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Chapter 17
The Alphabet and its Legacy
Madadh Richey
Origins
Beginnings in Sinai
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the oldest alphabetic inscription known to the scholarly world was the late ninth-century bce monument of Mesha, king of Moab. All this changed when, in 1904–1905, the W. M. F. Petrie expedition to Sinai discovered a corpus of enigmatic inscriptions in and among the turquoise mines of Serābīṭ el-Ḫādim. Flinders Petrie and his successors eventually found and published approximately forty inscriptions in the oldest alphabet yet discovered. These inscriptions are often difficult to read and variously interpreted (compare the confident “decipherment” of Albright 1966 with Sass 1988). The most recently published material is found in the contribution by Anne-Sophie Dalix (2012). Two new publications by Aren M. Wilson-Wright (2013, 2016) illustrate that interest in these texts continues, and our understanding of them is on increasingly solid footing. The Sinaitic graphemes are strongly pictographic, and most reveal their sources in Egyptian hieroglyphic and/or hieratic prototypes (Hamilton 2006: 7, 2014: 34). One hundred years after Petrie, scholarly debate continues over the decipherment of these inscriptions, as well as over the social status and extraction of their authors. One point of general agreement is that these authors assigned names and phonetic values to these graphemes on an acrophonic principle—that is, according to the first phoneme encountered in lexemes describing the appearance of the signs themselves. Thus the ox (*ˀalp-) was employed for ˀ, the house (*bayt-) for b, the throw-stick (*gaml-) for g, and so forth. It is not clear however, whether Serābīṭ el-Ḫādim—for all its abundance of early inscriptions—indeed represents the alphabet’s birthplace (see discussion and earlier bibliography in Goldwasser 2015). Gordon J. Hamilton (2014) has recently and admirably treated the classification of the Sinaitic script (Hamilton’s “Early Alphabetic A”) relative to other early alphabetic scripts.
In recent years, it has at least become clearer that the Serābīṭ el-Ḫādim writers were not so unique as formerly thought. Even as the Sinaitic inscriptions were appearing, another trickle of middle and late Bronze inscriptions emerged from the southern Levant (Sass 1988; cf. Finkelstein and Sass 2013: 153–63; also Naveh 1987: 23–42; Cross 2003: 95–350; the most recent publication of material is Sass et al. 2015, a ca. twelfth-century jar sherd from Lachish). These have revealed that the oldest alphabetic writing in that region was contemporary with or just later than in Sinai. In the 1990s, two additional early alphabetic inscriptions were found carved in the cliffs at Wādī el-Ḥôl, in the Egyptian western desert (Darnell et al. 2005; Vanderhooft 2013). A short Sinai-type inscription of questionable authenticity was first noticed at Timna Valley, in southern Israel, only a few years ago (Wimmer 2010). Furthermore, scholars have occasionally reevaluated long-known artifacts from elsewhere in Egypt and the Levant and have suggested that these, too, are witnesses to early alphabetic writing (Hamilton 2009, 2010). Scholarly orthodoxy presently traces the earliest alphabet from middle Bronze origins in Sinai or Egypt proper, up through the middle and late Bronze Canaanite city-states, and from there to the Lebanese coast (Naveh 1987: 23–42; Finkelstein and Sass 2013: 176–77). But with new finds emerging all the time (e.g., Colonna d’Istria 2012), regnant hypotheses are often nuanced and even overhauled.
From Scratches to Standards
The earliest alphabetic inscriptions can appear chaotic. Inscriptions are written from both left to right (dextrograde) and right to left (sinistrograde), the same letter can face every which way, and even a letter’s shape seems to tolerate more variation than in later periods. The two most visible standardizations of the early alphabet both took place on the northern Levantine coast, in modern-day Syria and Lebanon. The first, at Ugarit, involved the adaptation of the alphabet to the medium of cuneiform writing. Jay Ellison (2014) provides an excellent summary of Ugaritic paleography. The putative graphic correspondences between the Ugaritic and non-cuneiform alphabets are not always obvious or unimpeachable. For example, Ugaritic {ả} and Old Canaanite {ˀ} are similar, as are, for example, {b}, {g}, and {h} in the respective scripts. But the correspondences for such letters as {l} and {m} are harder to trace. Most recent work has nevertheless claimed a genetic connection between the Sinaitic and Ugaritic alphabets (classically Dietrich and Loretz 1988), but with various understandings of the precise nature of the relationship. The order of the letters in most Ugaritic abecedaries is essentially the same as that of the later Hebrew order, but the Ugaritic “long” alphabet has seven additional graphemes: {ḫ}, {š}, {d}, {ẓ}, {ġ}, {ỉ}, {ủ} and {ś}. The last three are innovations in Ugaritic. The first five—representing phonemes with different fates in related languages like Phoenician, Hebrew, and Aramaic—are scattered throughout the sequence famili
ar from Hebrew, and so forth; for example, {ḫ} is between {g} and {d}. It is therefore plausible to hypothesize that other late Bronze alphabets originally had such graphemes as {ḫ} and so forth in similar positions, but these were dropped in a process of standardization to conform to evolving phonetic realities. Scholars debate the date of the origin of alphabetic writing at Ugarit, but recent finds may support an invention only a few decades before the demise of Ugarit, ca. 1185 bce (recently Lam and Pardee 2012: 410–13).
A second standardization occurred in the Phoenician city-state of Tyre, certainly by ca. 850 bce but perhaps earlier. Before that, a group of royal inscriptions is attested from Byblos in the tenth century (KAI 1–2, 4–7), but these represent an ultimately sterile local tradition (Amadasi Guzzo 2014: 76), not the fount of the standard Phoenician alphabet. The most direct indication that Tyre was early on known as the source of a significant script is Yariris of Carchemish’s boast of knowing a {sù-ra/i-wa/i-ni-ti(URBS)} script (Hawkins 2000, specifically the text Karkamiš A15b §19; recently Younger 2014). But because Tyre has yielded no major early epigraphic material, the first evidence for this script comes from late ninth-century bce monuments scattered throughout northern Syria, Transjordan, Cyprus, and beyond. These include, for example, the inscriptions of Kulamuwa at Zincirli (= KAI 24), Bar Hadad near Aleppo (= KAI 201), the Mesha Stele in Moab ([= KAI 181]), the Honeyman Stele (= KAI 30), and the Nora Stele (KAI 46). This group includes inscriptions written in the Phoenician language, but also inscriptions in Aramaic or southern Canaanite (e.g., Moabite). Despite these linguistic differences, letter morphologies at one end of the geographical spectrum show until about 800 bce no consistent differences over against those from the other end. Not only are the letter morphologies standard but also the direction of writing (sinistrograde) and the stance of individual letters have been regularized. The number of graphemes has been reduced to twenty-two; scholars commonly attribute this to the Phoenician language having twenty-two consonantal phonemes (Amadasi Guzzo 1999: 11; cf. Finkelstein and Sass 2013: 185n161).
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