The Intellectual Heritage of the Ancient Near East, pp. 613-627, 2023/04/12
Proceedings of the 64th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale and the 12th Melammu Symposium, University of Innsbruck, July 16‒20, 2018
Palaeographic and orthographic peculiarities of various subcorpora of the Amarna letters, as well as the gloss phenomenon, have attracted the interest of numerous scholars. Moreover, in recent decades a number of scholars have contributed considerably to the study of Egyptian linguistic influence on the phraseology (Egyptian calques) and morphosyntax of the Canaanite Amarna letters. Nevertheless, the probable Egyptian background of the logogram use in the Amarna Letters has scarcely been noticed. In my opinion, the logogram use in the Amarna Letters in general, and in the Jerusalem letters in particular, may be paralleled to some typical features of the Egyptian writing system. Three cases of the use of logograms in the Amarna Letters comparable to Egyptian scribal practice are presented here, using the Jerusalem Scribe letters as an example. My observations are based on a number of scholarly works, and most of them are cited throughout the article.
