Script and Society

Front matter

SCRIPT

AND

SOCIETY

Contents

Acknowledgements nimesin eenia A iota cxi bn dat DU vii Part I. Background, theory and methods 1. Introduction: Ugarit and. its Scripts ode dida hoped dnd costi Poeni 3

2. The social archaeology of writing oso diapaveetd avc adeb Do e UR Des 23

Part II. Late Bronze Age writing practices in regional context

3: Writing in the Bronze Age Levant osa tonidpdibie ton rdra Fe ba URP ipe 43 4. Standardisation, vernacularisation and the emergence of

alphabetic cuneiform cipes tipp bnc ARE n Pulsa n pott b eee Et ran Rt Dod 67

Part III. Writing and society at Ugarit p. Thecontëxts or Writing at e ablb oue pane baia Gore t th naiiai 115 7, Writing and the social construction of place, title cinema tapt 147 8B. Who wrote Literacy wn LU BAN sait vistos noon ni i d lv deren qoe 173 10. Social change in Late Bronze Age DSABIE, uo nenpcndstesp MPa oo 2n 225 11. Writing practices and elite identity: imperialism,

For Jennie

Acknowledgements

No research project is the work of a single person in isolation, and this book in particular has benefited from the support and assistance of a great many people. It was written between 2016 and 2020 under the aegis of the CREWS Project - Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems, based at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge and funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 677758). This has, of course, been a time of great trauma and upheaval for the United Kingdom’s relationship with Europe, and I am profoundly grateful to the European Union for all it has done, and continues to do, to support research such as this. I hope that Britain’s self-imposed exile from this hugely beneficial combined effort will be a short one.

The CREWS Project has consisted of five members: Philippa Steele, the principal investigator, Robert Crellin, Natalia Elvira Astoreca, our administrator Sarah Lewis, and myself. The research in this volume has been massively enriched by the ideas and practical support these colleagues have offered, but I must single out Philippa for particular thanks. The best project leader anyone could hope for, she has offered constant advice, feedback and support over the last four years, including reading and commenting on multiple drafts of the manuscript.

Beyond CREWS, I must thank a number of other colleagues at Cambridge, in particular Martin Worthington, Selena Wisnom and Marie-Frangoise Besnier, who all went above and beyond the call of duty in allowing me to join their Akkadian classes. Without them, my understanding of Semitic scripts and languages and of Mesopotamian culture would be very much poorer. Augusta McMahon served as my mentor in postdoctoral research and has also given helpful thoughts and advice. I must also thank Nicholas Postgate for many helpful comments on my research at seminars and conference presentations, and for very generously giving me his volumes of Le Palais royal d’Ugarit. My friends and colleagues at the Faculty of Classics, Annie Burman, Anna Judson, Matthew Scarborough and Daniel Unruh, have all been great sources of advice and support on research and navigating a postdoctoral career. I would also like to thank the University’s ‘support’ staff - especially the librarians, computer officers and open access advisers - who have done a great deal to facilitate my work and its dissemination. The non-academic staff at universities rarely get the credit and appreciation they deserve, and I am very grateful to them.

Several fellow scholars have allowed me to reuse their images or offered thoughts, questions or suggestions when I have presented my research which have shaped my subsequent thinking. Where appropriate, these are acknowledged in the text. Others viii Acknowledgements have sent me articles, pointed me in the direction of references or answered questions I had. Sophie Hardach helped me with some German.

Two reviewers read and commented on a draft manuscript of this work. Their suggestions were extremely constructive and helpful, and I am extremely grateful for their time and advice.

A draft version of this volume was largely completed by spring 2020, but the process of review and revision coincided with the coronavirus pandemic that took hold early in that year. I was fortunate to have completed the bulk of the research before the effects of this crisis became severe, but even so, there has been an impact. It hasn’t always been possible to chase up references or contact people or organisations for image permissions. This is not to blame the virus for any mistakes or deficiencies in what is presented here, but to admit openly that there are things I would have liked to have included or elaborated in the later stages of revision which I have not been able to.

Finally, my deepest thanks and love to my wife Jennie, for everything she does.

P axes dd € i put Temple of Ba'lu i .

EM" 4 N of the High Rriest

SH eS) epp RESIDENTIAL BR UE E iE "Bp QUARTER 2 E 5 1 " TE TOWN S a CENTRE E Tum Royal Palace

Y ACROPOLIS a House of

RaSapabu

House of Yabninu ' , :

Fig. 0.1. Map of the city of Ugarit. Redrawn by the author after Saadé (2011, fig. 46).

