IN THE WAKE OF THE KARATEPE DISCOVERIES

Abstract

Among recent epigraphic finds, none has been cleared by scholarly examination with greater dispatch and a greater measure of unanimity than the Phoenician inscriptions of Azitawaddu, king of the Danunites. Only a few months after a fragmentary version of the royal epigraph, inscribed on a statue, had become available, it was deciphered and translated independently by scholars in various lands. And when shortly afterwards a complete version of the epigraph, incised on the wall of a gateway, came to hand, this too was followed in a matter of months by a series of publications offering more or less detailed treatments of the monumental discovery 1. There can be no doubt that this remarkable rapidity in laying bare a new Semitic text of great antiquity and of considerable length was greatly enhanced by the lucid style of the inscription as well as by the excellent legibility of the middle columns of the statue version and of all of the gate version. Unquestionably, too, it is owing to both the facility of the text and its good state of preservation that, except for specific peculiarities, those who studied the inscription have been at one as to its reading and interpretation. The most striking example of those peculiarities is the sentence pattern yqtl 'nk, which is used in the gate inscription in six or seven instances. Apart from initial attempts to account for this peculiar pattern by grammatical ignorance of the Phoenician scribe or by treating 'nk as a proper