King Abdi-Heba of Jerusalem Commissions a Syrian Scribe

For the different ways that the scribe writes the out the name of the site “Jerusalem,” see Alice Mandell, Scribal Creativity Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age (New York: London, Routledge, forthcoming).

William Moran, “The Syrian Scribe of the Jerusalem Amarna Letters,” in Amarna Studies: Collected Writings, HSS 54 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003), 249–74. See also the work of Anson Rainey to entangle the different scribal codes in the work of the Jerusalem scribe: Anson Rainey, “The Hybrid Language Written by Canaanite Scribes in the 14th century BCE,” in Language in the Ancient Near East: Proceedings of the 53e Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Vol. 1, Part 1), eds. Leonid Kogan et al., Babel und Bibel 4, Orientalia et Classica 30 (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2010), 851–61, esp.  851–53.

See Yuval Goren, Israel Finkelstein, and Nadav Naʼaman. Inscribed in Clay: Provenance Study of the Amarna Tablets and Other Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Tel Aviv: Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology, 2004), 236–37, 268–69.

EA 271, a letter from Milkilu of Gezer to the pharaoh, potentially references a different side of this story. Milkili asks the pharaoh to confer with Yanḥamu, his official. This letter supports ‘Abdi- Ḫeba’s suspicion that Yanhamu and Milkilu were allies.

For a description of how the multimodality perspective is applied to cuneiform and other ancient corpora, see Alice Mandell, “Ancient Literacy Practices and Script Communities,” in A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, eds. Alessandro Duranti, Rachel George, and Robin Conley Riner. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2023), 159–77.

The translation is from Alice Mandell, Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age (New York; London: Routledge, forthcoming).

The colon in line 6 and 10 is scribal wedge mark, used here to precede Canaanite elements in the passage.

We all vary our languages practices, sometimes using different languages, dialects, or even styles of language.

This expression appears in the Babylonian Talmud as well, in Aramaic אכלו ביה קורצא (b. Baba Metziah 86a).

This is a 3 dual form of this verb (followed by a 1cs suffix).

The scribe sets the two statements in parallel, which highlights the comparison between the impotence of local elites, and the power of Egypt:

⁹ a-mur a-na-ku

la-a ^LÚa-bi-ia ¹⁰ ù la-a ^MUNUSú-mi-ia : ša-ak-na-ni ¹¹ i-na aš-ri an-ni-e

A                                                                      B                      C

 ¹² ⸢zu⸣-ru-uḫ LUGAL-ri KAL.GA ¹³ ⸢ú⸣-še-ri-ba-an-ni a-na É ^LÚa-bi-ia

A’                                                                     B’                     C’

Look, as for me, neither my father nor my mother put me in this place.

Rather, it was the strong arm of the king that caused me to enter to my father's house.”

Another letter with this kind of message is EA 316, by King Pubalu of Yursa.

The Akkadian reads:

^{EA 286 61}[a]- ⸢na⸣ ⸢DUB⸣.SAR ⸢LUGAL⸣ EN-ia um-ma ^I⸢ÌR⸣-⸢ḫé⸣-⸢ba⸣ ⁶² ⸢ÌR⸣-ka-ma : še-ri-ib a-wa-ti.⸢MEŠ⸣ ⁶³ ⸢ba⸣-na-ta a-na LUGAL EN-ia ḫal-qa-at ⁶⁴ ⸢gáb⸣-bi KUR.ḪI.A LUGAL EN-ia

In EA 286: 22-23; 35-36; 49; 55-56; and 60.