Translation is seldom a straightforward exercise.¹ One may be reminded of all those hypothetical but nonetheless disappointed British tourists who happily tried to visit a football match in the United States of America and left very confused. And such contemporary matters, like when the sport that the British call ‘football’ is known as ‘soccer’ in certain other parts of the world, are complicated enough.² Imagine if a chasm of more than three millennia separates us from the language we aim to understand! And it is bridging such a chasm that we are attempting in today’s blog. As I shall show you the difficulty with understanding the lexicon of the ancient Levantine language that is today known as Ugaritic.

I will illustrate this difficulty with a brief search for all the ways in which one could refer to forests in Ugaritic. Because, as straightforward as this endeavor may seem, the question as to all the ways in which one could write about forests has as yet to receive a satisfying answer. There are roughly two fault lines here. In the first place, sometimes the proper interpretation of a word that might mean ‘forest’ depends on our view and knowledge of a lot of adjacent factors. Secondly, there are words that denote environments which would not appear to us now as forests, but may have been experienced as such in the deep past. As such, there is potential for overlooked forests in Ugaritic.

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Ugarit and Ugaritic

The name ‘Ugarit’, which is the ancient name for the site of Tel Shamra in modern Syria, may ring a bell for longtime readers. Because we have already explored the cosmic landscape that surrounded this ancient city and made up large parts of the titular kingdom in a previous blog.³ Today we are going to focus on one of the languages spoken and written there, the aforementioned Ugaritic.

We have only a short window to observe this tongue, as it is a dead language and most of the texts that survive to our time were written down during a brief period. That being the 13^th and the beginning of the 12^th century BCE, a period that is also known as the second half of the late Bronze Age.⁴ And the manner in which this writing took place is intimately connected to one of the two main obstacles when we try to establish certainty with regard to the precise meaning of Ugaritic words. These two obstacles are the quirks of the primary writing system used and the small size of the available text corpus.

The Ugaritic language is most often written in a local alphabet – that scholars have deciphered with an admirable tenacity – which in the bulk of cases only notes the consonants.⁵ Modern scholars do tend to vocalize Ugaritic texts, but this is often on the basis of comparisons with related languages or because certain (loan)words were written elsewhere in a script that indicates vowels more consistently.⁶ But without certainty about the vowels, as you can imagine, it is difficult to recognize and differentiate the inherited lexicon. Furthermore the sheer amount of texts at our disposal is simply too small to comprehend the language entirely. And the texts that we do have are often written in a language which is, to a certain extent, stylized and presumably differs from the way in which people used to speak.⁷ These circumstances thus limit our understanding of Ugaritic and this includes, as alluded to above, very basic words.

The Forest and the Trees

And this brings us to today’s example: can we find all the words for ‘forest’ in the Ugaritic lexicon? Luckily for us, there are a few candidates that are more or less uncontroversial. Most prominently, we have a word which appears to simply mean forest: yʔr (vocalized as /ya’aru/).⁸ And the word for tree, that being ʔṣ (vocalized as /iṣṣu/), could also be used to reference groups of trees.⁹ And you probably know how one can usually characterize a group of trees!

Besides these obvious candidates, there are other words that can fairly confidently be read as forests, but only under certain circumstances. The word for mountain, ġr (vocalized as /ġūru/) can sometimes be taken to mean ‘woodland’, for instance.¹⁰ When writing in Ugaritic, authors could also refer to forests by mentioning the trees that made them up. For example, the word ʔarz (vocalized as /arz/) is the designation for cedar trees and could be used to – as you might have guessed – talk about cedar forests.¹¹ But with that observation, we have come to the end of the easy part: get ready to rack those brains!

Uncertain Forests

Let us now leave clarity behind and venture, sensible as we are, into uncertainty. Because there is a rather rare word attested in Ugaritic that could mean ‘forest’, but only if you take an elaborate detour. Because of the doubts surrounding the interpretation of this word, I can only give you the attested spelling, gl, without an agreed upon vocalization. We are not completely in the dark, though, as the term has been discussed in an authoritative, alphabetically organized dictionary on Ugaritic, unsurprisingly called A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition. There we learn that this term can be translated as a qualification of a field or farm, but may also be read as ‘small’ or ‘forest’.¹² And this begs the question: why and when is the latter actually the case?

