Hebrew and Aramaic/Semitic Epigraphy

Comments and queries about the newly discovered bulla of a seal of Hezekiah, announced by the Hebrew University 2 December, 2015, and widely reported in the media. Though press coverage commonly reports the archaeologists’ claim that the bulla is more important than the eight previously known (and published) unprovenanced bullae with the same inscription because of the circumstances of its discovery, I argue that its true importance lies in its authentication of the unprovenanced bullae. It lifts the long-standing suspicion of forgery from unprovenanced bullae in general.

This article proposes a new analysis of Pitiaxēs Ousas' engraved gemstone dated from the third or fourth century CE and preserved in the glyptic collections of French National Library.
The ethnonym Karchedoi draws several interpretative hypotheses. It is in my opinion possible to find an Aramaic origin in this ethnonym which could designate the Iberians living in the citadel of Armazi and placed under the authority of the pitiaxēs governing the city.
The importance of the royal capital in Caucasian Iberia could then explain a shift in the meaning of the name Karchedoi, which came to designate the inhabitants of the country around the citadel of Armazi. The appearance of the geographical name K'art'li might perhaps find there a possible origin.

Revised and corrected working paper dated January 16, 2022.

Note: I no longer support my reading of the short epigraphic document inscribed on a stone from Armazi proposed in this paper as a support of the demonstration. For a new interpretation of this Armazian inscription, see my doctoral dissertation, Rois et royautés en Ibérie du Caucase, corrected version, pp. 314-5.

Access to the original paper published in Iberia-Colchis, №14, 2018, p. 42-66 :
URL : http://dspace.nplg.gov.ge/handle/1234/282001

"...we may assume that the apparently singular nouns were actually plurals, even if the relevant plural morpheme was imperfectly recorded by the script. This morpheme probably consisted of a merely vocalic ending *-ā. Such a vowel was recorded by the mater lectionis <-h> in Sefire and was not recorded at all in Tell Fekherye. This becomes clear if one considers that the same word in the same context was recorded in Sefire as shwrh and in Tell Fekherye as swr without any apparent ending..."

Feminine plurals in -an were subsequently created when the singular became homophonous after an intermediate stage with -h: *-at > *-ah > -ā.

Les nombres écrits en chiffres sont utilisés dans les inscriptions araméennes de Taymā' et dans les ostraca Iduméens d'époque perse ; les chiffres nabatéens dérivent de leur tradition et sont utilisés concurremment avec les nombres écrits en lettres dans les inscriptions nabatéennes. Les chiffres nabatéens se caractérisent par des innovations dans la graphie des chiffres 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 et 100. On note des variations chronologiques et régionales dans l'usage des deux systèmes, en rapport avec le degré de connaissance de l'araméen, en comparaison de l'arabe. Abstract : Numbers written in figures are widey used in Aramaic inscriptions from Taymā' and on the

This book offers a comprehensive linguistic evaluation of the 376 personal names attested in the roughly 600 Aramaic inscriptions of Hatra, the famous Northern Mesopotamian city that flourished in the Parthian age, between the 1st century BC and the 3rd century AD. This study benefits from the publication of many Hatran inscriptions during recent decades, which have yielded rich onomastic data, and some fresh readings of these epigraphic sources. This work is subdivided into three main parts: an “Onomastic Catalogue”, a “Linguistic Analysis”, and a “Concordance” section. The “Catalogue” is organized as a list of entries, in which every name is transliterated, translated (whenever possible), discussed from an etymological perspective, provided with onomastic parallels, and accompanied by its attestations in the Hatran Aramaic corpus. The “Catalogue” is followed by a “Linguistic Analysis” which describes, firstly, the principal orthographic, phonological, morphological, and syntactical features of Hatran names. The linguistic discussion proper is followed by a semantic taxonomy of the names which make up the corpus and an overview of the religious significance of the theophoric names. Charts of “Concordance” end the book.

The research of Classical Hebrew tends to focus on the major ancient corpora: Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew, and Qumranic Hebrew, and regularly neglects more minor manifestations of the language. Uri Mor’s book Judean Hebrew offers an examination of the language of a small yet revealing corpus: the Hebrew documents from Judaea between the First and the Second Revolts—a group of legal documents, military letters, and other everyday-life inscriptions, written in the Judean Desert region and discovered in the 20th century in Masada and the refuge caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea.
The linguistic importance of the documents lies in the direct evidence that they provide on the character of Hebrew during the turbulent period between the destruction of the Second Temple and the final redaction of the Mishna. The typical phonetic spellings in the documents, e.g. אנמקבל (=אני מקבל ‘I receive’), תמקום (=את המקום ‘the site’ [accusative]), and their non-literary, non-prestigious nature offer an intriguing glance into writing practices and speech customs of Hebrew users in ordinary circumstances, recording a legal process or inscribing a military edict. Judean Hebrew describes and analyzes this Hebrew idiom and determines its status in the sociolinguistic realm of Palestine. The detailed study of the linguistic features and their analysis reveal that in this period Hebrew was a living language in Judea, despite the undeniable influence of Aramaic, and that it was typologically similar—but not identical—to Rabbinic Hebrew.

Esther Eshel, and Yigal Levin (eds.), ‘See, I will bring a scroll recounting what befell me’ (Ps 40:8) Epigraphy and Daily Life from the Bible to the Talmud Dedicated to the Memory of Professor Hanan Eshel. Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 12. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.  Pp.245, incl. 60 figures. €99.99. ISBN 978-3-525-55062-5.

