REVIEW OF THE ACADEMIC ADVISER
for final qualifying work
Fedorova Elizaveta Alekseevna
“Calendar festivals of ancient Syria in texts in Akkadian”

Currently, the methodology for studying the literature of the ancient East has undergone great changes. Connections were established between three groups of sources - literary texts, commentaries and ritual records. As a result of a comprehensive study of these sources, it turned out that many works of fiction were arranged records of calendar rituals. As the stylistic analysis of the literary works themselves was carried out, the question arose of studying the stylistics of ritual-calendar texts. This helped to establish a number of historical-genetic and formal-typological correspondences between the texts of the Old Testament and the literature of the ancient Near East. While this work is being carried out quite actively for the calendar texts of ancient Mesopotamia, the analysis of the stylistics of calendar texts from Syria and Palestine still does not have a complete monographic study. The author of this work was tasked with collecting all the data on calendar texts from Syria written on clay in the Akkadian language, giving translations of the names of the months, reading the most significant ritual texts and giving a stylistic analysis of their rhetoric.
Work on this topic required the master's student to have qualifications in the peripheral Akkadian language, widespread in Syria and Palestine in the 2nd millennium BC, and Bible Hebrew, necessary in some cases for comparing months, festivals and some rhetorical devices. E.A. Fedorova read the cuneiform texts in the autograph and did her own transliteration and Russian translation. She thoroughly reviewed all currently existing scientific literature on the issues of her research. During her work, she constantly consulted with her supervisor, submitted each part of the work for verification in a timely manner, after which she corrected any mistakes and inaccuracies. The supervisor had no reason to reprimand the master's student due to negligence or missing deadlines for handing in chapters. It should be noted the high degree of self-control and responsibility of the author of the work. After submitting the entire work, she checked the text again and made additional corrections and clarifications both in the analytical part and in the translations.
The results of the study, in my opinion, are quite significant. A critical comparative analysis of the classification of months by Archi, Cohen and Fleming led the author to the conclusion about the need to divide the months into occasional and permanent, as well as to establish semantic analogies between some months of ancient Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine. It has been established that the start time of all festival cycles falls on the spring period of the year, which is far from obvious from a superficial reading of the texts. For the first time, a catalog of festivals was compiled according to all the ancient calendars of Syria and Palestine and the ritual semantics of rituals and sacrifices during these holidays was revealed. The genetic West Semitic relationship of the holidays Zukru and Passover was proven and the scientifically known hypothesis of the origin of Passover from the Emar holiday Zukru was rejected. When analyzing the rhetoric of calendar texts, such poetic features were identified as the presence of headings, organization of the text using time markers, third-person narration, prescriptivism, the use of parallelisms, chiasmus, lexical repetitions and ellipses. Emar cultic calendars were compared with Biblical cultic calendars, as a result of which structural and stylistic similarities were identified.
Final qualifying work E.A. Fedorova was completed at a high scientific level, corresponds to the main educational program VM.5866 “Literature of the peoples of Asia and Africa (with the study of the languages of Asia and Africa)”, is a significant contribution to the development of Assyriology and Semitology and is worthy of an excellent assessment.

  V.V. Emelianov,
Dr. Sc.,
Professor of the Department of Semitic and Hebrew Studies of St. Petersburg State University