Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log Sally Rooney bucket hat; Hittite, Ugaritic, and the alphabet

Sally Rooney bucket hat; Hittite, Ugaritic, and the alphabet

Language Log 2022-01-07

Earlier this week, my brother Thomas sent me the following note:

I recently read Beautiful World, Where Are You?, the latest novel by Irish millennial author Sally Rooney. As soon as I finished the book I started finding articles about her, including the famous Sally Rooney bucket hat. If you don't yet know about it, put Sally Rooney bucket hat into Google and you'll feel like you've been shipwrecked on a deserted island since the book came out in September. I'm not sure if SR will go down in literary history, but I will say I can't stop thinking about the book. It's one of the few books I've read lately in which the characters discuss the big ideas: politics, religion, sex, and the collapse of civilizations. The last is of great importance because the two main female characters are unmarried single women, and they're wondering why they don't yet feel the need to settle down and start families. Will they ever?

The two characters are hyper intelligent women, and the conversation between them is conducted in emails, so it's a millennial version of an epistolary novel. Sort of. The reason the collapse of civilizations figures into the novel is because of the question of procreation: is it moral to bring a child into a civilization that is collapsing? Like ours is. The discussions aren't so simple, but the tone is light and there is plenty of sex rolled in, so it never bogs down. And of course Rooney has the Irish facility for language and storytelling, One extended email discussion talks about how the world seems to be falling apart, and the character refers to the collapse of the late Bronze Age civilizations, for no apparent reason. In a note at the end of the book Rooney mentions that the exchange was inspired by the book referenced below. There's also a Wikipedia page on the collapse of these civilizations..

Here's the book to which Thomas was referring:

Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2014).

The Cline book is perceptively reviewed by Jospehine Quinn in "Your own ships did this!", London Review of Books, 38.4 (2/18/16).  Here I focus more on Cline's book than on Rooney's novel which was inspired by it, since the former engages directly with many topics that are of interest to readers of Language Log.  Here's the beginning and one other relevant passage from Quinn's review:

In​ 1982 a sponge diver spotted a ‘metal biscuit with ears’ on the seabed off the southwest coast of Turkey. It was a copper ingot from what is now known as the Uluburun ship, a single-mast sailing boat built of cedarwood from Mount Lebanon, which sank around 1300 bce. The wreck was lying at a depth to which archaeologists could safely scuba dive for only twenty minutes at a time, twice a day. Even then, the excavation director said, they ‘felt as though they had had two martinis before starting’. It took almost 23,000 dives to map the wreck and retrieve the cargo.

It was worth the effort: the quantity, variety and value of the goods the ship was carrying were astonishing. There were ten tons of Cypriot copper, and more than a ton of tin, probably from Afghanistan – enough to make more than three hundred suits of armour. There was coloured glass from Egypt, ostrich eggs (which would have been made into vases) and textiles dyed purple, a colour obtained from sea snails harvested and crushed in their millions for a product worth its weight in silver. There were storage jars containing half a ton of terebinth resin for perfumes and incense. There were spices – coriander, cumin, safflower, sumac – and almonds, pine nuts, dried figs, pomegranates, barley, olives, grapes, beads of glass and faience, vessels of metal and wood, carved ivory. There was pottery from Cyprus and the Aegean, silver from Anatolia and gold from Egypt, including a scarab inscribed with the name of Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten. There was a stone mace from the Balkans, Sudanese blackwood, elephant and hippopotamus tusks, musical instruments and a six-inch sculpture of a Levantine god.

The discovery was sensational, but it shouldn’t have been a surprise. In 1887, a peasant woman gathering fuel in Amarna in Middle Egypt, Akhenaten’s capital city, found a collection of clay tablets. The tablets contained a couple of decades’ worth of royal and bureaucratic correspondence from the reigns of Akhenaten and his father, Amenhotep III. One of the major themes of the letters is the exchange of gifts between kings, including the rulers of the Hittites in Anatolia, the Mitanni in Northern Mesopotamia and the Kassites in Babylon.

[VHM:  For more on the Amarna letters / tablets / correspondence (which I've been hearing about for as long as I've been in Oriental Studies at Penn, i.e., since 1979), see this lengthy Wikipedia article.]

In the Quinn review of Cline's book, the part that made me perk up the most was this:

The most famous Bronze Age city-state, Ugarit, was sacked around the year 1185. The site wasn’t reoccupied for 650 years. Ugarit was a vassal of the Hittites, but there’s evidence that its merchants operated independently with the city’s encouragement and protection, and traded widely. ‘Out of the ashes of the old world came the alphabet,’ Cline says, but adds that two different alphabetic scripts were already in use at Ugarit. This was a less elitist form of writing than the syllabic and ideographic scripts which required readers and writers to memorise hundreds of signs, each with multiple meanings, and one more appropriate to the more egalitarian world of the city-state.

VHM:  Ugaritic > Phoenician > Greek > Latin

The reason I was so excited when I read this passage is because it evokes an old project of mine that I began around four decades ago, in which I compared the sounds and shapes of the Ugaritic / Phoenician alphabet and the Chinese tiāngān dìzhī 天干地支 ("heavenly stems" and "earthly branches") that are used for calendrical, ordering, and other purposes.  A regular Language Log reader, Chris Button, and I have often discussed the uncanny similarities between the two sets of symbols.  At one time, Chris's PhD adviser, Edwin Pulleyblank, entertained similar ideas, calling the stems and branches "phonograms", and Chris himself has recently come up with a good comparison of the two sets.  I even published a brief article focusing on one pair of symbols, (Ugaratic >) Phoenician b / and Chinese bǐng 丙 of the heavenly stems and have an unpublished three hundred page book manuscript on the subject that I've kept in a strong box for the last three decades and more.

To return to the main thread, in my opinion we still need to go back and look at Robert Drews' work (see "Suggested readings" below) before we limit the collapse of Bronze Age civilization to a single year.

As a side note, Denis Mair, who was listening in on the conversation between Thomas and me, remarked, "I put a hold on Sally Rooney's book at Seattle Public Library. I am #935 on the waiting list. The library has 135 copies."

That left me downright astonished.  I never dreamed that libraries catered to the wishes of patrons to such an incredible degree and told Denis my reaction, whereupon he added:

A couple more remarkable factoids:

I put a hold on the Columbia Anthology of Chinese Literature. I want to read through your notes on Qu Yuan's (c. 340-278 BC) "Heavenly Questions", I am #10 in line; the library owns one copy. It's amazing that this book has such staying power. Not many humanities books from the 90s still have such a high ratio of holds to number of copies. I mentioned there are #900+ holds on Sally Rooney's book, and that the library owns 100+ copies. I was referring specifically to the e-book edition of Beautiful World, Where Are You?.

As for the print edition of the same book, there are 435 holds on 354 copies. You can see that the library goes all out when there is a groundswell of popularity for a book. They buy numerous copies of certain books so they can meet the demand they have forecast. As for the e-pub edition of Sally Rooney's 2017 novel Normal People, there are 285 holds on 50 copies. The print edition has 20 holds on 61 copies.

This should make librarians proud of their profession and citizens proud of their libraries.

As an end note, Thomas remarked, "To be honest, I was taken by surprise by all the fuss over the bucket hat. I can't for the life of me remember a bucket hat in the book."

 

Suggested readings