Semitic Alphabet Research Articles

WHO INVENTED WHAT? EXPLORING THE ROLE OF THE NORTH WESTERN SEMITIC ALPHABET UPON THE FORMATION OF MODERN EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

It is an accepted fact that, with some exceptions, the ancient Greek and Latin languages served as the basis for the formation of most of the Western (modern) languages. However, what remains less known is that the Greeks borrowed the alphabet letters from the North-Western Semitic alphabet of the 2nd millenium BCE. This alphabet was used by Phoenicians, Arameans, Hebrews and the Moabites beginning with the early second millenium and was borrowed by the early Greeks from Phoenician merchants in the later part of the second millenium and the beginning of the first millenium BCE. In this article we will explore the issue of the revolutionary contribution that the North-Western semitic alphabet had upon the cultures of the Ancient Near East (including Egypt, Canaan, Mesopotamia and Siria).2 The transition from a system that used hundreds of pictograms and signs (the cuneiform and hierogliphic alphabets) to an alphabet of only 22 linear letters marked one of the most important, yet neglected, innovations in ancient history. The purpose of our article is to draw on both ancient and contemporary scholarship in order to show how this revolutionary alphabet influenced the Greek and Latin alphabets (and implicitly the languages themselves) and the impact that this event had upon the formation of the modern European languages.

The West Semitic Alphabet in the Early Iron Age

In the hypothesis presented by the authors, stratified, nonmonumental inscriptions and their radiometric datings take center stage for the first time. It is in the living script of these texts rather than in the artificial alphabet of monuments that the evolution of the alphabet in Iron IIA can be studied properly. A key take-home lesson of the work is the significant ninth-century transformations of the alphabet from precursive Proto-Canaanite to supraregional cursive, thence to the well-known regional variants. Under the Omrides, the alphabet in Israel is attested minimally. No Omride texts were recognized at Samaria, nor Baashide texts at Tirzah. The newly founded West Semitic kingdoms since ca. 900 BCE will have constituted the cradle of the cursive, while papyrus or parchment and ink were the cursive’s likeliest vehicle. Alphabetic inscriptions on monuments, including Byblos, all cursive-inspired, will only have emerged in the last third of the ninth century.

漢字文化圈現行常用漢字字形比較

Chinese characters have been adopted in the Chinese writing system, which is a logograph ic system, in contrast with phonographic system in Semitic alphabet, which has been adopted in Arabic, Roman, and Cyrillic scripts. Chinese characters has also been borrowed and modif ied by China’s neighboring countries such as Korean, Japan and Vietnam during the past two thousand years, yielding variations. While the simplified characters are now used in mainland China since 1950s, the traditional full forms of characters remain to be used in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and oversea Chinese communities around the world. At the same time, Japanese has also recently created a set of new characters, which are distinct from both full forms and simplified forms of Chinese characters. The main purpose of this paper is to provide a three-way systematic comparison of the commonly used Chinese charac ters in contemporary East Asia for the facilitation of teaching and learning Chinese and Japanese writing systems as a second language.

Kadim bir şifreleme yönteminin kültürümüzdeki yansıması: Hatt-ı şecerî

El yazması eserlerde, birbirinden farklı yöntemlerle tasarlanmış standart dışı alfabe örnekleriyle karşılaşılabilmektedir. Herkesçe bilinmemeleri itibarıyla birer gizli yazı türü olarak da kabul edilen bu alfabelerden biri de hatt-ı şecerîdir. Adını şeklinin ağaca benzemesinden alan söz konusu yazıya muhtelif türdeki Türkçe, Arapça ve Farsça el yazmalarında tesadüf edilebilmektedir. Arap yazısının ebced diziliminden faydalanarak tasarlanan bu alfabenin, geçmişte bazı bilgileri gizli bir şekilde kaydetmek veya güvenli olarak nakletmek amacıyla kullanıldığı anlaşılmaktadır. Yine şeklinden ötürü hatt-ı nahlî, hatt-ı servî, hatt-ı şecer, kalem-i miscer, kalem-i müşeccer, kalem-i serv ve kalem-i şecerî gibi birçok farklı adla da anılan söz konusu alfabe, kadim bir şifreleme yönteminden yararlanılarak tesis edilmiştir. Bu yöntem, el yazması kayıtlarından ve sair kaynaklardaki bilgilerden anlaşıldığı kadarıyla en az 2.500 yıllık bir geçmişe ve kullanıldığı dönem itibarıyla da evrensel bir yaygınlığa sahiptir. Bahse konu yöntemin İslam muhitindeki bir yansıması olan hatt-ı şecerî, el yazmalarındaki uygulama örneklerine ve kaynaklardaki başka kayıtlara göre temelde üç farklı modele sahiptir. Bu çalışmada hatt-ı şecerînin tafsilatlı bir tanımı yapılarak menşei konusu tartışılmış, mevcut örnekler üzerinden belli başlı modelleri belirlenip müstakil türler olarak tasnifleri yapılmış ve el yazmalarındaki işlevlerine bakarak daha çok ne tür metinlerde hangi amaçlarla kullanıldıkları belirlenmeye çalışılmıştır.

