet-Shemesh, mais montre aussi des différences dans la forme et dans l’ordre des signes, atteste qu’il s’agit de deux représentations de ce qui devait être un système phonéto-graphique inévitablement différent à la fois de celui de l’ougaritique et de celui de la langue canaanéenne parlée à Beth-Shemesh”.

88. The Phoenician inscription found at Ras Shamra belongs to the levels of the Persian period; see Segert 2001. Inscriptions in the short cuneiform alphabet written outside Ugarit could be considered Phoenician; see in this regard Hayes 1991, p. 611, n. 11; Diedtrich-Loretz1988: 274f, 299f, 295ff.

89. Bordreuil-Pardee 2001.348, speculate that the language for whose notation this alphabet was devised “été celle des marchands d’origine non-canaannéene et non ougaritaine…”. Those merchants could only have come from the east; in fact at Ugarit we have documents that certify this commercial exchange. Was it enough for them to know the new order of the letters to write and read Ugaritic accounts? On the exchanges of Ugarit with inner Syria, see Beckman 2007.


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Ugaritic and South Arabic