Abstract
The publication of some important cuneiform corpora from the Late Bronze Age Levant over the past decade has drastically changed the perspective taken towards issues pertaining to the acquisition and adaptation of cuneiform writing in the so-called peripheral areas. This development can especially be observed following the current research in cuneiform palaeography.
The meetings in Leiden (2009) and Warsaw (2014) already demonstrated the potential of cuneiform palaeography for our understanding of the process of writing, the composition of the respective texts, and many other aspects. It is striking that the most complete tool for the study of one of the principal "peripheral" cuneiform corpora of the second millennium B.C., the Amarna corpus, remains to this day the sign list of O.
Schroeder, published already in 1915. In 2012 a new project dedicated to the digital epigraphy and palaeography of the Amarna tablets started at the Charles University in Prague.
In this paper some results of the paleographic research conducted in this project are presented. The paper investigates possible common sources for a cuneiform palaeography of the Northern Levant with special attention given to the corpus of documents from Qatna (mod.
Tell Mishrifeh, EA 52-56, EA 57?). The results are set into a more general frame of cuneiform writing in peripheral areas of the Late Bronze Age.