The reading of the Ugaritic word gl as ‘forest’ is based on the translation of an Akkadian text that was also found in Ugarit. Akkadian was a distantly related language to Ugarit. It was predominantly spoken in what is now Iraq and mostly written on clay tablets with cuneiform signs. As we saw in a previous blog, cuneiform signs can denote both entire words as well as indicate sounds that are used to spell words.¹³ In the aforementioned Akkadian text we find a word that is spelled as GA-AL-LU and can be connected to the obscure term qallu.¹⁴ This spelling does indeed appear to look like the Ugaritic word gl – if it was vocalized, that is – but how do we know that this rare Akkadian word does mean ‘forest’?

The conundrum brings us, believe it or not, to ancient Egypt. Known for its pharaohs and of pyramid fame.¹⁵ In the late Bronze Age, Akkadian was the lingua franca of the area that encompassed West-Asia and Egypt. In this part of the world, the correspondence between kings and courtiers that spoke different tongues was conducted in Akkadian.¹⁶ And in Amarna, a short-lived capital of the Egyptian kingdom at the time which was known as Achetaton back then, we find Akkadian texts that may help our investigation. Because the clay tablets there do indicate that the Akkadian word qallu can be translated as ‘forest’.¹⁷ So if one can equate the Ugaritic word gl with the Akkadian term that was spelled as GA-AL-LU in texts from that same city – and if that term corresponds with the Akkadian word qallu as it was used on the clay tablets from Amarna – then gl could perhaps mean ‘forest’.

Forests that Aren’t

While searching for all Ugaritic terms that indicate forests, we can – in addition to words where the precise meaning is unclear – also consider words whose meaning is less obscure but which do not literally mean ‘forest’. Instead they denote an environment that we would experience and perceive as a kind of forest.

And this not as far-fetched as it may sound. For instance, in the Hebrew Bible we find the word סֹבֶךְ (sobèk) that we can with a high degree of certainty translate as ‘thicket’.¹⁸ Definitely not a forest, don’t you think? But when we take a look at some of the environments that used to be considered thickets, we find that these regularly covered large expanses full of intertwined vines whose height surpassed that of human beings.¹⁹ These were places where one could wander endlessly, miss the sun, and get lost. Some thickets in the ancient Levant thus shared many characteristics with the biomes that we would view as forests.

And there is at least one environment in our Ugaritic texts that perhaps could also be experienced as one would experience a forest, though it was not called that. When I was looking for forests in Ugaritic, I stumbled across a legend that is nowadays called The Tale of Aqhat, which chronicles the fortunes of one family. At one point the son of the family, the titular Aqhat, is in the possession of a bow coveted by the warrior-goddess Anat.²⁰ But he refuses her, explaining how she could have her own. Creating a similar bow and arrows would require visiting several places for materials. Interesting enough for our purpose, Anat would have to source specific trees that grow in certain forests and travel to an environment that is variously translated as a reed forest or a swamp.²¹

The term used for the latter location, il qnm (which can tentatively be vocalized as /il qanî-ma/), is difficult to understand.²² But it is not out of the question that we deal here with a vast field comprised of high reeds, the traversing of which would vaguely resemble a journey through a forest. One possible clue is the fact that this reed bed is juxtapositioned with other overwhelming environments. In addition to the aforementioned forests, Anat would also have to search the mountains for goats.²³ Whether this is a situation that resembles the thickets from the Hebrew Bible, which were more forest-like than it one would expect on first glance, sadly requires more information. The relevant knowledge could at least in part be acquired through Paleobotanical research. This is a field that, among other interests, studies the remains of ancient flora.²⁴ And the researchers specialized therein have the know-how to investigate the circumstances of reed beds in the past. But even if we did not acquire certainty today, we certainly learned something and realized there is still much we don’t know!

Conclusion: Learning from Uncertainty

Did I mention that translation is seldom straightforward? There is a reason I opened this blog with that statement. Because the adjacent difficulties are not only a hindrance to understanding the ancient world and its languages. Our detour with the word gl and our struggles with understanding the reed bed that the goddess Anat had to visit, taught us something we did not know yet. We now have more knowledge about Akkadian texts in Ugarit and Egypt, as well as about the differences between the ancient labels for certain environments and our current designations. We learned more than we would have otherwise done, because the answers that we sought were not all that easy to acquire.

