3.1. The Phoenician alphabet
Few inscriptions are known from Phoenicia for several centuries after the early Byblos monuments, but the development of the script can be traced through texts from Cyprus, Anatolia, and Phoenician colonies farther west. In southern Anatolia local kings and nobles erected stone monuments with Phoenician texts during the late ninth and eighth cen-turies, notably at Zinçirli, with the letters carved in relief in Hittite style.
The letters took more cursive forms, visible in seventh-century bce graf-fiti on jars from Phoenicia, in Persian-period papyri from Egypt, and into Roman times. In North Africa the Punic and Neo-Punic alphabets show a continuing movement of the pen in longer downstrokes and other sim-plifications. Only from the fifth century onward were vowels occasion-ally marked, w and y for ū and ī, Punic also employing ʾ and ʿ.
3.2. The Aramaic alphabet and its descendants in the Levant The movements of Aramaean tribes, trade, and Assyrian deportations carried the Aramaic language and script throughout the Fertile Crescent.
12 Benjamin Sass has argued for a later date, between 850 and 750 bce, in The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium (Tel Aviv: Institute of Archaeology, Tel Aviv University, 2005). For counterarguments see Christopher A. Rollston, “The dating of the early royal Byblian inscriptions: A response to Benjamin Sass,” Maarav 15 (2008): 57–93.
Clay tablets bearing notes in Aramaic, or whole texts, presumably writ-ten on clay when papyrus or leather were unavailable, illustrate the cur-sive hands of daily life in the seventh century leading to the documentary script standardized for Imperial Aramaic across the Persian empire from Afghanistan to Egypt. Following Alexander’s conquest of the Persians, official records were composed in Greek, but Aramaic continued in com-mon use and eventually replaced Greek in many regions. In the smaller states which succeeded the Greek kingdoms, local varieties arose, nota-bly the Semitic Hatran, Palmyrene, Syriac, and Nabataean, while writers of Parthian and other Iranian languages adapted the Aramaic alphabet to their tongues.
Inscriptions in the Aramaic language survive from the ninth century bce onward. Some of the twenty-two letters served to represent two pho-nemes which the language continued to distinguish, as the shift in Impe-rial Aramaic reveals: in Old Aramaic z stood for z and d
¯, in Imperial and later Aramaic d was used for d
¯; Old Aramaic had š for š, ś, and t
¯ while s stood for s and ś, t for t
¯ in Imperial and later Aramaic; Old Aramaic had q for q and ḍ, Imperial and later Aramaic had ʿ for ḍ. The oldest exam-ples of Aramaic already display the double significance of h, w, and y for consonants and as vowel letters, although not with complete consistency (see Section 3.6).
Distinctive features of the script appear at the end of the century with longer descenders, a tail on d, and a Z-shaped z. The Tell Deir ʿAlla plaster text (see Section 3.4) displays early cursive forms with the circles of ṭ and q opening at the top and the three bars of h reduced to an s-like stroke. The cursive trend continued into the Persian period when nu-merous examples on papyrus and leather display it. Characteristic are the opening of the heads of b, d, ṭ, ʿ, q, r, and reduction of strokes in k, m, ṣ. Jewish scribes adopted the Aramaic script during Persian rule and the Dead Sea Scrolls enable its features to be followed in detail from the mid third century bce until 70 ce, by which time the letters had taken the shapes current today.
Of all the descendants of the Aramaic script, the most significant is the Nabataean, for it was in cursive Nabataean letters that Arabic began to be written in pre-Islamic centuries and so became the script of the Arabic world and Islam. Nabataean inscriptions of the first century bce show the distinct script which continues into the fourth century ce. The discovery in caves west of the Dead Sea of Nabataean documents from the first century ce written on papyrus has proved that the cursive Naba-taean alphabet was the ancestor of the Arabic script. Certain letters that were originally distinct were reduced to virtually the same forms, e.g. r and z, g and ḥ, p and q, leading to likely confusion between those letters.
Arab scribes at an early date resolved that by placing one or two dots above or below the second of each pair. As Arabic needed twenty-eight letters to represent it adequately, the scribes also differentiated letters for sounds the twenty-two-letter system did not represent by adding one, two, or three dots to the second of ʿ and ǵ, d and d¯, t and t
¯, ṣ and ḍ, ḥ and ḫ, s and š (the Aramaic sign for s, Hebrew samekh, having been dropped).