Fig. 0.2. Map of the Kingdom of Ugarit. Drawn by the author after Calvet (2012, fig. 1).

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Part I

Background, theory and methods

Chapter 1

Writing is a social practice. It fits into the same category as cooking a meal, performing one’s daily routines, worshipping a deity. It is a thing that people do, and that they do according to patterns within which they have been socialised or which they have cultivated. It is not usually a solitary practice but one of communication and interaction, even if that occurs at some remove in time and space and even if the interlocutor in some cases is only imagined.

This, I would hope, is self-evident, since it forms the foundational premise for this book. It is also somewhat at odds with how writing in the ancient world can often be approached by scholars. Much work on writing has focused on writing systems, on the abstracted and self-contained workings of the scripts themselves, their development, spread and the techniques of their use. Research of this kind, while useful, can be strikingly unpeopled: it is filled with systems, graphemes, phonemes and styles. It is immaterial, austere and often mechanistic, and can seem divorced from the other practices of human life, from beliefs and agendas, from choices and agency. The goal of this work is to redress that balance, to reintegrate writing practices with other aspects of human practice and human social life, to situate them within their specific historical, cultural and material contexts - in this example using the case study of the Late Bronze Age kingdom of Ugarit, a small but prosperous trading city on the coast of what's now Syria. It is, in short, to produce an archaeology of writing practices at Ugarit, fully integrated into the rest of the polity's archaeology.

As such, this book isn't a comprehensive guide to the languages and scripts of Ugarit. Such works already exist by scholars eminently more qualified than me to describe the linguistic and palaeographic details.! Nevertheless, since I hope this volume will be of interest to archaeologists and non-specialists who may not be as well acquainted with the principles of the main scripts we'll be discussing, this introductory chapter will lay them out in brief summary, after providing a grounding in the site of Ugarit and the history of research there.

! See,in particular, Schniedewind and Hunt 2007; Huehnergard 1989; 2012; Bordreuil and Pardee 2009.

Introducing Ugarit

Thanks in part to colourful retellings such as that quoted above, written by Claude Schaeffer almost thirty years after the event, the tale of the discovery of the site of Ugarit and its archives of tablets has acquired something of the quality of legend, a true-life tale of chance discovery and buried treasure. In 1928, we are told, a local farmworker was ploughing fields near Minet el-Beida, around 12 km north of modern Latakia. His plough struck a stone and revealed the opening to a vaulted chamber tomb. His find swiftly attracted the attention of the interest of Service des Antiquités of the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon, under the direction of Charles Virolleaud.? Excavations began the following year in 1929, led by Schaeffer, both at the necropolis at Minet el-Beida and the tell of Ras Shamra, around a kilometre inland. It was here that Mohamed Moursal made his important discovery, though of course it's Schaeffer and Virolleaud's names that would be remembered by history.

The importance of Ras Shamra was well established by the early campaigns, and its copious documents allowed it to be swiftly and securely identified as ancient Ugarit, whose magnificence was alluded to in the Amarna Letters:

[The king of Tyre's] property is as great as the sea. I know it! Look, there is no mayor's palace like that of the palace in Tyre. It is like the palace in Ugarit. Exceedingly great is the wealth in it.

Excavations continued until the outbreak of the Second World War. This work focused particularly on the area of the acropolis, including the important archives ofthe House of the High Priest. Full-scale excavations resumed in 1950, in the area of the Royal Palace. Schaeffer remained director until 1970, when he was replaced by Henri de Contenson. After him, work at the site continued under Jean Margueron, Marguerite Yon, Yves Calvert and Bassam Jamous. In 2005 the archaeological investigations were

'At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when the setting sun began to transform the Alawite Mountains to the east of the tell into a fringe of gold, I observed one of my workers who had stopped his work to examine what at a distance had the appearance of a small brick. Mohamed Moursal, a Turk from Bordj Islam - a good worker, but preferring effort more often than the delicate task of extracting fragile objects - spat on his find and, with the palm of his right hand, rubbed on it to remove the layer of earth which masked the surface? (Schaeffer 1956, 1, my translation).

