Diversity

Languages

We are told by linguists that each century witnesses regressively the extinction of many more languages than are generated. This is true of the ANE as well, where names of places and of individuals often betray unknown linguistic families. Some of the languages we know from recovery of documents resist attachment to families (Sumerian, Hurrian, Hattic, Elamite). Others represent the earliest written representatives of Indo-European (Hittite, Luwian). Most belonged to branches of Semitic that have not survived the times:

Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, biblical Hebrew. One, Egyptian, evolved into Coptic, and now barely survives.

With their capacities and idiosyncrasies, these languages play a major role in shaping thought patterns (perhaps also vice versa), and although we want to believe that story lines, themes, and motifs can survive crossing language barriers, the evidence is not encouraging. We debate the very few tales that betray their importation from other cultures. For example, Elkunirsha and Ashertu and Astarte and the Sea, both containing Canaanite themes and motifs, have been found respectively in Hatti (Anatolia) and Egypt, but not yet in their own homeland. For the Gilgamesh epic, there are Hurrian and Hittite renderings, the latter even containing motifs probably not available either to the Old Babylonian original or the contemporaneous Middle Babylonian version of the epic (Beckman 2003). Yet it remains a fact that before the Hellenistic period literary works that are simply translated (rather than, say, adapted or recast) for foreign audiences are scarce.

This is not to say that fluency in more than one language was abnormal in the ANE. In fact, trade and diplomacy depended on such capacity, and armies brought their own tongues into occupied territories. Bilingualism (even multilingualism) could not have been rare; but the available documents written in more than one language had limited goals. Aside fTom dictionary compilations destined for scribes, bilingual documents come from multiethnic communities, and they preserve mostly cultic materials, such as prayers, omens, rituals, and mythic etiologies. To claim the prestige of a dominant tradition or to mollify suzerains, such rulers as the Hittite Hattusili I, the Elamite Puzur-Insusinak, the Etruscan Thefaries Velianas, the Syrians Azatiwada of Karatepe and Hadad-Izri of Sikanu, commissioned official pronouncements in two languages, their own as well as in the prestige one then current. A good number of bilinguals from Mesopotamia, including fawning letters or poems in praise of gods and kings, were written both in Akkadian and Sumerian, the latter a language that had lost native fluency late in the third millennium bce.

The ANE languages we know most about (Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Ugaritic, Hittite, Hebrew) come to us with complications. The Bible’s Hebrew has been manipulated by generations of scribes; the recording of its consonants occurred much earlier than its vowels, resulting in a composite language that barely approximates how it originally sounded. Despite the homogenizing influence of scribal schooling, the languages of Mesopotamia are rich in dialects (even two that are major: Assyrian and Babylonian). But they also include arrangements (not dialects) that are peculiar to learned compositions: Sumerian breaks into Emesal (etymology disputed, but once thought to be a woman’s language), while Akkadian displays a ‘‘hymnic-epic’’ mode that exaggerates poetics. Such manifestations limit successful exportation of narratives, if only because they challenge understanding by the non-initiated.

Languages control the way narratives are shaped. Semitic languages in all their dialects are poor in abstraction, relatively ambiguous syntactically, and fond of circumlocutions. How such idiosyncrasies affected the production of literature is hard to say; but it is observable that Semitic narratives avoided physical descriptions, whether of people or places, rarely made the age of protagonists crucial to a story, and seldom attributed introspection to characters. The same can be said about Egyptian storytelling. Yet languages and their eccentricities are not alone in controlling the forms narratives take. Script and writing media are no less crucial.