Thus the latest descendant of the alphabet approached the earliest form, with the addition of ḍ and ẓ
3.3. The Hebrew alphabet
Assuming the Gezer Calendar (Gez(10).1) and the Tel Zayit abecedary13 are Hebrew texts, which cannot be proved or disproved at present, they, with a few graffiti on pots, are the oldest extant examples of ancient Hebrew script. Set beside the tenth-century Byblos inscriptions, the longer descenders of ʾ, w, k, m, p, q, and r and their upright stance are no-ticeable, for those would become more apparent in the ninth and eighth centuries, giving rise to the elegantly curving strokes of k, m, n, and p seen, for example, in the Kuntillet ʿAǧrūd, Nimrūd Ivory, and Siloam Tunnel inscriptions (KAgr(9), Nim(8):1, Jer(8):3). The longer descenders also occur in inscriptions written in Syria and Anatolia, in Aramaic and Phoenician, away from the coast. Unlike Aramaic and, eventually, Phoe-nician, Hebrew retained the equal-armed X-shape of t. Beginning early in the eighth century, a small downward tick was sometimes added to the tails of z, y and ṣ, and to the lowest horizontal of s. For the letter w, the scribes shifted from the Y-shape to making the right-hand branch as an oblique stroke running across the vertical, while the left-hand branch became curved. By the end of the seventh century, cursive forms show many changes: the arrowhead of ʾ made with two separate strokes no longer meeting, or with a tail running from the right end of the lower arm back to the vertical; the downstroke and the foot of b becoming a
13 Ron E. Tappy, P. Kyle McCarter, Marilyn J. Lundberg, and Bruce Zuckerman, “An abecedary of the mid-tenth century b.c.e. from the Judaean Shephelah,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344 (2006): 5–46, see 25–41; and McCarter,
“Paleographic notes on the Tel Zayit abecedary,” in: Ron E. Tappy and P. Kyle Mc-Carter (eds.), Literate Culture and Tenth Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2008), 45–59. Christopher A. Rollston, “The Phoenician script of the Tel Zayit abecedary and putative evidence for Israelite lit-eracy,” ibid., 61–96, argues that the elongation is not distinctive, that the script is Phoe-nician. Yet there does seem to be some difference between texts from the coast and those from inland.
single slightly curved line; y losing its tail and its upper bar lengthening;
in k the left finger slopes down from the shaft, with the central finger rising from it and the right finger reducing to a shoulder; the pen mov-ing quickly when formmov-ing the zig-zag head of m resulted in an open S-shape with a small cross line; the head of q opened into a sideways S (e.g. Lak(6) 1.3). Under Persian rule, the Aramaic alphabet gradually replaced the Hebrew, Jewish tradition asserting that the Torah was trans-ferred to the Aramaic in the time of Ezra the scribe (mid fifth century).14 The Hebrew script, preferred by patriots, carries legends on coins of the Hasmonaeans and the First and Second Revolt and it was used for a few copies of biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Samaritans have continued to use it until the present day.
Excavations in Philistia uncovered a dedication on a stone block, several graffiti on pots (at Ekron), and two ostraca (at Tell Jemmeh), all from the seventh century. Their script is similar to Hebrew, yet evidently affected by Phoenician; more examples are needed before these can be reckoned a “Philistine” form of the alphabet.
3.4. Transjordanian alphabets
The history of the alphabet in Transjordan exhibits local varieties, iden-tifiable with the kingdoms of Ammon, Moab, and Edom. In Moab the oldest inscriptions – the Moabite Stone and the Kerak fragment (KAI 182, 181) – of the ninth century are engraved in Hebrew letters, as are a frag-ment of unknown provenance from the next century and a slightly later incense altar,15 but legends on seals of the seventh and sixth centuries have a local shape of m with a large head, a U-shaped ʿayin, while three-pronged š reflect Aramaic influence from the north. No Edomite writ-ing older than the seventh century has been found. The script of seals and ostraca is similar to the Moabite, with an idiosyncratic k, like an inverted pointed spade. The Ammonites followed the Aramaic pattern from about 800 bce, developing local forms on stone, metal, and pottery such as a flag-like h and k with a head like an axe-head. At Tell Deir ʿAlla in the Jordan Valley about 800 bce a scribe copied onto a plastered wall
14 Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 21b.