A Double Abecedary?HalaḥamandʾAbgadon the TT99 Ostracon

This article attempts to advance the debate on the terms inscribed on an ostracon of the Egyptian 18th Dynasty from the excavation of Theban Tomb 99, suggested by Ben Haring to contain the first historical attestation of the Halaḥam sequence. It presents new etymologies for the words listed on the two sides of the document, all of them in Egyptian syllabic writing. The obverse contains at least the five initial consonants of the Halaḥam sequence; the words of the acrostic may form a mnemonic verse. Additionally, the reverse side may provide the first historical attestation of the beginning of the second and historically more consequential ancient alphabet sequence, the ʾAbgad. This sheds important new light on the history of the Semitic alphabets and Egyptian knowledge of alphabetic ordering in the 15th century B.C.E.

The swan-song of Proto-Canaanite in the ninth century BCE in light of an alphabetic inscription from Megiddo

The paper presents a sherd with the remnant of an inscription, unearthed at Megiddo in the 2014 excavation season in a level affiliated with either the transition from Stratum VB to Stratum VA-IVB, or with Stratum VA-IVB. This is the earliest alphabetic text from the site. The continuation of Proto-Canaanite into the ninth century is then addressed, and other questions concerning the development of the West Semitic alphabet in the tenth-ninth centuries.

The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts. Gordon J. Hamilton.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts. Gordon J. Hamilton.Anson F. RaineyAnson F. Rainey Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 354May 2009 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/BASOR25609319 Views: 18Total views on this site Journal History This article was published in the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (1921-2021), which is continued by the Bulletin of the American Schools of Overseas Research (2022-present). Copyright 2009 The American Schools of Oriental ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Dating of the Early Royal Byblian Phoenician Inscriptions: A Response to Benjamin Sass

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Dating of the Early Royal Byblian Phoenician Inscriptions: A Response to Benjamin SassChristopher A. RollstonChristopher A. RollstonEmmanuel School of Religion Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Volume 15, Number 12008 A journal of ASOR Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/MAR200815105 Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 American Society of Overseas Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Benjamin Sass and Israel Finkelstein The West Semitic Alphabet in the Early Iron Age: A New Hypothesis, Near Eastern Archaeology 86, no.11 (Mar 2023): 28–45.https://doi.org/10.1086/723458Nathan Lovejoy Ambiguity of Divine and Royal Portraiture and the Hiyawan Image of Kingship: Political Identity through the Monuments of ÇİNEKÖY and KARATEPE, Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research 387 (Feb 2022): 113–138.https://doi.org/10.1086/719049Jessie DeGrado Syrian Fashion, Assyrian Style: Clothing Syro-Anatolia in Ninth-Century BCE Assyrian Art, American Journal of Archaeology 125, no.44 (Oct 2021): 479–504.https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.125.4.0479

The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts (review)

The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts (review)

Text search for medieval manuscript images

In this article we introduce a text search algorithm designed for ancient manuscripts. Word-spotting is the best alternative to word recognition on this type of document. Our method is based on differential features that are compared using a cohesive elastic matching method, based on zones of interest in order to match only the informative parts of the words. Thus we improved both the accuracy and the runtime of the word-spotting process. The proposed method is tested on medieval manuscripts of Latin and Semitic alphabets as well as on more recent manuscripts.

Vectors of the Virtual in New Media Theory

nature of these activities, altering what and how we read and write, as well as producing deleterious effects on our very language. Thus, in The Gutenberg Elegies literary critic Sven Birkerts argues that the electronic millenium will inevitably bring about an erosion of language, the complexities and expressive capacities of the language we now use and assume being gradually replaced by more telegraphic sort of 'plainspeak,' with an attendant flattening of his- torical perspective and waning of the private self.1 In this view the Internet continues or even increases the debilitating effects on literary culture produced by radio, cinema, and television. But predictions also run in the contrary direc- tion. Theorists like Pierre Levy herald the formation of the many new virtual communities and on-line identities—indeed, the creation of a new Internet superlanguage—as prospects for a more egalitarian, even Utopian, society.2 This double and polarized reaction to technological change is of course his- torically familiar. A classic example is Plato's denunciation of writing and his banishment of the poet from the Republic. In Phaedrus, Plato has Socrates argue that writing things down not only weakens memory but worse: it promotes lying and the irresponsible propagation of fictions, since the writer never has to meet face to face with his or her interlocutor. But in The Republic this defense of oral culture is reversed and the poet as its representative sent packing. In his remark- able study, A Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock explains mat poetry in Plato's still mostly oral culture is associated with an aggregative, paratactic style reflecting a fluid, situational, and dispersed subjectivity, whereas the Republic must be founded upon an absolute and unquestioned truth arrived at in an abstract, ana- lytic style. The Republic thus requires a fixed, coherent, and stable subject, the very subject (Havelock suggests in a later book) produced by alphabetic writing. Adding vowels to the original Semitic alphabet, Havelock argues, allowed the

