Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age by Mandell, Alice;

Short description:

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offers a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550-1200 BCE).

Long description:

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age offers a nuanced exploration of the scribal practices behind the Canaanite Amarna Letters and wider scribal culture of the Levant during the Late Bronze Age (1550–1200 BCE).

The book features a summary of the historical and scribal contexts of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets – a corpus of diplomatic letters between Canaanite rulers and Egyptian rulers of the later 18^th Dynasty – and provides a synthesis of research on cuneiform scribalism in the Late Bronze Age. It also offers a methodology for the multimodal analysis of Canaanite cuneiform tablets, which can be applied to other ancient corpora. Specifically, the proposed “code-alteration” approach offers a more accurate description of the range of linguistic, orthographic, and marking systems in the Amarna Letters. The book sheds light upon the use of cuneiform script and written Akkadian in diplomatic communications in the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean, broadening our understanding of this period which was pivotal to the development of writing, scribal culture, and West Semitic literary traditions.

Canaanite Scribal Creativity and the Making of Cuneiform Culture in the Amarna Age is suitable for scholars of the Late Bronze Age southern Levant and those interested in literacies and scribal practices of the Ancient Near East.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Writing, Scribes, and Diplomacy in the Southern Levant in the Amarna Age; 2. From Speech Communities to Script Communities: Past Approaches and New Directions in the Study of the Canaanite Amarna Letters; 3. The Canaanite Amarna Letters and the Scribes Who Wrote Them; 4. Approaches to Code-Switching and Related Phenomena in Speech and Writing; 5. Code-Alternation in Canaano-Akkadian, a Multimodal Strategy of Communication; 6. Broad Strokes: The Visual Design of the Canaanite Amarna Tablets; 7. Code-Alternation in EA 286: A Jerusalem Amarna Letter, Written by a Scribe Trained Outside of Canaan; 8. Code-Alternation in EA 147: A “Literary” Letter from Tyre; 9. Code-Alternation as Register Shifting in EA 300 and 378; 10. Code-Alternation in EA 369, an Egyptian-Akkadian Letter; 11. Conclusion: The Canaanite Amarna Letters as Portals into Cuneiform Script Communities.