EA 89, 47ff. Translation adapted from Moran 1992.

w

E formally shifted from a French operation to a joint Franco-Syrian undertaking. They are currently co-directed by Valérie Matoian and Khozama Al-Bahloul. At the time of writing, the civil war in Syria has interrupted archaeological investigation at the site, but to date it appears that Ugarit has fortunately largely escaped the large-scale damage and looting that has devastated many of the country’s other historic sites.°

The site

The tell of Ugarit covers about 28 ha and rises around 17-20 m above the surrounding terrain at its highest point, the acropolis where the city’s principal temples stood. The elevation of the site is, however, extremely uneven, with a marked depression towards the south. Deep sondages at the site have indicated that it was likely occupied since the Neolithic, in the eighth millennium BC, but for the most part archaeological work has proceeded outwards rather than down, uncovering an extensive area of the Late Bronze Age city but providing us with relatively little diachronic information. There have been some features excavated that have been dated earlier, such as various tombs, the so-called Hurrian Temple or the North Palace, all of which have at various times been assigned to the Middle Bronze Age; however, these are either poorly published, as with the funerary evidence, or have been shown by more recent work to belong to the Late Bronze Age, as is the case with the ‘North Palace’. Sondages and Middle Bronze Age finds point to the important temples of Ba‘lu and Dagan having existed at this period, but the surviving remains are fragmentary and provide little to go on.‘ It does appear that there were a number of major construction horizons within the Late Bronze Age; the Royal Palace, for instance, evidences several destructions and rebuildings, including one that excavators have been keen to link with the partial destruction by fire alluded to in Amarna Letter EA 151 (hence, mid-fourteenth century), and a second around a century later that is paralleled across much of the rest of the site and is generally seen as due to an earthquake. The latter phase of rebuilding and restructuring is particularly important for our purposes as it coincides with the adoption of the alphabetic cuneiform script.

Excavators at Ugarit have delineated an assortment of broad districts. It's not necessary to explore each of these in detail here,’ but a general sketch gives a helpful overview of the character of the site. The two main focuses of elite activity are the Royal Palace and the Acropolis. The former is a massive complex in the north-west of the city, covering around 10,000 square metres of palace and associated structures. In keeping with its political status, it appears to have been somewhat segregated from

* A report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 2014, based on satellite photography, noted that the coastal area where Ugarit is situated has not been a site of major fighting and did not find visual evidence of major damage (https://www.aaas.org/page/ancienthistory-modern-destruction-assessing-status-syria-s-tentative-world-heritage-sites-7, accessed 16 March 2017).

* Callot 2011.

7 A useful and accessible summary is available in English in Yon 2006.

the rest of the site, with relatively few, closely controlled, connections between them and its own monumental fortified gatehouse in the western rampart of the tell. The Acropolis, in the north-eastern corner of the site, is most famous for being the home of Ugarit's two most prominent temples, to Balu and Dagan, and for the so-called residence of the High Priest between them, from which have been recovered a number of literary and religious texts, including the celebrated Ba'lu epic.

Ugarit was not, however, characterised by a high level of urban planning - it was densely occupied, with labyrinthine and narrow streets (sometimes as little as around 1 m wide). Beyond the royal district, there was not rigid zoning by function or status. Certainly, there seem to be more high-status residences close to the palace, but these jostle with smaller houses; there’s general residential occupation on the Acropolis right up to the temples. Large residences belonging to senior officials pop up amid the smaller homes of ordinary Ugaritians. Shops, workshops and smaller temples are interspersed in and among the warren of domestic habitation. Buildings of different function and status are jumbled together in a chaotic hodgepodge of human life. It can be helpful for modern scholars to talk about the ‘South Acropolis’ or the ‘City Centre’, but these should not be taken to imply the existence of well-defined correlating districts in the ancient city. This appearance of disorganisation extends to the deposits of written material. Collections of inscribed materials have been found throughout the city, and these include a wide range of scripts, languages and genres in various relationships with the ruling authorities. The so-called House of Urtenu, for example, is in the South-central area, some distance from the Palace and not far from the main north-south thoroughfare that ran through the heart of the general residential area. Nevertheless, 'Urtenu seems to have been an extremely high-ranking official and his archive includes a wide array of diplomatic and other official texts, including royal correspondence.

As is well known, Ugarit was destroyed at the end of the Late Bronze Age, an act usually attributed to the so-called Sea Peoples. There are limited signs of subsequent occupation, including small-scale use of the site by non-sedentary populations during the Iron Age, and a certain amount of inhabitation in the Persian and Roman eras, but unlike many similar Levantine sites Ugarit was not rebuilt or reoccupied on a large scale (see Chapter 12).

