Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Yitzhak Sapir" <yitzhaksapir AT gmail.com>]

On Dec 26, 2007 1:11 AM, kenneth greifer wrote:
>
> Jim,
>
> Could you please type out the exact quote in Amarna 287 that says 318 men 
> or soldiers
> or whatever it says? Also, could you type out the footnote on page 300 of 
> that book you
> mentioned by William Moran? I don't have the book, and I can't find the 
> whole EA 287 on
> the internet.

The footnote reads, apparently,
"Before '8', Knudtzon saw traces that he tentatively identified as '318.'"
I found this with Google Book Search:
http://books.google.com/books?id=Z7wNAAAAYAAJ&q=318&pgis=1
The lines can be "read" (in transliteration of Canaano-Akkadian) at:
http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/semitic/EA263-end.html
287:054  [_ LÚ].MEß a-$í-ru 5 li-im[
287:055  [3 M]E[ 1]8 LÚ.MEß ú-bi-li-mi KASKAL.HÁ LUGA[L-ri]
If it makes you feel better, the people who wrote these didn't seem to know
Akkadian too well either :)  More accurately, they wrote in a "barbaric"
form of Akkadian, and probably just used Akkadian words and script to
write out Canaanite (to give an example, it would be somewhat like writing
"housim" in English, to mean "houses," which they would read as "batim").
The appropriate tablet can be viewed here, and you can see the state of
conservation of these lines.  The lines seem to be between the 12th and 13th
cm:
http://amarna.ieiop.csic.es/amarna/Tablillas/EA%20287/EA%20287-VAT%201644%20(1).jpg

As you see, the 3 and 1 are in broken portions of the tablet.
Together with the line before
(also broken at the end) which reads "five thousand", my guess is the
text should probably
read "5318," if Knudtzon's tentative reading is accepted.  The "5000"
ends some distance
before the end of the line -- right before the crack, but as you can
see on other lines, not
all lines reach the very end.

Yitzhak Sapir