joe has been busy studying for his comprehensive exams, which will be in exactly one month from now; five eight hour exams within one week of time. i took a peek at what he was studying yesterday and this is what i found:
it’s a ugaritic letter to a master complaining about the destruction of a city apparently by some bandits. obviously.
6 Comments
yeah a post!! you’re so funny, sherwin! i love that you said, “obviously”. “well, duuh.” came to mind.
thank goodness for the link for the definition of ugaritic. a letter huh? where’s the salutation? how did the scholars realize this was a letter? and how do you describe this, joey? looks like someone sketching some candlelabra’s or stacking ice cream cones to me.
i could make something like this up easily. if i just had a stack of earring backings, i could just scatter them on a table and draw it out like this. and it could be a letter from angie to sherwin, describing her confusion…
great post sherwin. no wonder joe drinks as much coffee as he does. that’s some serious study material.
so obvious. although, it kind of looks like a huge refrigerator with food spilling out of it to me….
can’t wait to see you guys in a week!!!
pam
The first two lines (up until the horizontal line) read: “To GRDN my lord, say: …” which is a standard salutation formula in ancient letters. The image is, of course, a line drawing of a clay tablet which is currently in a museum in Damascus, Syria.
I never thought about it, but the wedges do resemble ice-cream cones. Or a refrigerator with lots of wedge-shaped magnets on it.
nerd alert! nerd alert!
so that’s where i put that letter. i’ve been looking for it for ages. 7,560 years actually.
did you know… if you turn the letter upside down… it looks about the same.
is this RS 18.147? can you post a translation?
It’s actually RS 19.011, and D. Pardee’s translation of the text can be found in The Context of Scripture, Vol. III, pp. 109-110.