Abstract
The origin of alphabetic script lies in second-millennium BC Bronze Age Levantine societies. A chronological gap, however, divides the earliest evidence from the Sinai and Egypt—dated to the nineteenth century BC—and from the thirteenth-century BC corpus in Palestine. Here, the authors report a newly discovered Late Bronze Age alphabetic inscription from Tel Lachish, Israel. Dating to the fifteenth century BC, this inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant, and may therefore be regarded as the ‘missing link’. The proliferation of early alphabetic writing in the Southern Levant should be considered a product of Levantine-Egyptian interaction during the mid second millennium BC, rather than of later Egyptian domination.
Highlights
It is often assumed that early alphabetic writing was developed by members of a Semiticspeaking, Western Asiatic population (‘Canaanites’) who were involved in Egyptian mining operations around Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula (Sass 1988; Goldwasser 2006; Naaman 2020)
The new ostracon from Tel Lachish fills the gap between the potential early alphabetic writing on the late Middle Bronze Age Lachish Dagger and the corpus from the later Late Bronze Age phases
We suggest that early alphabetic writing spread to the Southern Levant during the late Middle Bronze Age, and was in use by at least the mid fifteenth century BC at Tel Lachish
Summary
It is often assumed that early alphabetic writing was developed by members of a Semiticspeaking, Western Asiatic population (‘Canaanites’) who were involved in Egyptian mining operations around Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula (Sass 1988; Goldwasser 2006; Naaman 2020) Later, this early alphabet would spread to the Southern Levant, where it was transformed into the Phoenician alphabet, from which the Greek alphabet subsequently derived (Albright 1969; Naveh 1987; Sass 1988; Goldwasser 2006; Hamilton 2006, 2014; Morenz 2011; Daniels 2017; Burlingame 2019; Naaman 2020). The new early alphabetic inscription was found during the 2018 excavation season in area S, in locus L1114 of stratum S-3b This area was originally excavated between 1973 and 1987 by the Tel Aviv team, who uncovered a sequence of Iron Age and Late Bronze Age occupation levels (Table 1) (Barkay & Ussishkin 2004a & b).
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