The Culinary Tablets at Yale

Abstract

IT IS A HAPPY OCCASION for me to tender here the first interest on an old debt. Like other Assyriologists, I became obligated to the work and publication of the American Oriental Society. I owe it much, and for such a long time. I also became obligated to the Yale Babylonian Collection and to its director, W. W. Hallo. With much generosity and with J. van Dijk's agreement, he and his associates placed at my disposal and gave me permission to study before their publication what must now be called the Yale's culinary tablets. They also extended to me all sorts of courtesies. They supplied me with M. I. Hussey's photographs and autographs as well as with A. Goetze's early annotations. W. Farber communicated to me his latest collations. For more than one reason, I sincerely regret my inability to personally make this presentation. But if you, as you must, love your beautiful tongue; and if you just recall the quality of my English and of my wretched pronunciation of it-those who know me could edify you on this score-, I beg you to consider my forced absence from your assembly as a Providential blessing. Now that everything has found publication in the rich and pleasing YOS XI-a volume anticipated with Messianic expectation by not a few among us-, I hope to soon find the time to finalize the work over which I have labored for so many years in order to decipher, explain, and translate these difficult, but altogether original and astonishing, documents. In the meanwhile, because I owe it to you and because you were so good as to invite me to address you, the best that I could do here is to present these tablets to you, briefly of course, but in words enough to give you at least an idea of their contents and to highlight their particular interest. We are dealing here with 3 tablets, autographed in YOS XI, under the numbers 25 (YBC 4644), 26, (YBC 8958), and 27 (YBC 4648), which I will henceforth for convenience cite as A, B, and C. We know nothing, I believe, of their provenance; but their written style and their orthography allow me to assign them, by and large, to the Old Babylonian period-rather to the middle of it, say around 1700-, and to pinpoint Southern Babylonia as their place of origin. The first tablet, A, is almost 12 cm long and 16.4 cm high; it is complete in its 75 lines. A break has robbed the right side of about two-thirds of the lines along a quarter of its length; but parallels (above all in A but also in B and C), formulaic repetitions, and stylistic cliches, allow us to fill a good percentage of the missing segments; so much so in fact, that understanding the text is not too seriously affected. In this regard, A is the best preserved and most intelligible of the three, and it is for this reason that I shall linger over its contents but will pass more rapidly over B and C. A kind of total is found in the last two lines of A; located on the lower edge it summarizes the contents of the tablet as follows: 21 (kinds of) meat broths (siru) / / (and) 4 (kinds of) greens (warqu). Here, as in B and C when in similar context, the term water (miu, construct me) refers to the material aspect of the dishes which, as we shall see, were all cooked in water. If such a definition, which is foreign to our vocabulary, seems to have satisfied the ancient cooks, we have some difficulty in trying to fit it within our own categories. For nothing informs us about a distinction that for us would be most crucial: to learn about the relevance and function of the liquid component after cooking. If this element turns out to be primary, then we should call it bouillon, or perhaps even soup; if it is sufficiently evaporated and thickened, we shall label it sauce, There are occasions (in particular, as we shall see, at B 1:47), where it is obvious that we are dealing with sauce. Certain dishes, especially those with vegetables, could rather assume the consistency of some sort of mash (French: bouillie).2 Most often, however, we have little with which to settle the matter. For this reason, I have decided to render mu in these contexts as stew (French: bouilli), a term which is really little used, but 1 A large segment of this paper was offered to the Assyriology section of the American Oriental Society meetings held in New Haven, March 10, 1986. The translation is by J. M. Sasson. 2 The word Sipku occurs 3 or 4 times (cf. A:64).