The Lexical Texts from Kabnak (Haft Tepe)
Haft Tepe 10; Extract from Ura (trees). Photograph © Javier Alvarez-Mon.
The site of Kabnak (Haft Tepe), not far from Susa, yielded a large number of cuneiform tablets, including school texts. The exercises are the product of a local scribal community, continuing practices developed in Old Babylonian Susa. Kabnak was build during the reign of Tepti-ahar, king of Susa and Anšan, who was a contemporary of the fourteenth century Kassite king Kadašman-Enlil I. The writing of Akkadian in Elam had a tradition of several centuries and had evolved in ways that were different from the conventions used in Babylonia. For instance, Elamite-Akkadian uses the sign ŠA₃ for the syllable /ša/; SI in the reading ši₂ and the number sign 3.20 for the word šarru = king.
The exercises from Kabnak include a copy of the very elementary exercise Syllable Alphabet A (HT 167 +169) and extracts from Diri, Ura, and Izi. Several other exercises remain unidentified (for instance HT 168).
27 Dec 2019Further reading
- Daneshmand, Parsa 2004 An Extispicy Text from Haft-Tappe. Journal of Cuneiform Studies 56: 13-17. Download from JSTOR (subscription needed).
- Herrero, Pablo, and Jean-Jacques Glassner 1990 Haft-Tépé: Choix de textes I. Iranica Antiqua 25: 1-45. Download from Proquest (subscription needed).
- Herrero, Pablo, and Jean-Jacques Glassner 1991 Haft-Tépé: Choix de textes II. Iranica Antiqua 26: 39-80. Download from Proquest (subscription needed).
- Herrero, Pablo, and Jean-Jacques Glassner 1993 Haft-Tépé: Choix de textes III. Iranica Antiqua 28: 97. Download from Proquest (subscription needed).
- Herrero, Pablo, and Jean-Jacques Glassner 1996 Haft-Tépé: Choix de textes IV. Iranica Antiqua 31: 51-82. Download from Peeters Online (subscription needed).
- Negahban, Ezat O. 1991 Excavations at Haft Tepe, Iran. University Museum Monograph 70. Philadelphia: The University Museum.
Niek Veldhuis
Niek Veldhuis, 'The Lexical Texts from Kabnak (Haft Tepe)', Digital Corpus of Cuneiform Lexical Texts, The DCCLT Project, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/dcclt/lexicallistsperiods/middlebabylonian/kabnak/]