Two-Bit Technology

The alphabet was unrivalled as an efficient machine for encoding human perception - until we invented the bit. Digital machines have unfolded across the social landscape since the invention of the semitic alphabet, grafting themselves onto successive technologies - papyrus, paper, type, silicon - gendering new ways of seeing and new ways of being. But are ways of seeing undermined or overlayed? And how does a culture change a technology that's supposed to be changing it? This paper begins to sketch out a few directions.

The origin of classical greek culture: the transparent chain theory of literacy/society interaction

Classical Greek culture differs from that of previous societies. Various people have attributed this to the Greek alphabet (which differed from its precursor, the Semitic alphabet, in containing vowel letters). I review recent research upon the reading of vowelled and unvowelled alphabet writing. Early writing systems were phonetic—in spite of this, research together with palaeographic evidence suggests that the first people to read phonologically were the Greeks. I propose a two chain theory of literacy whereby the method of reading affects literacy-society interaction. I call the chains transparent (closely associated with phonological reading) and opaque (associated with non-phonological or lexical reading). Opaque literacy enhances and produces authoritarian structured societies; transparent literacy in contrast is anti-authoritarian. I suggest this trait inhibited the rise of ruling (or governing) elites in Greek society. Human communities (such as hunter-gatherer bands) without such elites show (a) individualism, (b) debate (where all freely contribute), and (c) egalitarianism. I propose that the major cultural, intellectual, and social innovations of the Classical Greeks relate to (1) the inhibition of ruling elites by the Greek alphabet, which (2) created human culture based upon individualism, debate, and equality—human traits last expressed in hunter-gatherer bands—but which (3) led to cultural and intellectual innovations in the Greeks because they existed within the technological circumstances of urban life. This explanation reverses the usual explanans and explanandum of Classical studies: instead of culture and politics explaining the nature of literacy in Classical Greece, I suggest literacy explains the nature of Classical Greek culture and politics. The key idea of this paper is that different kinds of writing create and disable different kinds of social authority. The impact of literacy upon society is an area yet to be fully debated and explored; this paper adds to it critical new information about the reading of vowelled and unvowelled writing which must change our view of the history of literacy.

On the Transmission of the Alphabet to the Aegean before 1400 B. C.

This article argues that Rhys Carpenter's date of ca. 700 and Naveh's of the 11th century B.C. for the transmission of the Semitic alphabet to Greece, are both far too low. New finds of early inscriptions in North Arabic scripts, notably that at Kamid el-Loz, revive the hypothesis proposed by Praetorius at the beginning of the century, that the so-called new in the Greek alphabet derive from ones found in Thamudic and Safaitic, for consonants that merged in Canaanite. As these letters seem to have disappeared from the Phoenician coast by the 14th century B.C., it is argued that the alphabet must have been transmitted to Greece before then. Further, the hypothesis of an earlier date removes many anomalies of the present schemes and makes possible a general theory for the many alphabets and alphabetically-based scripts that are found around the Mediterranean and beyond.

Inscribed Javelin-Heads from the Period of the Judges: A Recent Discovery in Palestine

Previous articleNext article No AccessInscribed Javelin-Heads from the Period of the Judges: A Recent Discovery in PalestineJ. T. Milik and Frank M. Cross Jr.J. T. Milik Search for more articles by this author and Frank M. Cross Jr. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Bulletin of the American Society of Overseas Research Volume 134April 1954 A journal of the American Schools of Oriental Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/1355623 Views: 3Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Journal History This article was published in the Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (1921-2021), which is continued by the Bulletin of the American Schools of Overseas Research (2022-present). PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Benjamin Sass and Israel Finkelstein The West Semitic Alphabet in the Early Iron Age: A New Hypothesis, Near Eastern Archaeology 86, no.11 (Mar 2023): 28–45.https://doi.org/10.1086/723458 Mark S. Smith The Contribution of Frank Moore Cross to Ugaritic Studies, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 372 (Nov 2018): 189–202.https://doi.org/10.5615/bullamerschoorie.372.0189