Scripts

What is striking about the scripts of the ANE is their deficiency. Not one of the scripts used before the first millennium ce conveys accurately what was heard. Many of them give us consonants (not a complete set of phonemes at that) but not vowels - for example Egyptian, Ugaritic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. (Egyptian scribes compensated through an elaborate scheme of complements and determinatives, eventually even devising, but not successfully applying, a syllabic series of signs.) We know from the history of biblical interpretation that the limitations of such scripts generated interpretive problems in antiquity; the more so for us. Ugaritic narratives, for example, are not for the faint, and determining what they say is more of a scholarly convention than is admitted. Sumerian is still difficult to assess and there are almost as many grammars for it as there are Sumerol-ogists. Akkadian and Hittite adapted the scripts of other languages; but in doing so they lost a capacity to fully deploy it phonologically. The only Aramaic candidate for inclusion in our category, The Two Princes, is preserved in Egyptian demotic script, so compounding our problem in establishing its basic meaning. (See below.) The consequence of script complications is twofold: in antiquity, the transfer of narratives across languages might have not have fared well if it depended on the written rather than the spoken word; in our own days, translations from some ancient languages may not be as secure as we might like them to be.

Media

Stone, wood, skins, and bones were among the writing materials in the ANE. In all regions, stone (of all varieties) was preferred for monumental inscriptions. Clay was the choice writing medium in Mesopotamia and Khatti, papyrus in Egypt, a combination of both in Canaan. Chalked or waxed wooden boards were often used but few have survived. Sumerians shaped compositions to fit on single tablets and so avoided the elaborate storage and retrieval systems for narratives requiring more than one tablet. Not uncommon, however, were single-tablet stories that shared the same protagonist (for example, five so far for the Sumerian Gilgamesh). Such single-tablet tales average 500 lines (for example, the size of four Sumerian narratives about Enmerkar and Lugalbanda). Unusual are the two 60 cms high clay cylinders with 1,360 ‘‘lines’’ that recounted Gudea’s building of a temple in Lagash.

Akkadian compositions, however, could stretch over a number of tablets. The longest ‘‘heroic’’ narrative in Akkadian is a version of the Gilgamesh epic that required twelve tablets. The whole is estimated to be about 3,000 lines (20 percent of which is still missing), so a fraction of the Iliad (15,600 lines) or the Odyssey (12,000 lines). The Old Babylonian version of Atrahasis is shorter: 1,245 lines over three tablets, according to the precise count of Nur-Aya, a scribe of King Ammisaduqa of Babylon (seventeenth century BCE). The longest composition in Ugaritic cuneiform, Baal and Anat, stretches over six multi-column tablets that might have contained a total of 3,000 lines; but it is not yet certain that the whole was a single unit. Other narratives (Keret and Aqhat) are much more modest, three tablets each, with anywhere between 250 and 350 lines per tablet. Narratives in Hittite literature tend to be even briefer; the longest, the Song of Ullikumi, covers three tablets.

In Egypt and Israel scribes had a broad selection of writing materials, but they wrote and copied sacred literature on papyrus scrolls. Egyptian papyri can reach 40 meters, but narratives occupied much smaller dimensions. Sporadically Egyptian scribes also used leather, its technology having been perfected late in the third millennium BCE. Israel probably adopted leather rather late; but as scrolls could attain 10 meters and still retain their integrity, the potential for threading a single subject over a full roll (if not also in a series of rolls, such as the Five Books of Moses) gave narratives a density and complexity far beyond their deployment in other media. Israel could, therefore, unfold its story over millennia and across a vast canvas, filling it with themes that repeat, characters that prove paradigmatic, and events that are verisimilar. Because they are embedded within a single story, even its laws, regulations, and moral exhortations become part of a narrative with a single lesson: the only God that ever was is committed to the welfare of a single, albeit unpromising, people.

Literacy

Literacy has many levels. Between the illiterate (no ability to read or write) and the learned (creative reader and writer), there are people who can recognize symbols but not read, read but not write, or do both but within specific genres. Those who could record original, esoteric, and abstract thought were probably rare. (We have notices from Old Babylonian Mari, a relatively literate age, that kings scoured their empires for the few scribes who could work in literary languages.) What is striking, however, is that the level and range of literacy do not seem tied to the complexity of a script. It is very likely, therefore, that illiteracy went deeper (or at least just as deep) in urban medieval Europe, where the alphabet reigned, than in urban Babylon with its cumbersome cuneiform. It might also be noted that antiquity esteemed varieties of literacy that are scarcely acknowledged among us, for example the capacity to read omens in the sky or to decipher markings on the innards of animals, both of which required the assimilation of much traditional lore only a fraction of which was written in our sense.