And next week we will attempt more of the same. Learning, I mean. Let us leave the detours and struggles aside for now!

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References

1. Theo Hermans, “Translatability”, in: Mona Baker & Gabriela Saldanha (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 300-303.
2. Angus Stevenson (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 681.
3. Roger Matthews, “Peoples and Complex Societies in Ancient Southwest Asia”, in: Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 457. For a primer on this cosmic landscape, see: Jordi Vidal, “The Sacred Landscape of the Kingdom of Ugarit”, Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 2004, 4 (1), p. 143-153.
4. John Huehnergard, An Introduction to Ugaritic (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishing, 2012), p. 1.
5. Robert Hawley, “Ugaritic”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 258; Huehnergard 2012, p. 12-13.
6. Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 265.
7. Pierre Bordreuil & Dennis Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2009), p. 10. For the text corpus, see: Hawley, “Ugaritic”, p. 258-259.
8. Gregorio del Olmo Lete & Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition – Volume 2, translated by Wilfred G.E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 947-948. For this system of noting vocalizations, see: Huehnergard 2012, p. xvii.
9. Gregorio del Olmo Lete & Joaquín Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition – Volume 1, translated by Wilfred G.E. Watson (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 186-187.
10. Bordreuil & Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic, p. 353; Olmo Lete & Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition – Volume 1, p. 324.
11. Noga Ayali-Darshan, “The Background Of The Cedar Forest Tradition In The Egyptian Tale Of The Two Brothers In The Light Of West-Asian Literature”, Ägypten Und Levante / Egypt and the Levant 2017, 27 (1), p. 186; Olmo Lete & Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition – Volume 1, p. 112-113.
12. Ibidem, p. 297.
13. Christopher Woods, “The Emergence of Cuneiform Writing”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 36, 39.
14. Olmo Lete & Sanmartín, A Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition – Volume 1, p. 297; John Huehnergard, Ugaritic Vocabulary in Syllabic Transcription (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2008), p. l74.
15. Marc van de Mieroop, A History of Ancient Egypt (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. xxi.
16. Juan Pablo Viat, “Akkadian as a Lingua Franca”, in: Rebecca Hasselbach-Andee (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), p. 358-366.
17. John Anthony Brinkman et al (red.), The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary: Volume 13 (Q) (Chicago: The Oriental institute, 1982), p. 66.
18. Francis Brown, Samuel R. Driver & Charles A. Briggs, The Hebrew and English Lexicon (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2012), p. 687.
19. Julian Evans, God’s Trees: Trees, Forests and Wood in the Bible (An Illustrated Commentary and Compendium) (Leominster: Day One Publications, 2014), p. 99.
20. Fritz Graf, “Myth”, in: Sarah Iles Johnston (ed.), Religions of the Ancient World: A Guide (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 55.
21. James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts: Relating to the Old Testament (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 151; Harold L.Ginsberg, “Ugaritic Myths and Epics,”, in: James B. Pritchard and Daniel E. Fleming (eds.), The Ancient Near East: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 122; Carolina López-Ruiz, Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 194; Chloe Sun, The Ethics of Violence in the Story of Aqhat (Piscataway: Gorgias Press 2013), p. 93.
22. Kenneth T. Aitken, Structure and Theme In The Aqhat Narrative (Edinburgh: Dissertation University Of Edinburgh, 1978), p. 111. Kenneth Aitken cites a related word in Arabic, see: Ibidem, p, 111, note 1. For the vocalization, see: Daniel Sivan, A Grammar of the Ugaritic Language (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 43; Bordreuil & Pardee, A Manual of Ugaritic, p. 266. David Wright remarks that the word qn, that is here translated as ‘reed(s)’, may also reference the arrows that could be made from it, see: David P. Wright, Ritual in Narrative: The Dynamics of Feasting, Mourning, and Retaliation Rites in the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2001), p. 108, note 38.
23. Aitken, Structure and Theme In The Aqhat Narrative, p. 110.
24. See in general: Dan Cabanes, “Phytolith Analysis in Paleoecology and Archaeology,” in: Amanda G. Henry (ed.), Handbook for the Analysis of Micro-Particles in Archaeological Samples (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020), p. 255-288.