The Kingdom of Ugarit

The territory of Ugarit is relatively well-defined thanks to the surviving textual material (see Fig. 0.2 at the start of this volume)? In the north it was bounded by the mountains that stretched inland from Mt Sapanu (modern Jebel al-Aqra), where Ba'lu was believed to have his palace. The western boundary was, of course, the sea. In the east, the Jebel al-Ansariyeh mountains provide an obvious natural boundary for most of Ugarit's

* The literature on the geography and topography of the kingdom of Ugarit is extensive, but good starting points are the contributions to Yon et al. 1995; van Soldt 2005; or, more recently, Calvet 2012.

territory, although the question of the Nahr al-Kabir valley has been debated. This route into the Orontes valley was the only connection between Ugarit and the Syrian interior, and scholars have taken differing stances on the extent of Ugarit’s control along it. The maximalist position was proposed by Michael Astour, who attempted to identify locations well east of the Orontes with the toponyms listed as being assigned to Ugarit from its neighbour Muki§ in the diplomatic texts RS 17.340 and RS 17.237.° Astour's suggestion has not been generally accepted, and most scholars see Ugaritian control as ending on the banks of the Orontes at the furthest; probably further west, between the mountains.

The southern borders are also fuzzy. It's clear from diplomatic correspondence that a separate kingdom existed to the south, centred on the cities of Siyannu and USnatu. For a while this was a vassal of Ugarit, but at its own request it was separated off by the Hittite authorities during the reign of Niqmepa' (i.e., the late fourteenth or early thirteenth century) and placed directly under the overlordship of Karkemi8. Exactly where the line was drawn is unclear, but administrative records seem to point to the port town of Gibala (Tell Tweini) being within the Kingdom of Ugarit, so it is likely this was one of its southernmost holdings.

The Kingdom has not been extensively investigated compared to the capital: there has been no systematic archaeological survey. Many modern place-names are evidently descended from towns and villages recorded in Ugarit's administrative texts, which points to a general continuity of occupation, but there has been little or no archaeological work in these smaller settlements. Aside from textual data, our knowledge of the Kingdom beyond the capital comes mainly from four larger centres that have received archaeological study. The port of Minet el-Beida (ancient Ma'hadu) is of course one. Another is Ras Ibn Hani on the promontory a little way down the coast. The palatial complex that was found there is thought to have belonged to the royal family of Ugarit and produced a collection of tablets (see below), and publication is still ongoing.” The third site that has been excavated is Ras al-Bassit, on the coast north of the capital." Finally, and most recently, the southern port of Gibala/Tell Tweini has been excavated. This project has been particularly interesting not just as another point of comparison with metropolitan Ugarit, but also because of the contrasting methodology of the archaeologists. Unlike the principally textual and architectural focuses of the Ugarit campaigns, the Tweini excavators have undertaken a number of scientific analyses that provide valuable data on features such as ancient climatic changes."

Arnaud and Kennedy 1979; Bordreuil and Caquot 1979; 1980; Bounni et al. 1979; 1981; 1998; Lagarce et al. 1983; Bordreuil et al. 2019.

Published in preliminary form only by Courbin (1986), whose mention of the material culture focuses almost exclusively on Mediterranean imports.

Bretschneider et al. 2004; 2008; Bretschneider and Van Lerberghe 2008; Kaniewski et al. 2015; Bretschneider and Jans 2019a.

2 o m. [en m S

Beyond the kingdom of Ugarit proper, it’s worth mentioning the site of Tell Sukas, just the other side of the southern border. Since it probably fell within the territory of Siyannu-USnatu, the site provides useful comparative data both during and after that kingdom’s time as an Ugaritian vassal. Tell Siyannu itself has also been investigated, but has not yet produced Late Bronze Age levels, possibly because of levelling in the Iron Age.”

One important observation from this relatively limited archaeological investigation of Ugarit’s territory is that these second-order centres do not seem to have been abandoned at the end of the Late Bronze Age like Ugarit itself was. Ras Ibn Hani, Ras el-Bassit and Tell Tweini all show continuity of occupation into the Iron Age, with rebuilding after the destructions of the end of the Bronze Age." This makes the abandonment of Ugarit all the more curious.