El mantenimiento de la frontera romana oriental siempre fue un quebradero de cabeza para los generales y emperadores romanos que, desde Carras (53 a.C.), se enfrentaron a la magnitud y cohesión del Imperio Parto y, después, Sasánida, desde el siglo III d.C. Es en este marco geopolítico tan complejo en el cual el comercio a través de la Ruta de la Seda fluye o se interrumpe según las vicisitudes políticas del momento.

Durante el correinado de los emperadores Valeriano y Galieno (253-260), y después solamente de Galieno (260-268), el Imperio Romano experimenta cambios políticos y territoriales muy importantes, a la vez que se llevan a cabo nuevas soluciones para afrontar los problemas que el complicado siglo presenta. Además de los múltiples usurpadores que surgen durante este período (hasta 30 registrados durante el reinado de Galieno), el poder central, con sede en Mediolanum y Antioquía, debe hacer frente, a partir del año 260, a una serie de realidades políticas alternativas de gran tamaño, como son el Imperio Galo (260-274) y el Imperio de Palmira (260-273), que presentan problemáticas y discursos diversos, complementarios y, a veces, antagónicos respecto al poder imperial central.

El surgimiento del Imperio de Palmira se gesta en un marco de inestabilidad y guerras posterior a la intervención de Valeriano en Oriente y se actúa en varias fases con diversos grados de autonomía. Protagonista indiscutible, según las fuentes, de este fenómeno es Septimius Udaynath, Odenato en latín, descendiente de una potente familia de Palmira, cónsul sufecto en el 258 y nombrado supuestamente Corrector totius Orientis por el mismo Galieno. Él y su mujer, la famosa Zenobia, organizaron, según las fuentes escritas, una realidad territorial paralela y a veces problemática. Pero ¿Creó Odenato realmente un estado paralelo al de Roma? ¿Cuales fueron las dinámicas? ¿Cómo fue su cursus honorum?

El objetivo de este poster es el de dilucidar estas cuestiones y ver hasta qué punto las fuentes literarias nos dicen o nos ocultan acerca de la naturaleza de esta realidad política alternativa, contrastándola con las fuentes arqueológicas y epigráficas disponibles, a la vez que se analizan las dinámicas comerciales que permitieron que la ciudad de Palmira se erigiese como realidad autónoma de Roma, con las implicaciones económicas que comportaba, a mediados del siglo III d.C.

This is an abstract of a longer paper which was read in Salerno during the XXI Convegno di Studi Vetero-Testamentari: I Samaritani. Un ebraismo autonomo oltre l'ottica  scismatica giudaica e quella idealizzante cristiana (September 9-11 2019). The paper deals with both the material culture of the Achaemenid province of Samaria [archeology of Samaria and Sichem; the territory of Manasseh; the epigraphy (the papyrii of Wadi Dalyieh), bullae and seals; the Samarian coinage; the governors of Samaria] and the material culture of Hellenistic Age (Mount Garizim excavations; the Aramaic and Paleo-Hebrew inscriptions of the sacred precint)

The paper is prompted by the surge in publication in recent years of bullae from seals bearing personal names of Israelites, mostly from pre-exilic times. The number of individuals known from such seals and bullae has almost doubled since 2000. I have been registering them all in The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew Revised, currently in progress, each individual being numbered separately. I know, for example, of 91 persons named Shallum, 81 Azariahs, 34 Ahabs, etc., including those in the Hebrew Bible. But how many individuals do we know of altogether? I have offered an answer in the paper, together with tables showing  what the data reveal of Hebrew onomastics. We are greatly in need of an online database with information about every ancient Israelite individual we know of, and the paper sketches a proposal for the creation of such a prosopographical database.

The chief aim of this article is to show the key features of the Aramaic version of the Book of Hosea, that is a part of the Targum Jonathan. The first section of the research is the translation of a few passages of Targum Hos 1–3. On the basis of these translations, the allegorical meaning of the marriage of the Prophet in the targumic interpretation is shown. These are also some features of targumic renderings. The second part of the article discusses the most important aspects of the theological concept of Targum Jonathan based on examples from Targum Hosea.

The Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia 2.0

The project “The Epigraphic Corpus of Georgia” has been in progress since 2015 at the Institute of Linguistic Research of Ilia State University. Its aim is to document the wealthy epigraphic legacy discovered or preserved in Georgia, according to the standards of EpiDoc, the digital heir to the Leiden Convention. The first electronic publication of the Armazi Bilingual produced according to those standards was prepared in 2014 by Tamar Kalkhitashvili within the framework of her MA research. Because of its use of the latest approaches to digital humanities, this publication merited a high score at the International Conference of Digital Epigraphics organized by EAGLE (The Europeana network of Ancient Greek and Latin Epigraphy). At this stage, the Epigraphic Corpus (head of the project: Prf. N. Doborjginidze) includes the 1st-9th cc AD. Georgian, Aramaic and Greek inscriptions. The project is long term, and besides the Georgian, it also aims at preparing, according to the above mentioned standards, the publication of the corpora of the Urartian, Aramaic, Greek, Jewish, Arabic, Persian and Armenian inscriptions.

The topic of this article are terms for animals in the Old Aramaic inscriptions. The corpus is quite rich (ca. 50 terms), including both terms for particular mammals reconstructed for proto-Semitic, and terms that are rarely attested in other Semitic languages. Two peculiar Aramaic forms are already evidenced in Old Aramaic: the word for "cow" created through morphological rather than semantic opposition to the word "bull", and the word for "serpent" derived from the verb "to live". The attestation of some terms in Old Aramaic that do not occur in later Aramaic dialects is possibly due, at least in some cases, to external influences (for example, Akkadian in the inscription of Sfiré). Other terms are known later in a slightly different form, maybe due to tabooisation processes. However, the stability of the lexicon in general is quite remarkable. As is usual in ethnobiological classification, the most common taxa by far are generic species.