1.1. Egyptian and Babylonian
When Israelites occupied Canaan at the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca.
1250–1150 bce), they took over a land where writing had been known for almost two thousand years. In the south, potsherds bearing Egyptian hieroglyphs for the name of pharaoh Narmer have been found at Arad and Tell el-ʿAreini, while seal impressions with names of other early pharaohs and officials were discovered at ʿEn Besor. Those signs of authority were recognized in Early Bronze Age Canaan (ca. 3500–2200 bce), whether or not local people could read them. Although Babylonian cuneiform was current in Syria during the latter part of the third millennium bce, the earliest cuneiform texts found in Canaan belong to the Old Babylonian period or Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1550). They are seven incomplete tablets and two liver models, which imply a local readership, and part of an inscribed stone jar, all from Hazor; perhaps a letter from Shechem; an administrative text from Hebron; and a fragment from Gezer (the dating of the last three between the Middle and Late Bronze Ages, ca. 2000–
1200, is debatable). The few inscribed cylinder seals did not originate in Canaan, and their legends were not necessarily read there. At the same time, numerous Egyptian scarabs circulated, many bearing the names of officials often with funerary formulas, but they functioned principally as amulets, so their legends were not necessarily more meaningful than magic signs. Egyptian and Babylonian writing are better attested from the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1550–1200), when Egypt made Canaan a prov-ince. Pharaohs had inscriptions engraved throughout the region on rock faces and stelas, while Egyptian officials who resided in various places erected monuments for themselves or their pharaonic masters (e.g. at Beth-Shan, Gaza, and Jaffa).1 Their control involved collecting taxes, and
1 See Alan Millard, “Ramesses was here . . . and others, too,” in: Mark Collier and Steven Snape (eds.), Ramesside Studies in Honour of K. A. Kitchen (Bolton: Rutherford
a few ostraca bearing hieratic texts relating to that activity hint at a much greater amount of recording done on papyrus. However, the Babylonian system remained the vehicle used by many local rulers for communicat-ing with Egypt. Rulers in at least eighteen places on either side of the Jordan River sent letters to Egypt, which survive among the El-Amarna letters, and cuneiform tablets have been found at some of those and at three others. The fifteen tablets and fragments at Tell Taʿannek and two at Shechem prove the use of Babylonian cuneiform for local administra-tion and correspondence; legal deeds are not included: presumably any that were written were written in other scripts. Canaanite scribes had to learn Babylonian script and language, and a few fragmentary tablets from Aphek and Ashkelon show the process of writing lists of words, in one case with Canaanite equivalents.2
1.2. Alphabetic writing 1.2.1. The Canaanite linear alphabet
Early in the second millennium bce an unknown genius, acquainted with Egyptian writing, had the revolutionary idea of drawing a sepa-rate sign for each major sound alone in his Canaanite language, adding no others to indicate syllables or categories of words. The signs were evidently selected on the acrophonic principle, the initial sound of the name of the sign being its value (e.g. m from mêm ‘water’). As no word began with a vowel, no sign was created to mark a vowel, and the lan-guage could be written with sufficient clarity without vowel notation, as in ancient Egyptian, and as remains true for Arabic and Hebrew. The progress of the signs of the linear alphabet can be traced through the Middle and Late Bronze Ages in Canaan from the scanty specimens
Press, 2011), 305–312; and Stefan J. Wimmer, “A new stela of Ramesses II in Jordan in the context of Egyptian royal stelae in the Levant,” in: Proceedings of the Third Interna-tional Congress of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, Paris, 2002 (forthcoming).
2 Alan Millard, “The knowledge of writing in Late Bronze Age Palestine,” in Karel Van Lerberghe and Gabriela Voet (eds.), Languages and Cultures in Contact: At the Cross-roads of Civilizations in the Syro-Mesopotamian Realm: Proceedings of the 42nd Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale (Louvain: Peeters 1999): 317–326. For the cuneiform texts, see Wayne Horowitz, Takayoshi Oshima, and Seth Sanders, Cuneiform in Canaan: Cu-neiform Sources from the Land of Israel in Ancient Times (Jerusalem: Israel Exploration Society, 2006); Eilat Mazar, Wayne Horowitz, Yuval Goren, and Takayoshi Oshima,
“A cuneiform tablet from the Ophel in Jerusalem,” Israel Exploration Journal 60 (2010): 4–21.
scratched or painted on stone, metal, and pottery. In the early stages, the script probably consisted of twenty-six letters, each representing a differ-ent phoneme, although the iddiffer-entification of some is uncertain. They are ʾ b g ḫ d h w z ḥ ṭ y k š l m d¯ n (ẓ) s ʿ p ṣ q r t
¯ ġ t.3 Egyptian influence meant that papyrus was the normal writing material; consequently most texts are lost to modern scholarship. That loss is alleviated by the situation to the north of Canaan where scribes were trained in Babylonian and so were accustomed to writing on clay.
1.2.2. Cuneiform alphabets
Seeing advantages for themselves in the alphabetic system, those scribes created a cuneiform alphabet. At Ugarit scribes wrote their dialect with the cuneiform alphabet of twenty-seven signs, arranged basically in the order known in Phoenician and Hebrew in the Iron Age (ca. 1200–600 bce), with three additional signs to help them record the non-Semitic Hurrian language adequately: ả b g ḫ d h w z ḥ ṭ y k š l m d¯ n ẓ s ʿ p ṣ q r t
¯ ġ t and ỉ ủ s̀ . The three ʾaleph signs supplied in some cases the vowel signs lacking from the linear alphabet, being used to indicate vowels alone, without the value of the ʾaleph.4
Another arrangement of the cuneiform letters is attested on one tab-let from Ugarit and one from Beth-Shemesh. It follows the order known in southern Arabia in the first millennium bce and later: ḥ l h m q w š r b t s k n ḫ ṣ ś f ʾ ʿ ḍ g d ġ ṭ z d¯ y t
¯ ẓ. As yet these two tablets, listing the signs, are the only examples of this type of cuneiform alphabet.
While the twenty-seven-letter script was normal at Ugarit, the scribes were aware of a shorter one, with only twenty-one signs, which is at-tested in slightly different forms at other Levantine sites as far south as Tell Taʿannek: ʾ b g d h w z ḥ ṭ y k l m n ṣ ʿ p q r š t. Although variations suggest it is likely that the scribes were adapting the principle of the cuneiform alphabet to different dialects, they may also have been reflect-ing varieties of the linear alphabet. In each case the number of phonemes represented was clearly reduced from the twenty-seven known at Ugarit and in the earlier form of the alphabet. Alphabetic cuneiform tablets from Ugarit cover almost the whole range of ancient writing and allow
3 See Gordon J. Hamilton, The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts (Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph 40) (Washington, D.C.: Catholic Biblical Asso-ciation of America, 2006).
4 Compare the writing mrỉả, ‘fattened’, in KTU 1.4 VI:41–42 with mrả in 1.4 V:45.
the deduction that scribes farther south could have applied the linear alphabet similarly.5