Albert Planelles
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden: Leemans hall
Organized by: Albert Planelles
The Netherlands Institute for the Near East (NINO) at Leiden University is pleased to host the conference qibīma! Second Millennium Cuneiform Letters and their Language.
a[l-lu]-me ia-aq-bu šàr-ru EN-li a-[n]a mi-ni at-ta-ma ti-ìš-tap-ru-na a-na ia-ši
(EA 117: 6-9)“Behold, the king, my lord, says: ‘Why do you keep on writing to me?’”
It is unclear whether all ancient Near Easterners shared the enthusiasm for letter-writing of Rib-Hadda of Byblos, who sent so many letters to the pharaoh that he eventually received this dismissive reply. What is clear, however, is that letters were a widespread form of communication, as evidenced by their discovery in many sites. Due to political and economic reasons, letters became ubiquitous in the second millennium BCE. Some of the largest corpora of preserved cuneiform letters date back to this period, which also saw the emergence of a number of local traditions outside the Mesopotamian core.
In cuneiform archives, one of the elements that most clearly defines letters is language. Letters can be distinguished from other types of documents by the use of specific formulas, the concurrence of injunctive verb forms, and a rather free language and style. In fact, since letters seem to be less constrained by the standardised usages that characterize other text genres, they are often assumed to preserve a language which is closer to the spoken dialects. Unsurprisingly, the language used to write letters has been the focus of many contributions, but not often from a comprehensive point of view. The purpose of the conference is to facilitate a scholarly discussion which, based on the rich material from the second millennium BCE, identifies both general patterns and regional trends in letter writing, revealing different writing traditions and cultural continuums, as well as the ways in which individual agencies interacted with tradition and contributed to its evolution.
The conference will bring all these elements into focus through papers that will explore the relationship between the language used in letters and everyday speech, as well as the use of expressions and idioms that appear only or mostly in letters, including formulaic expressions and rhetorical devices. The conference will also delve into how letters are used in the framework of interpersonal relations, inasmuch as they are used to express emotions and feelings and to convey power dynamics. Finally, dialects attested in letters will also be addressed, as well as language contact, language interference, and literacy.