The Letter-order of the Semitic Alphabets in Africa and the Near East

Opening ParagraphThe Ethiopic syllabary employed for writing the classical Ge'ez and also, with certain modifications, the contemporary South Semitic vernaculars of East Africa, was formed by super-imposing a system of auxiliary vowel-marks upon a basic consonantal alphabet; this alphabet occurs, alongside of the syllabic script, in the Old Ethiopic inscriptions of the Axumite Kingdom in the fourth century of our era, and is a derivative of the Sabaeo-Minaean or Old South Arabic script found in the monuments of the south-west Arabian kingdoms. But although the Ethiopic syllabary is thus genetically connected with the other main branches of the Semitic alphabet, the traditional order of the signs, in which the consonantal component and the accompanying vowel are the primary and secondary determining factors respectively, does not agree with that of any Semitic alphabet hitherto known. There is no old or reliable native tradition as to the reason underlying the order of the signs; no help is to be had from numerical signs, which elsewhere, as will shortly appear, afford valuable testimony to the order of the letters; for Ethiopic borrowed Greek alphabetic signs for this purpose, while the South Arabian inscriptions used single strokes for the units, and for higher denominations the initial letters of the native words for five, ten, hundred, &c. The mnemonic word-groups reconstructed by Bauer and others are open to objection on grounds of language and sense. Other external criteria yield only tentative and inconclusive results, and the subject has accordingly remained one of speculation and controversy.

The Archaic Inscriptions from Lachish, (A Non-Phoenician System of the North Semitic Alphabet)

Book Review| June 01 1939 The Archaic Inscriptions from Lachish, (A Non-Phoenician System of the North Semitic Alphabet) The Archaic Inscriptions from Lachish, (A Non-Phoenician System of the North Semitic Alphabet), Julian Obermann. J. W. Flight J. W. Flight Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (1939) 58 (2): 187–189. https://doi.org/10.2307/3259862 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. W. Flight; The Archaic Inscriptions from Lachish, (A Non-Phoenician System of the North Semitic Alphabet). Journal of Biblical Literature 1 June 1939; 58 (2): 187–189. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3259862 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Origin and Evolution of the Semitic Alphabets

Book Review| June 01 1938 The Origin and Evolution of the Semitic Alphabets The Origin and Evolution of the Semitic Alphabets, Abram Setsuzau Kotsuji. J. W. Flight J. W. Flight Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (1938) 57 (2): 222–223. https://doi.org/10.2307/3259755 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation J. W. Flight; The Origin and Evolution of the Semitic Alphabets. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 June 1938; 57 (2): 222–223. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3259755 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Origin of the Ras Shamra Alphabet

In 1931 the cuneiform alphabet of Ras Shamra was derived from the Sinaitic alphabet by M. Sprengling and A. T. Olmstead (The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinaitic Inscriptions, Chicago); and in March, 1934, by E. Ebeling, apparently without knowledge of the work of Sprengling and Olmstead, from Babylonian cuneiform (Zur Enstehungsgeschichte des Keilschriftalphabets von Ras Schamra, Sitz.-Ber. d. Preuss. Akad. d. Wiss.). In June, 1934, J. G. Février, also independently of Sprengling and Olmstead, showed connections with South Semitic, suggesting that the South Semitic alphabet was for the most part derived from the Ras Shamra cuneiform or from a common source (Rev. des Éitudes sémitiques, pp. xiii–xvi). In the same month T. Gaster accepted the theory of Olmstead (Ancient Egypt, 1934, p. 34), and in July, 1935, defended in some detail the origin of the Ras Shamra alphabet from a derivative of the Sinaitic approximating to the Phœnician (PEF. Quarterly, 135 ff.).

Did the Early Semites of Asia Minor Use the Alphabet?

MORE than a thousand cuneiform tablets have now been published containing the records of the business transactions of a community of Semitic merchants, who lived and traded in the region afterwards called Cappadocia, in the latter half of the third millennium B. C.1 There is indirect evidence in these tablets that even at this early date these merchants also used another system of writing, which may have been a primitive North Semitic alphabet. It may be supposed that this primitive alphabet was written upon parchment or other perishable material, and it would be the rarest of good fortune if any actual remains of it should ever come to light. As evidence that another system of writing was in use the following facts are submitted. A very unusual feature of the Cappadocian tablets is what has been called a word-divider. An upright wedge, sometimes only about half the length of the other upright wedges on the tablet, and having its head on a level with the top of the other signs, is frequently used with the obvious purpose of showing where one word ends and another begins. The scribes varied a great deal in their use of this device. There are texts in which it is missing entirely,2 others in which it occurs only occasionally,3 and others in which it is found at the end of almost every word.4 The practice of using this quasi-punctuation is entirely unparalleled in other