Amarna Studies: Collected Writings

Abstract

Amarna Studies: Collected Writings, by William L. Moran. Edited by John Huehnergard and Shlomo Izre'el. HSS 54. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2003. Pp. xxxi + 363. $44.95 (hardcover). ISBN 1575069067. This book is a tribute to the memory of the dominant scholar in Amarna studies during the second half of the twentieth century. The editors seek to present all of the major essays on the grammar and contents of the Amarna correspondence that Moran wrote and published. They begin with his Ph.D. dissertation, A Syntactical Study of the Dialect of Byblos as Reflected in the Amarna Tablets, completed under William F. Albright in 1950. Described by the editors as of the most oft-cited unpublished works in the field of Near Eastern studies, the publication of this work fifty-three years after its completion attests to the groundbreaking nature of Moran's study and its ongoing importance for research. It is the most important single service that the editors perform. They make easily accessible a previously unpublished work that within its 130 pages provides the syntactical distinctives of this important dialect, and thereby presents the major single corpus of linguistic information for antecedents to biblical Hebrew, Ugaritic, and the West Semitic languages of the Iron Age. To this may be added the value of the dissertation as a model for the study of the whole collection of West Semitic dialects as represented in the corpus of the Amarna correspondence, the fourteenth-century B.C.E. cuneiform letters exchanged between the princes and administrators of Canaan and the pharaohs of Egypt. In the period before Moran's work, the general perspective on the language of the Amarna correspondence was that it reflected poorly trained scribes or, at best, made use of mixed dialects that confused interpretation. Moran chose to study the largest collection of Amarna letters from one geographic site, that of Byblos. In this manner, he was able to define a dialect from a single city over a relatively short period. Moran identified significant features in the particles, verbal morphology, and clause syntax that demonstrated a meaningful and distinct dialect. He argued that this dialect consistently reflected West Semitic grammar and syntax, distinct from the Old Babylonian language, which appeared in the script and vocabulary that the scribe used. One example of a major breakthrough in Moran's study was his identification of modal congruence in purpose clauses. …