15 Shmuel Aḥituv, “A new Moabite inscription,” Israel Museum Studies in Archaeology 2 (2003): 3–10; Echoes from the Past: Hebrew and Cognate Inscriptions from the Biblical Period (Jerusalem: Carta, 2008), 419–423; Paul-E. Dion and M. Daviau, “An inscribed incense altar of Iron Age II at Ḥirbet el-Mudeyine (Jordan),” Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina Vereins 116 (2000): 1–13; Aḥituv, Echoes, 423–426.
a composition about the seer Balaam in a version of a flowing Aramaic hand, imitating a column of a scroll, the oldest surviving example of a literary text in the West Semitic alphabet.
In comparing the “national” alphabets, it should be noted that the common origin of the letters may have resulted in some taking identical shapes without there necessarily being a connection, e.g. Ammonite in-scriptions of the seventh century and Sidonian of the fifth century share an axe-head or wedge-shaped k.16 Any comparison has to be made with the whole range of letters in each script.
3.5. The Greek alphabet
The reason the Greeks adopted the alphabet from the Phoenicians was almost certainly the needs of trade. As the oldest Greek writing comes from the latter part of the eighth century bce, the transfer should be set slightly earlier. It clearly happened at one moment in one place, for the Greek alphabet marks a major step forward in marking vowels. The Phoenician letters ʾ, h, w, ḥ, y, and ʿ, denoting consonants which were not needed for writing Greek, were re-assigned to mark the vowels a, e, u, ē, i, and o, with w also serving for the consonant w at an early pe-riod (as digamma). It was essential for the comprehension of Greek that vowels be marked; otherwise the negative ou could not be written. Thus Greeks could “spell” words completely, producing the first true alpha-bet. Additional letters were added for sounds necessary for Greek, phi, chi, psi, and omega, with variations for different dialects.17
3.6. Vowel letters (matres lectionis)
A disadvantage of the linear alphabet is its wholly consonantal system.
The need to include signs for vowels, perhaps at first in foreign words and names, began to be met in the ninth century by Aramaean scribes
16 See Frank M. Cross, “Notes on the Ammonite inscription from Tell Siran,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 212 (1973): 12–15, repr. in: Leaves [n. 7], 100–102; J. Brian Peckham, The Development of the Late Phoenician Scripts (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1968), 67, 94–95.
17 For a detailed discussion of the Greek alphabet, see Manfred Krebernik, “Buchsta-benamen, Lautwerte und Alphabetgeschichte,” in: Robert Rollinger, Andreas Luther, and Josef Wiesehöfer (eds.), Getrennte Wege? Kommunikation, Raum und Wahrnehmung in der Alten Welt (Frankfurt: Verlag Antike, 2007), 108–175.
who used h to mark ā at the ends of words, w, and y, for ū or û and ī or î, respectively, as most evident in the Tell Fekheriyeh Statue inscription.18 Hebrew scribes gradually followed. Later in the eighth century, at about the same time, one used w for medial ū in the word ʾārūr, “cursed’, while another did not (Jer(7):2,2; EGed(8):2,1); in the Siloam Tunnel Inscription the word for ‘man’ is written ʾš (Jer(8):3,2), whereas in a Lachish letter a century or so later it is written ʾyš (Lak(6):1.3,9-10).19 Ancient scribes were not constrained by the consistency required in modern texts! (For the Greek creation of vowel signs, see Section 3.4.)
3.7. Word division
With the Canaanite linear alphabet, word dividers were used occasion-ally, e.g. on the Lachish ewer, the Qubur al-Wulaydah bowl, and the Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon (see Section 2.1). Short vertical strokes sepa-rate words in the early inscriptions from Byblos, but thereafter Phoe-nician was written continuously. Two or three dots one above another divide words in the script of the Aramaic Tell Fekheriyeh inscription, but thereafter Aramaic was often written continuously until the Persian period when a small space was left after each word. East of the Dead Sea, the Moabites adopted the Hebrew letters and, by accident, the Moabite Stone (KAI 182), set up by king Mesha about 840 bce, provides the earli-est lengthy example of the script, displaying clearly the practice of regu-lar word division by a point. Hebrew scribes maintained that, normally with a point after each word, except when they were bound together grammatically. In hastily written ostraca the ink of the point is often absorbed into an adjacent letter, or it may be omitted.20
18 See Ali Abou Assaf, Pierre Bordreuil, and Alan Millard, La Statue de Tell Fekherye et son inscription bilingue assyro-araméenne (Paris: Association pour la diffusion de la pensée française, 1982), 39–42, and among subsequent studies note Francis I. Andersen and David Noel Freedman, “The orthography of the Aramaic portion of the Tell Fekherye bilingual,” in: W. Claassen (ed.), Text and Context: Old Testament and Semitic Studies for F. C. Fensham (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1988), 9–49.