Outlining the history of Ugarit

One of the consequences of the excavation strategy adopted by successive teams at Ugarit - uncovering the Late Bronze Age phases extensively while only probing deeper in limited sondages - is that much discussion of the city and its culture tends to adopt a highly synchronic perspective. The numerous discussions of social organisation and political economy!* draw from fourteenth and thirteenth century material to form a rather static composite picture of how Ugaritian society functioned. Attempts to introduce questions of social change into this discussion have centred mainly on exploring the processes leading to the city's destruction at the end ofthe Bronze Age," rather than on longer-term and more incremental social transformations of the kind expected under the model of structuration outlined in the next chapter.

That isn't to say that discussion of Ugarit has been entirely lacking a chronological dimension. Far from it: there is a flourishing sub-discipline concerned with Ugarit's political history, drawn overwhelmingly from the textual records of the site and of others with which it corresponded. There is not the space to review this in detail here, but a brief outline will be helpful in establishing the political background for the discussions of social context to come.

Because of the lack of excavation, Ugarit's history before the Late Bronze Age is little known. Much of the discussion of its early history has been rather ethnonationalist in focus, concerned with whether its origins are ‘Canaanite’ or 'Amorite'.

13 Riis et al. 1996; Bretschneider et al. 2004, 220; 2019.

Some earlier material is summarised in, for example, chapter 1 of Schaeffer (1939b), but just as there has been little impetus to uncover material from earlier than the Late Bronze Age, the material that has already been excavated has been at the back of the queue for re-evaluation and full publication. 16 eg, Heltzer 1999; Schloen 2001; Monroe 2009.

U Liverani 1987.

Singer (1999) is the most convenient starting-point, but see also Freu (2006) and countless shorter articles on particular aspects of political history.

This is ultimately futile given that we know virtually nothing about how the city’s inhabitants thought about identity, their own or others’, at this time. More recent work, such as Buck (2018, esp. 21) has sought to downplay the ethnic dimension of this debate and reframe it in terms of linguistic and material culture relationships. As far as we can tell, Ugarit’s political situation paralleled that of other important port cities on the Levantine coast. Lacking military strength or extensive natural resources beyond the timber forests of its mountainous hinterland, it relied on its commercial networks and deft political manoeuvring to negotiate its position within a Late Bronze Age international landscape dominated by the superpowers of Egypt, Hatti, Babylon and, for a while at least, Mitanni. Another important, but unresolved, debate is whether Ugarit fell within the Mitanni Empire in the first half of the Late Bronze Age. Most scholars don’t think it was under direct Mitanni control; however, Ugarit’s northern neighbours in Mukis (Alalah) were Mitanni vassals, and it has occasionally been suggested that the empire exerted more influence over Ugarit than has generally been assumed.” Certainly there are clear cultural similarities between Ugarit and Mitanni vassals such as Alalah, just as there were between Ugarit and its southern Levantine neighbours. We can reasonably assume close links, as is demonstrated by the fact that some of the earliest surviving Akkadian material relating to Ugarit is diplomatic correspondence with Alalah (RS 4.449 and AT 4 from Alalah itself). This needn’t necessarily indicate that Ugarit was politically subject to Mitanni authority, however. This is an important issue, as it would likely have profound effects for how people in Ugarit might have viewed cuneiform writing culture, and for their relationship with Mitanni’s enemies the Hittites; but at the moment, the evidence is simply not there to make a judgement one way or the other. For a more detailed discussion of the role of Mitanni and ‘Hurrian’ culture and identity at Ugarit, see Chapter 9. Although it is occasionally mentioned in earlier texts from cities such as Ebla and Mari (the latter’s king, Zimri-Lim, visited the city around 1765 BC),” our first written material originating in Ugarit itself dates from the fourteenth century: first, at least two and probably more of the Amarna Letters, and then - slightly later - the earliest Akkadian texts found at Ras Shamra itself. These documents describe an important political transition for Ugarit around the mid-fourteenth century. The Amarna letters indicate a close relationship with Egypt - probably more in the vein of partnership and elite emulation than direct political control - but shortly afterwards this seems to have been curtailed by the expansion of the Hittite Empire into Syria under Suppiluliuma I. A number of Akkadian documents at Ugarit record its incorporation

1% Singer 1999, 619-620 and n. 51. Astour (19812) judges that Ugarit was independent of Mitanni but had previously been under the control of the kingdom of Yamhad. Liverani (1979, 1297) considers Yamhad control possible but not demonstrable from the available evidence. Recently, Cancik-Kirschbaum et al. (2014) and, in the same volume, Otto (2014) have counted Ugarit as a Mitanni vassal, but this is merely taken for granted, with no arguments made or evidence cited to support it. Buck (2018, 127), citing Singer as her source, concludes that Ugarit was not under Mitanni's political control.

