Scriptural Mormonism: Jacob Lauinger on mashiktu in the Idrimi Inscription

Monday, March 24, 2025

Jacob Lauinger on mashiktu in the Idrimi Inscription

3 i-⸢na⸣ uruha-la-abki E₂ a-bi-ia 4 ma-si₁₇-ik-tu₂ it-tab-ši u₃ hal-qa₃-nu / IGI 5 ⸢LU₂⸣.HI.A urue!-marki a-ha-te.HI.A 6 [š]a um-mi-ia u₃ aš-ba-nu a-na urue-marki

In Halab, the household of my father, a criminal act occurred, so we fled before resident aliens at Emar, my mother’s sisters, and stayed at Emar. (Jacob Lauinger, The Labors of Idrimi: Inscribing the Past, Shaping the Present at Late Bronze Age Alalah [Ancient Near East Monographs; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2024], 3)

4. ma-si₁₇-ik-tu₂ it-tab-ši u₃ hal-qa₃-nu / IGI

Collation confirms Oller’s (1977a, 24) observation that the first sign in the line is MA, which is indented considerably. While there is some light surface damage to the beginning of the line, I did not see the traces of any signs. There is no obvious explanation for the indentation. Perhaps the surface damage had occurred to the statue before the inscription was carved; see the discussion in §3.4.

Believing text to be no longer preserved at the beginning of the line, previous scholars had understood masiktu to be used attributively (e.g., [nukurtu] masiktu, “an evil hostility”). After Oller’s collations, the word has been understood to be a substantive.

Most scholars have translated it as “an evil”; von Dassow’s (2008, 19) translation of the word as “a bad thing” improves on this etymologically and captures the euphemism. Significantly, the word masiktu—also written with IGI(si₁₇)—appears in AlT 17 [31.3], a legal text from Level IV Alalah. This text is the record of court proceedings in which the ruler Niqmepa returned property that had been confiscated when a certain Apra “turned into a criminal and was killed because of his crime” (map-ra a-na EN ma-si₁₇-ik-ti it-tu-ur u₃ ki-ma ar-ni-šu GAZ, ll. 7–9). This text has been discussed in relation to line 4 of the body inscription at least as far back as Landsberger (1954, 60 with n. 129). In particular, it has been suggested that the attestation of masiktu in AlT 17 [31.3] should refer to an act of rebellion and so, by extension, should the attestation in this line of the body inscription.

Some scholars have proposed that the masiktu was the conquest of the city by various Hittite rulers, as recorded in Hittite documentation. These conclusions depend on a variety of unsupported assumptions, beginning with the assumption that the attestation of masiktu signifies that Halab was in fact destroyed; they can also involve questionable chronological reconstructions that require the symbolic spans of time found in the inscription to be counted literally. However, just because the arguments that have been put forward attributing the masiktu to Hittites cannot be proven does not mean that it has been proven that the Hittites were not responsible for the masiktu.

Otherwise, the masiktu has been increasingly understood to have been instigated by the growing power of Mittani. For instance, von Dassow (2008, 44) cautiously describes what she terms “the incident at Halab” as “most likely an early event in the nascent kingdom of Mittani’s imperial expansion.” The two pieces of evidence raised in support of Mittani involvement are, first, the state of enmity that existed between Barattarna and Idrimi after he captured Alalah and their subsequent rapprochement, as detailed later in the inscription (ll. 42–58), and, second, the use of word masiktu as a descriptor itself, which is taken as being deliberately vague. However, this interpretation runs into the comparison with the Level IV text AlT 17 [31.3], where masiktu is juxtaposed with arnu and seems to refer to a specific action.

In part, the euphemistic impression given by masiktu derives from the verb ittabši, where the inchoative use of the N stem serves to obfuscate who, exactly, was responsible for the flight of Idrimi and his brothers. Without denying this impression, it is worth noting that the perfect tense of bašû in the N stem is also commonly used in the protases of omen texts; sometimes these protases omit šumma. The use of the verb ittabši may have the effect of suggesting, then, that the criminal act that drove Idrimi and his brothers from Aleppo was a sign, and that the following narrative was predetermined.

The verb halqānu is one of several attestations of an Akkadian stative used as West Semitic perfective, as is common in the Canaano-Akkadian of the Amarna letters. This use was recognized already by Smith (1949, 37) and has been maintained by most subsequent scholars; see, most recently, Medill 2019, 245–46, discussing previous literature. The West Semitic influence on halqānu (and also the verb of the following clause, ašbānu) is also apparent in the larger syntax in which the verbs appear. As Smith also noted, the clause-initial position of the stative/suffix conjugation verbs, immediately following the conjunction u and preceded by a clause with a prefix conjugation verb, seems to be a clear example of the sequence of tenses found in West Semitic languages. As Medill (2019, 252) put it, “from the very first sentence of the Early History [= ll. 3–60a of the body inscription] the reader is nudged into a Northwest Semitic linguistic frame as he immediately encounters verbs which are Akkadian in form but Northwest Semitic in meaning.”

In support of seeing IGI at the end of line 5 as text that has run over from line 4 and not a suffix -ši with a-ha-te.HI.A in line 5, see Lauinger 2022a, 220 n. 6. In addition to the observation about the horizontal ruling below line 5 made there, note that none of the objections to understanding IGI as a prepositional use of pānu really hold up. In particular, Greenstein and Marcus’s (1976, 71) assertion that prepositional uses of pānu are “generally confined to later texts in Akkadian” is inaccurate. CAD 12, s.v. “panu,” 1h gives several examples from the second millennium where pānu functions as preposition itself, and Vita (1997) has gathered additional examples attested in western hybrid Akkadian corpora. Furthermore, as Greenstein and Marcus acknowledged, a prepositional use pānu occurs later in the body inscription (l. 33). (Jacob Lauinger, The Labors of Idrimi: Inscribing the Past, Shaping the Present at Late Bronze Age Alalah [Ancient Near East Monographs; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2024], 189-92)