The Lost Link
The Alphabet in the
Hands of the Early Israelites
Brian E. Colless
Massey University, Palmerston
North, New Zealand
I have made a surprising discovery about the way the alphabet was used by the
Israelites in their early period of settlement in the Promised Land, that is,
the time of the Judges (including Samuel) or, archaeologically speaking, Iron
Age I (c. 1200 to 1000 BCE).
I feel
like the woman in the parable (Luke 15:8-9) who lit a lamp, poured light on the
scene, and searched diligently for a lost coin, one of her ten silver drachmas;
when she found it she rejoiced and rushed to tell her friends and neighbours.
So here is my ten drachmas’ worth to share with everybody, as I am confident
that I have alighted on something significant that has been overlooked for
three millennia. This lost object, now ready for our inspection, is just one of
a whole bunch of keys that can open doors to our understanding of the early
alphabet, with regard to its features and functions. Indeed, it is a missing
link in a ten-point theory of the origin and evolution of the alphabet.
The main
difficulty we encounter, as practitioners of ancient Hebrew epigraphy, is the
dearth of documents available for study, from those early centuries of the Iron
Age. The few inscriptions we do have are brief and frequently fragmentary.[1]
However, things are now improving, and we possess two five-line texts, namely
the Izbet Sartah Ostracon[2]
and the Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon[3].
The Qeiyafa Ostracon came to light in Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fort overlooking the Valley of Elah, where David confronted Goliath (1 Samuel 17); the site has been plausibly identified as Sha`arayim (mentioned in 1 Samuel 17:52), but other names have been proposed,.
A
tentative drawing of the Qeiyafa Ostracon (BEC)
On this potsherd from three thousand
years ago there are five faded lines of alphabetic letters, written in ink; and
some of the signs have their upper part missing, because of damage to the top
of the ostracon. The
text runs from left to right (the opposite of later Hebrew writing). The first
letter on the first line (top left corner) is ’Aleph, in a reclining attitude.
The better-known upright stance (Greek Alpha and Roman A) appears at the start
of lines 4 and 5. The original form, the head of an ox with horns, is found
near the end of the top line. Closer examination reveals that other letters
likewise have variations in their shape and stance. Notice that the letter Shin
stands at the beginning of the second line in a figure-3 pose, but further
along the line it looks like W. The numerous instances of Mem (all vertical,
never like the horizontal Greco-Roman M) have different numbers of curves (or
water waves).
The
question that begs to be asked (though nobody has dared to articulate it) is
whether all the variations are arbitrary (just vagaries of the writer’s style
of handwriting, like the three different renderings of P in my personal repertoire)
or whether the differences are deliberate and meaningful.
The
common assumption is that the early Hebrew alphabet was like the Phoenician alphabet
of the Iron Age: it had twenty-two letters and each of them stood for a
particular consonant, and of course there was no indication of the vowels in
writing. The dots and dashes found in Hebrew Bibles for indicating vowels were
much later inventions of scribes who were concerned that the Sacred Scriptures
should be recited correctly. Eventually, later in the Iron Age, vowel markers
were inserted in a Hebrew text, using Waw for showing the presence of a long u or o,
Yod for long i or e, and He for long a; these are known technically as matres lectionis (mothers of reading, offering sustenance to the
reader, so to speak). This idea was not used in Phoenician inscriptions, but it
is still employed in Modern Hebrew writing.
Returning
to our question regarding the possible significance of the variations in the
letters on the Qeiyafa Ostracon, we may now ask whether the various forms and
stances of each letter constituted a way of denoting particular vowels.
Actually, there was already an analogy for this in the West Semitic cuneiform
alphabet, which was particularly associated with the city of Ugarit (on the
Syrian coast, east of Cyprus) but it is also attested throughout the
Levant. The scribes of Ugarit, in the Late Bronze Age II, immediately preceding
the Iron Age, had a cuneiform sign for each consonant, made up of wedge-shaped
marks, and I am convinced (having demonstrated this elsewhere) that each was
constructed with the image of the corresponding letter of the Semitic alphabet
in mind.[4]
This is the relevant detail: on the clay
tablets of Ugarit there were three distinct ’Aleph characters, representing ’a, ’i, ’u.