Many scholars have offered estimates of the percentage of literates in given populations; these estimates are all speculative and obey the swings of the scholarly pendulum, although currently the trend is to find it wider than previously allowed. (Overview in Vanstiphout 1995. For the Levant, see Parpola 1997: 320-1; Wilcke 2000; Charpin 2003: 502-3; for Egypt, see Lesko 1990 and Wente 1995.) Within individual communities, the number of literates may have been affected by taste and political institutions. From mid-third millennium Ebla (near Aleppo in Syria) comes a repertoire of texts that betrays heavy dependence on Sumerian literary taste. Whether this condition reflects folk, elite, expatriate, or a merely scribal interest is not easy to tell; but it must certainly have required expansion of school facilities. Centuries later, as Mesopotamia became home to multinational empires, the centers of literary knowledge moved from the scribal schools, associated with private quarters, to those within temples and palaces. There remains continuity in copying the inherited documents; but creativity begins to gravitate toward the production of omens and ritual texts, while heroic narratives (Etana, Atrahasis, Adapa) are folded within incantations (Michalowski 1992: 233-40).

Orality/Aurality

The above observation is of import to a debate on the composition, reception, and transmission of literature deemed heroic or even mythic that has claimed attention ever since Milman Parry and Albert Lord first investigated the relationship of oral tradition to Homeric studies. Parry’s basic premise is that our received Greek epics betray evidence that illiterate bards crafted and orally delivered heroic and mythic literature by improvising on absorbed folklore and by using a formulaic yet poetic language. The earliest audiences marveled at what these bards told, but they also delighted in finding a correspondence between their own worldview and that of the past. The premise here is that unlike written literature, which can lie dormant for centuries, orally forged literature cannot ever be antiquarian or historically distant from its presentation.

Over the years, these tenets have been critiqued and denied by classicists, with defenders offering modifications galore on such issues as premeditation, memorization, dictation, presentation, and performance. The same debate has made a universal impact on the study of literature, including that of the ANE. Parry and Lord could offer their hypothesis because all the Homeric manuscripts were appreciably later than the date of their presumed composition (generally eighth century bce), let alone of their inspiration (sometimes claimed to be Mycenaean). However, except for the biblical material, which parallels the Homeric epic in its complex transmission history and in its lack of chronological anchoring, the literatures from Mesopotamia, Ugarit, Hatti, and Egypt are excavated from well-defined contexts, even if one cannot always pinpoint the process of transmission before they were committed to writing. Many compositions occur in critical recensions or even multiple versions, and they betray active scribal (thus, written) reshaping. It is not surprising, therefore, that the sharpest conviction about the orality/aurality of Hebrew literature originated at Harvard, where Lord was spreading the gospel.

Other ANE specialists have been ambivalent about the matter, most often ignoring the issue as it pertains to the creation of texts, but delivering diverse opinions as it applies to the presentation of compositions. Sumerian compositions tend toward economy of words and location, attachment to doxological formulation, and narrative pivots at regular intervals, hence easing aural absorption (Vanstiphout 1995). Yet a significant portion of this literature was crafted when Sumerian was no longer a living language, so unlikely to be based on living transmission, dispensed by illiterate bards, or appreciated by multilingual audiences. (One notable exception is the imperfectly understood Lugalbanda and Ninsun from the Early Dynastic period when Sumerian was still spoken. It may have told the birth of Gilgamesh, traditionally Lugalbanda’s son!) Moreover, Sumerian literature, while full of word-pairing and fond of strophic repetition, is not particularly formulaic. It is dense in imagery (for us, much of it far-fetched) that impacted emotionally but was hardly easy on the ears. It was also full of the long repetitions that would have put an insomniac to sleep but easy on the reader who might simply skip them.