2 The first possible reference to Ugarit is in a gazetteer from Ebla - ca. 2400 BC (Tell Mardikh 75.6.2231 col 1, 1.5).

into the Hittite sphere, although not always entirely clearly. It seems to be the case that while some of its neighbours resisted, Ugarit’s king, Niqmaddu, saw which way the wind was blowing and ‘voluntarily’ invited Hittite overlordship, for which he was rewarded with territory from those kingdoms that had had to be forcefully integrated. From around the mid-fourteenth century to its destruction in the early twelfth century, Ugarit was formally a vassal of the Great King in HattuSa. Often, Hittite control seems to have been relatively hands-off, probably due to Ugarit’s status as an important source of wealth from its mercantile enterprises. Mostly, political oversight was managed by the Hittite appanage kingdom of Karkemi§ rather than the authorities in HattuSa directly, and Ugarit was at times permitted exemptions from obligations to military service.

So long as the annual tribute was paid and Ugarit's kings came to HattuSa periodically to reaffirm their loyalty, their rule was permitted to continue with relatively little interference." Although Ugarit was obliged to fight alongside the Hittites at Qades, there are signs that it continued to feel more cultural connection with Egypt than with Anatolia. Aegyptiaca continue to comprise an important element of Ugaritian elite display, in contrast with the relative scarcity of imported or emulated Anatolian material culture. Unlike many of its neighbours, there is no sign of Hittite or Luwian being used at Ugarit. The only texts in these languages and writing-systems originated elsewhere. In the later thirteenth century, during the détente following the peace of Qade§, and as the Hittite Empire weakened, diplomatic correspondence between Ugarit and Egypt resumed - if it ever truly ceased.

Towards the end of Ugarit's existence, there's a sense in the documentation that it was increasingly testing the limits of its vassal status. Numerous letters from the Hittite court attest dissatisfaction with levels of tribute, laxness in royal visits to the Great King or other failures to comply with their obligations. This is a topic we will return to, since it is precisely within this climate of increasing Ugaritian assertiveness and self-possession that alphabetic cuneiform first appears. This brings us to the matter of the scripts in use at Ugarit.

The principal scripts of Ugarit Logosyllabic cuneiform

We'll start with logosyllabic (or Akkadian) cuneiform, since that's the more widely known of Ugarit's two main scripts, as well as the older and the one attested first at the site. Cuneiform was, of course, not created originally for Akkadian, but for the unrelated Sumerian language. It began as a pictographic script during the late fourth millennium BC, and over time grew increasingly schematised to facilitate quick and efficient writing by pressing wedges into soft clay with a stylus. By the second

^ Although Niqmaddu's successor, 'Arhalba, has often been thought to have been forcibly replaced by his overlords for some sort of insubordination, due to the brevity of his reign.

millennium BC, some signs retained traces of their pictographic origins, such as (gat - hand) but most had become thoroughly abstracted.

The relationship between Sumerian and Akkadian is key to understanding how logosyllabic cuneiform works. Sumerian writing, even after the pictographic stage, was primarily logographic - each sign represented a single word. However, signs could have multiple meanings - such as where the same sign was used for homophones. When the system was adapted for the Semitic language of Akkadian, many of the original Sumerian logographic readings were retained and the original pronunciation was used as a syllabic value. So, for example, E meant ‘hand’ in Sumerian so could be read as the Akkadian word qatu - hand. However, the Sumerian word for ‘hand’ was šu, so it could also be used syllabically with this value in Akkadian. Signs also continued to be able to stand for things that sounded the same as, or similar to, their primary value. Thus, = could be read as a logogram for ‘wood’, which in Akkadian was isu, but it could also be read syllabically as the similar sounding is, is, iz, es, es and ez. In addition, signs could function as determinatives - unpronounced indicators of what class of object the following word belonged to; thus - could indicate that the word that followed was something made of wood. It can often be unclear which way a sign is to be taken. To give a very simple example, the same signs could indicate alu á-ga-ri-tu - ‘the city of Ugarit’ or *“u-ga-ri-tu - ‘Ugarit (which is a specified to be a city)’. The difference in meaning is subtle here, but in other situations much more significant alternatives are possible. To add additional complication, the same syllable might be rendered by a number of different signs, represented in transcription with diacritics or subscript numbers.