This
phenomenon could account for the trio of ’Aleph forms on the Qeiyafa Ostracon. But
my idea goes further than that: in the early “Israelian” Hebrew alphabet each
of its twenty-two letters had two additional forms, making a total of sixty-six
signs. In fact, the system was not a simple consonantary (which the Phoenician
alphabet certainly was, in the Iron Age) but a syllabary. Incidentally, there
has long been a discussion about the nature of the Phoenician alphabet, and
whether it should be understood as a syllabary, with each sign standing for a
consonant with any vowel; but that is a different matter. What I am proposing
here is a syllabic alphabet.
How can
this syllabary hypothesis be tested? A first step would be to compare the
letters found on the Qeiyafa inscription with their counterparts in the Izbet
Sartah text.
Tentative
drawing of the Izbet Sartah Ostracon (BEC)
The boon of this document is the
copy of the scribe’s own script in the fifth line, running from the left (sinistrodextrally)
with the familiar Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, which would become Alpha, Beta,
Gamma, Delta when the Hellenic alphabet was constructed from the West Semitic
consonantary, and when Aleph (the glottal stop) became the sign for the vowel a, with no consonantal reference. The
copy of the alphabet presented to us on the Izbet Sartah Ostracon has the
expected twenty-two letters, though some of them are hiding from us, and
several of them are not in the order we know from the later Hebrew and Greek
alphabets.
Habitually in this field of
endeavour, the assumption is made that when the letters in this abecedary (or “abagadary”)
are used in a text, the reader will have to supply the appropriate vowel in
every case. However, in the four lines of writing above the Izbet Sartah
alphabet (which are an interesting personal message from the writer himself, in
my interpretation of them) we are offered Aleph in more than one stance (though
the inverted A-form, the ox-head, is absent here). And when we have established
the shape of the Lamed in the bottom line (more like a 6 than a 9), we look
higher and see 9s as well as 6s (with the added complication that this scribe
makes it difficult to distinguish B and L).
Consider also Kaph: we can see the
origins of Greek Kappa in the model provided in line 5, but at the beginning of
line 2 it is quite different, being a bisected right angle on a stem; I suggest
(after experimenting with possible words and meanings in both texts) that the
K-form says ka, and the trident is ki. My detailed observation of the
letters in this line, in comparison with examples on the Qeiyafa inscription and
other related documents, leads me to suspect that this inventory is indeed an abagadary, in that every sign has the
vowel a built into it: ’A, BA, GA,
DA, and so on to TA. The Taw here is not a simple + cross (like a plus sign) since
the cross-beam points north-east; and if we focus on a trio of them, one above
another, in lines 1, 2, and 4, we see the middle one has its cross-bar pointing
north-west, and I have reasons for believing it is TI.
Now, if we take the Izbet Sartah TA to
the Qeiyafa text, this matches the third letter in the top line, and the
presumed TI is the penultimate sign in the bottom line. The TU is lurking in
line 3 (a small character) as a cross that is shaped almost like a
multiplication sign. If we apply this information to Phoenician inscriptions
from the same period we might expect to see the TA syllabogram functioning as
Taw, or even a perfectly even cross (+); but the TI is predominant.
Looking at Shin, we know two forms,
“W” (SHI) and “3” (SHA in the Izbet Sartah abagadary), and the Qubur Walayda
Bowl (pictured below) provides the third, a reversed “3”; the SHI sign (W) is
what we see in the Phoenician realm, as well as in later Hebrew inscriptions, notably
the Gezer Calendar[5],
which show that the Phoenician style was adopted, in the 10th
century BCE, during the reigns of David and Solomon, when commercial and
diplomatic relations were flourishing between Jerusalem and Tyre.
A supposition is rising up before our
eyes: the Izbet Sartah abagadary (with its a-vowel syllabograms) is not the
place to look for the originals of the letters in the later consonantal
alphabet, because this simpler system was made up of i-syllable signs (but with
the vowels ignored). Fortunately we have at our disposal a list of the
consonantal letters from Iron Age II, on the Tel Zayit Stone, and it seems that
this document confirms the supposition.[6]
Thus, the Zayit K is not the KA of
the Izbet Sartah abagadary, but the KI at the start of line 2 (as mentioned
earlier), which is a trident. The Qeiyafa KI (in the word MLK “king”)
apparently has no stem, but this is likewise the case with all the Phoenician
examples.
