On the Anticipatory Pronominal Suffix before the Genitive in Aramaic and Akkadian

Abstract

ALL SEMITIC SCHOLARS are familiar with the fact that in Aramaic, when one noun is dependent on another as a genitive, a pronominal suffix is frequently attached to the first noun agreeing in case with the dependent genitive after which the relative pronoun )I stands before the noun which is in the genitive case. This construction is found as early as the time of the Elephantine Papyri' (in which the relative appears in its earlier form '1), in Biblical Aramaic,2 in Syriac 3 and in the Talmud.4 Assyriologists are also familiar with the fact that in the language of some of the Babylonian contract-tablets of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods a similar usage is found. In the numerous contracts published by Strassmaier, which vary in date from the reign of Nebuchadniezzar to the reign of Darius I, the witnesses' names are regularly written So-and-so apit-s.u sa So-and-so. This usage was, however, confined to certain localities in Babylonia, since it is not the usage of the tablets of Murashu-Sons and is not found in the Greek period. It is not employed in the documents from Erech, dating from that time, in the Morgan Library.5 It is not the Babylonian usage in the documents of the Cassite time or the period of the first Babylonian Dynasty, though sometimes found in Assyrian documents of the Sargonide time. Such being the known employment of the idiom in Semitic, certain appearances of it upon which the writer has come appear to him interesting. Thus it not infrequently