19 See Alan Millard, “Variable spelling in Hebrew and other ancient texts,” Journal of Theological Studies 42 (1991): 106–115.
20 Alan Millard, “ ‘Scriptio continua’ in Early Hebrew: Ancient practice or modern sur-mise?” Journal of Semitic Studies 15 (1970): 2–15; Joseph Naveh, “Word division in West Semitic writing,” Israel Exploration Journal 23 (1973): 206–208.
3.8. Numerals, measures, and abbreviations
Phoenician and Aramaean scribes used a simple system of number nota-tion based on vertical strokes for 1–9 and horizontal strokes for tens. He-brew scribes made single strokes for 1–4, then adopted a form of Egyptian hieratic cipher numbers, with a reversed gamma-like sign for 5 (Γ), signs for 6–9, and a lambda-like sign for 10 (Λ). Higher hieratic numbers occur on some ostraca, those from Tell el-Qudērat reaching several thousands (Qud(7):6). ‘Hundred’ and ‘thousand’ were spelled in full (mʾh, ʾlp). A variety of signs denote weights and measures, their equivalents mostly uncertain. An є-like sign may denote the measure seʾah, although the ḥōmer is also suggested; a line hooked at each end the ʾēphā; half an H the kōr; and the letter b followed by a slanting line the bath. A single point, or occasionally a small circle, signals the Egyptian ḥq3t measure.21 A figure 8 open at the top was the sign for the šeqel, apparently the Egyptian hier-oglyph šs, perhaps used for its initial sound, or a sign for something tied.
Why the Hebrew scribes favored the Egyptian systems is obscure. Three possibilities are advanced. First, they were a legacy from the Late Bronze Age when Egyptian scribes were active in Canaan, although no cases are extant of hieratic numerals beside Canaanite script. Second, the reigns of David and Solomon, the latter linked with Egypt by marriage, brought increased administration drawing on Egyptian experience.
Third, there was stronger Egyptian influence in the eighth century, the time when the systems are first well attested in Hebrew epigraphy. It may be observed that the ciphers are present in the Samaria ostraca early in the eighth century bce (Sam(8)) and so would have been current ear-lier. Given the frequent contacts, diplomatic and mercantile, between the two kingdoms, Egyptian fashions may have had an intermittent im-pact on Canaanite and Hebrew scribes, so that they could have reflected Egyptian forms of more than one period.
Abbreviations were formed from initial letters of words, principally for measurements. Hebrew ostraca have š for ‘sheqel’ and also ʿ per-haps for ʿbr, ‘harvest’, ḥ for ḥth ‘wheat’, ṭ perhaps for ṭb, ‘good’, q for
21 The most recent detailed analysis of the numerals and other symbols is Stefan Wim-mer, Palästinisches Hieratisch: Die Zahl- und Sonderzeichen in der althebräischen Schrift (Ägypten und Altes Testament 75) (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008). For earlier sur-veys, see André Lemaire, Inscriptions hébräiques, vol. 1: Les ostraca (Littératures anci-ennes du Proche-Orient 9) (Paris: Cerf, 1977), 277–281; G. I. Davies, Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions, Corpus and Concordance, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991–2004), 1: xix–xxii, 1: 512–535 (concordance), 2: 224–229; Renz, Handbuch [n. 6], vol. 2/1, Zusammenfassende Erörterungen, Paläographie und Glossar (1995), section D.
qdš, ‘holy’. Aramaic papyri from Egypt have š for ‘sheqel’ and for śʿryn
‘barley’, and kš for ksp šql ‘sheqel of silver’, ʿ for the ʿardab measure, g for grib ‘handful’, ḥ for the ḥallur measure, and r for rbʿ ‘quarter’. Other ab-breviations became common in Hellenistic and Roman times.22
The alphabet is one of the greatest inventions of the human mind, the legacy of the Canaanites to the world.