Seeking a Phoenician counterpart for
one of the three Aleph characters, we are at a loss, but perhaps the key feature
is not the stance but the crossbar, which breaks through one side or both
sides. The Zayit Aleph is typical, pointing leftwards, the direction of the
writing, and having a vertical line cutting through it. Here we must
acknowledge that the various scribes had their idiosyncrasies (whether regional
or personal) and possibly made their own rules for distinguishing the syllabic
forms of each letter.
Samek in the international
consonantal alphabet was a “telegraph pole”, a stem with three (or just two)
crossbars; it is actually an Egyptian djed,
representing a spinal column. However, this character does not appear in any of
the Iron Age I inscriptions, because they have a fish for their Samek. That is
what we see in the Izbet Sartah abagadary between Nun and Pe; on the Qeiyafa
text, in line 4, between Y and D (notice the dots indicating a fan-tail in each
case); also on the Beth-Shemesh Ostracon; but prejudgement (rather than blind
prejudice) does not allow most epigraphists to see it, because they are
convinced that the fish in the Bronze Age proto-alphabet was D (from dag “fish”). Possibly the tree-shaped Samek functioned as SI
in the syllabic alphabet, and it has not turned up in the extant inscriptions.
There were presumably 66 signs, and we certainly have not seen them all yet.
‘Ayin in the Phoenician alphabet, as
also on the Zayit Stone, is a circle, but without the centre-dot that is
characteristic of the sign in the south in Iron Age I. However, on the
Beth-Shemesh Ostracon[7]
there is one of each, leading to the suspicion that the empty circle is the
syllable ‘I. The sign for ‘U remains to be identified.
Mem has a variety of forms in the
documents, but there are three basic types: the Phoenician M is presumably MI
and it has the top stroke pointing NE, and the bottom stroke SW (the number of intervening
angles varies for MI in Israel); MA has the top as NE and the bottom as SE (and
only one angle in between); MU has the top as NW and the bottom as SW (with two
angles or only one in between). Confusion could occur between MA and SHU, and
also between SHA and short versions of MU, but the Sh-signs have horizontal
tops and bottoms.
Looking
back to the beginnings, the original prototype of the alphabet came out of the West
Semitic syllabary in the Bronze Age.[8]
At least eighteen (18/22) of the letters that survived into the Phoenician and
Hebrew consonantal alphabet of the Iron Age were already in the syllabary; this
can be seen on the table of alphabet evolution appended below (note the BS
[Byblos script] column in the Phoenicia section). For the most part, the
syllabograms with –a were chosen for
this purpose. The proto-alphabet was patterned after the Egyptian writing
system, which did not indicate vowels, but the characters could function as
logograms, ideograms, and rebograms (rebuses).[9]
We see this in the proto-alphabetic inscription from Wadi el-Hol in the
Egyptian desert, which speaks of feasting in celebration of the goddess ‘Anat,
in agreement with the Egyptian inscriptions reporting similar carousing in
honour of Hathor.[10]
The new Iron
Age syllabary did not necessarily select the direct descendant of these
originals for the a-set: for example, the
Aleph corresponding to the ox-head is not ’a, but little more can be said on
this score at present.
Suddenly
we realise that we are hearing the vowels as well as the consonants! The writer
of the Izbet Sartah says, in my reading of his text (line 1b-2a): “I see that
the eye gives the breath of the sign into the ear”. In this statement he uses
the ‘Ayin sign for “see” and then for “the eye”, continuing the practice that
goes right back to the inception of the proto-alphabet, and also to the West
Semitic syllabary that preceded it, whereby the pictophonograms could act not only
as consonantograms or syllabograms, but also as logograms, ideograms, and
rebograms (rebuses), as happened with the hieroglyphs in the Egyptian writing
system, which influenced the formation of these two West Semitic scripts.
Thus, the
early Hebrew alphabet of Iron Age I was not the same as the Phoenician alphabet
of the Iron Age: it had sixty-six letters (not simply twenty-two), and each of
them stood for a particular open syllable (consonant plus vowel, not merely a
single consonant), and so there was every indication of the vowels in writing.
Moreover, the signs were multifunctional, a concept that is never countenanced
in the standard manuals of West Semitic epigraphy.
