Publisher's Synopsis
The Syro-Palestinian Amarna letters have a multiple linguistic interest. The language used in the 14th century B. C. in the letters from the Syro-Palestinian vassals from Egypt, known as Canaano-Akkadian, seems to be Akkadian based on an Old Babylonian dialect. But they were the work of autochthonous Syro-Palestinian scribes, whose mother tongue was a North-West Semitic language which frequently seeped into the Akkadian language, regarding morphology, syntax and lexicon. Throughout the last four decades there has been increasing evidence that the language used in the Amarna Palestinian letters is not uniform, which has led to focusing on the study of local corpora or subcorpora. The direct and thorough analysis of these texts revealed, through the palaeography of the letters, that one single scribe could write documents for two or more kings simultaneously. The book contains two main parts. The first one intends to individualize the hands of the scribes who wrote the letters from the small kingdoms of Syria-Palestine. The various corpora are presented and the analysis of the correspondence from each corpora is structured according to the following pattern: historical corpus, linguistic corpus, identified scribes, and general comment. The purpose of the second part is to show the usefulness of the methodology of palaeographic identification of the hands of the scribe as a tool for future philological, linguistic and historical investigations of the Canaanite Amarna letters. The volume is supplemented by many detail photographs of the cuneiform tablets under discussion.
