Scribal Traditions in Emar

Abstract

C. Wilcke found two different paleographical systems among cuneiform tablets from Emar and the vicinities: Syrian type and Syro-Hittite. This paper supports the existence of two scribal traditions in accordance with these paleographical systems from orthographic and linguistic point of view. It further tries to correlate these two scribal traditions with three major subcorpora of Akkadian texts from Emar, i. e. documents bearing the name of one of the kings of Emar (Royal documents), those referring to Ninurta and the elders (Ninurta documents) and those mentioning kings and princes of Carchemish as well as Hittite dignitaries (Carchemish documents). It concludes that Royal documents and Carchemish documents represent the Syrian tradition and the Syro-Hittite respectively and that Ninurta documents basically belonged to the Syrian scribal tradition, but a part of them were written by scribes who apparently belonged to the other tradition.