In
summary, here are some indicators for distinguishing the two early Iron Age
alphabetic scripts, which we might call (1) the
neo-syllabary and (2) the
international consonantary.
(1)
ISRAELIAN
SCRIPT AND HEBREW LANGUAGE
(2)
PHOENICIAN
SCRIPT AND HEBREW LANGUAGE
(1) Various forms for each letter (’abugida syllabary)
(2) Single form for each letter (’bgd consonantary)
(1) Dextrograde, sinistrodextral (L > R)
(2) Sinistrograde, dextrosinistral (L < R)
(1) Fish for Samek
(2) Spinal column (djed) for Samek
(1) Dot in circle of `ayin
(2) No dot in circle of `ayin
(1) Vertical and horizontal forms of Sh-sign (3 and W)
(2) Horizontal Sh only (\/\/)
(1) Logography and Rebography
(2) Consonantal writing only
In the light of these criteria, we may
consider some examples.(1) Various forms for each letter (’abugida syllabary)
(2) Single form for each letter (’bgd consonantary)
(1) Dextrograde, sinistrodextral (L > R)
(2) Sinistrograde, dextrosinistral (L < R)
(1) Fish for Samek
(2) Spinal column (djed) for Samek
(1) Dot in circle of `ayin
(2) No dot in circle of `ayin
(1) Vertical and horizontal forms of Sh-sign (3 and W)
(2) Horizontal Sh only (\/\/)
(1) Logography and Rebography
(2) Consonantal writing only
The broken inscription on the Ophel Pithos from Jerusalem is highly problematic, not having the key indicators (Samek, ‘Ayin, Shin), and with uncertainty about the direction of the writing.[11] It appears to have two forms of Nun (NI and a reversed version) or possibly two different instances of Mem; its Het is unusual, lacking a central crossbar, and so it seems to be neo-syllabic, possibly H.U but not H.I; the Mem (first letter on the left) seems to fit the MI mould, rather than MU or MA, and so it is not prescriptive either way; the letter following could be R (facing in the wrong direction) or Q (which should have the stem piercing the oval for QI and Phoenician Q), and the next one P (a reversal of the Phoenician P) or L (inverted and reversed). It is thus anomalous as a Phoenician-style text, and this perhaps supports it as neo-syllabic; and so it might have been written before David established his capital there. But it was inscribed before it was baked, and it was not necessarily made in Jerusalem.
Fragmentary
pithos inscription from Jerusalem
Then there is the Qubur el-Walaydah bowl,
usually dated early in the Iron Age, and is quite instructive as far as it
goes.
Drawing
of the QW bowl (BEC)
Transcribing the writing (from left to
right) with consonants only, I read:Sh M B? ` L | ’ Y ’ L | M H.
The bulk of the text is a personal name, the second part being the patronymic. As stated above, the Sh-sign (not “3” SHA nor “W” SHI) would be SHU. The Mem should be MI (though it has more angles than the Phoenician form). Thirdly B or P (but BA seems more likely than PA, because it is the god Ba`al). Then comes ‘Ayin with no dot, so it is ‘I. The Lamed here is not the same as the one further on, and I will not make a decision on their respective sounds; but it might be LI. Hence Shumiba`ili (“name of Ba`al”). Regarding the Mem Het combination (apparently separated from the rest by another dividing stroke), this could say MAH.U “a fatling” (a sacrifice, as at the end of the Wadi el-Hol horizontal inscription).
Another intriguing inscription comes from Gath, the hometown of Goliath.[12]
Gath Ostracon
The Gath inscription is certainly Philistian, and perhaps its script is a local version of the consonantary or the syllabary. The Qeiyafa Ostracon is from a fort in the vicinity of Gath, but I have reasons for believing its script and language are Israelian. The Zayit alphabet is clearly the international consonantary, and this site is also in Philistia, near Gaza, but it could be Israelian, in the kingdom of David and Solomon. The Qubur Walayda inscription is supposed to be early, and its geographical position (south of Gaza in the Negev) hints that it might be Philistian rather than Israelian; the name Shumi-Ba`ili is not decisive.
Consequently it may well be that the new syllabary was not only used by Israelites but also by Philistines, and possibly Jebusites (in Jerusalem, on the Ophel pithos). In any case, my guess is that the change from local syllabary to international consonantary came about when the Davidic dynasty established cultural and commercial ties with Phoenicia (2 Samuel 5:11-12, 1 Kings 5:1-18, Hiram of Tyre) and adopted the international consonantal alphabet, as used in Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos (the chief supplier of our inscriptional evidence).
And now a question about priority (or priorness): which came first? Was the Phoenician consonantary a reduction of the Israelian neo-syllabary, employing only the -i characters? Or was the Hebrew neo-syllabary an expansion of the Phoenician alphabet, which became the i-column in the new construction?
There are no known alphabetic inscriptions from Phoenicia in the Bronze Age. It is not credible to surmise that the Phoenicians were not writing and recording in that era, but we might assume that they were favouring the original Byblos syllabary, which is attested all around the Mediterranean region and beyond (notably Jamaica[13] and Scandinavia[14]); and their written records would have been on perishable papyrus.
Nevertheless, four Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions (or graffiti) have turned up on clay tablets, in Mesopotamia (from the Sealand, at the Persian Gulf) from the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon, that is, around 1600 BCE. Amazingly the letters have the same forms as the Iron Age consonantary. One of them is a transcription of the name Ali-dîn-ili. For our purposes it is unfortunate to see so many –i syllables in it, but we can say that the same form of Aleph is used in Ali and Ili (an acute angle with a vertical line running through both sides, and pointing leftwards, the expected direction of the writing). Another graffito begins with that form of Aleph, and, judging only from drawings, both texts have the regular forms known from the Iron Age (the Tel Zayit alphabet is invoked by the reporting researcher, for comparison). One exception is Yod, which is uncharacteristically reversed. This surprising evidence needs closer scrutiny and confirmation of its date.[15]
In the nineteenth century the bones of the Ichthyosaurus lay “unpublished” in glass cases in the Ashmolean Museum for a hundred years or more; they were disturbing to the consensus. In our own times, photographs of two ’abagadaries of the proto-alphabet (which were discovered in southern Egypt and included by William Flinders Petrie, in 1912, in the frontispiece of his book The Formation of the Alphabet) have been disregarded and not taken into account in all the published discussions and speculations that have gone on in this realm; and they are not mentioned in any of the handbooks on the subject.[16]
The climate is changing drastically around us, and apparently the paradigm has now shifted in West Semitic epigraphy. Still, this neo-syllabary (which has been posited here) could be a hypothesis that can be easily falsified; but the variation in forms of letters in a single inscription such as the Qeiyafa Ostracon requires an investigation.
I have chosen to announce my findings here, because of the strong connection with ASOR that the forerunners had, namely William Foxwell Albright and Frank Moore Cross, and I regret that they did not live to share in this new knowledge. Unfortunately their successors sometimes fail to test the theories of these masters, upholding the proposed identifications for the signs of the proto-alphabet without taking sufficient account of other possibilities.
I have been inspired by the words of another keen practitioner of this art and science, namely Gordon J. Hamilton, who said (on the internet) that the recent discoveries of such inscriptions should have the effect of “motivating researchers to dig deeper and reconsider previous views”.
We must also try harder to read these important texts. In line 3 of the Qeiyafa Ostracon, I discern this sequence: M T G L Y T B ` L D W D, and the syllables seem to reveal GULIYUTU and DAWIDU, and the meaning is: “Goliath is dead, David has prevailed (ba`ala)”.[17]
APPENDIX
Ten-point theory of the origin and evolution of the
alphabet.[18]
(1)
Before 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia a complex pictophonographic logosyllabary
emerged; the rebus principle produced numerous phonetic syllabograms from its
logograms; its pictorial and symbolic characters turned into cuneiform script,
using wedge-shaped components. Five vowels were represented (i e a o u).(2) Before 3000 BCE in Egypt a complex pictophonographic logoconsonantary was created; its pictorial and symbolic hieroglyphs became stylized and unrecognizable (in the Hieratic script), but the original shapes of its logograms and phonograms (simple and complex consonantograms) were preserved for monumental inscriptions. Generally, vowels were not represented.
(3) Before 2300 (in the Early Bronze Age) in Canaan (Syria-Palestine), probably at Gubla (Byblos), a simpler pictophonographic logosyllabary was constructed, largely from Egyptian characters, and using the acrophonic principle (a modification of the rebus principle) to form syllabograms (representing a single consonant with a vowel), which could also function as logograms and rebograms. Twenty-two consonants and three vowels (i a u) were represented.
(4) This became the model for other acrophonic syllabic scripts: Aegean (Cretan and Cyprian, 5 vowels) and Anatolian (Luwian, 3 vowels); also American (notably the Maya acrophonic logosyllabary, with 5 vowels).
(5) After 2000 BCE (in the Middle Bronze Age) in Egypt, apparently, the West Semitic proto-alphabet was constructed as a simple logoconsonantary, largely from elements in the West Semitic syllabary and thus based on Egyptian hieroglyphs; its phonograms were acrophonic consonantograms, which could also function as logograms and rebograms. The number of consonants was expanded from 22 to 27 (or possibly more). No vowels were represented.
(6) This proto-alphabet spread to the Levant (in the Hyksos period, 17th century BCE?) and was used alongside the syllabary (in Egypt and Canaan). No vowels were represented. The number of consonants was retained at 27, but this was, sooner or later, reduced to 22 phonemes.
(7) In the Late Bronze Age, apparently at Ugarit, a cuneiform consonantary was devised, with cuneiform characters based on the pictorial forms of the proto-alphabet. There was a long version, with the full complement of consonants, and syllabic signs for ’a ’i ’u; and also a short version used beyond Ugarit.
(8) Early in the Iron Age, in Israel (and Philistia?) a syllabic alphabet appears, “the neo-syllabary”, a new development employing the stylized forms of the proto-alphabet, with a reduced number of consonants (22, the same as in the earlier West Semitic logosyllabary), and with three vowels (u a i) represented by changing the shapes and stances of the letters. The practice of logography persisted, and the signs were multifunctional, as in the proto-alphabet.
(9) In the Levant, in the Iron Age, a simple consonantary with 22 letters, conventionally known as the Phoenician alphabet, became the international writing system for West Semitic languages (Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Moabite, and others). In some cases matres lectionis were added, to compensate for the lack of vowel signs.
(10) In the Hellenic regions an alphabet was invented, with the elements of the West Semitic consonantary put to new uses, including the innovation of vowel-letters (“vocalograms”).
Table of the evolution of the Alphabet
Note
that the neo-syllabary of Iron Age I is not shown
[1]
Early Iron Age inscriptions, with comparative tables of signs:
Fig 8:
Tel Zayit abagadary
[2]
Izbet Sartah Ostracon: Photograph: http://storiadigitale.zanichellipro.it/media/images/070.jpg
http://qeiyafa.huji.ac.il/ostracon12_2.asp
[4]
Cuneiform alphabet:
[5]
Gezer Calendar:
[6]
Tel Zayit ’bgdary (see also note 1 above):
[8]
West Semitic acrophonic
logo-syllabary: https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/westsemiticsyllabary
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/03/oldest-west-semitic-inscriptions-these.html
[9]
Technical terms (some are
neologisms) in “paleogrammatology”: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/science-of-paleogrammatology-and.html
[10]
Wadi el-Hol proto-alphabetic
inscription: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/wadi-el-hol-proto-alphabetic.html
[11]
Ophel Pithos from Jerusalem:
[12]
Gath Ostracon:
Maeir,
A.M., Wimmer, S.J., Zukerman, A. et Demsky, A. 2008. An Iron Age I/IIA Archaic
Alphabetic Inscription from Tell es-Safi/Gath: Paleography, Dating, and
Historical-Cultural Significance. Bulletin of the American Schools of
Oriental Research
[13]
Inscribed metal cup from Jamaica:
[14]
West Semitic syllabic inscription in Norway: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/phoenicians-in-scandinavia.html
[15]
Four Phoenician graffiti on
Babylonian clay tablets:
Laurent
COLONNA D’ISTRIA
Université de Genève, Épigraphes alphabétiques du pays de la Mer, N.A.B.U.
2012, 3 (septembre), 61-63
Dalley
S., 2009, Babylonian Tablets from the First Sealand Dynasty in the Schøyen
Collection, CUSAS 9
[16]
Two abagadaries of the
proto-alphabet from Egypt:
[17]
My work-in-progress on the
Qeiyafa Ostracon may be viewed here:
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