The / "'1 Biblical L OF Archaeologist Publishedb y The AmericanS choolso f OrientalR esearch 126I nmanS treet, Cambridge,M ass. 02139 ro?u 14 Jae, 4LL Af, - AP w l A, eo?p r Volume 37 No. 3 September, 1974 54 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. 37, The Biblical Archaeologist is published quarterly (March, May, September, December) by the American Schools of Oriental Research. Its purpose is to provide readable, non-technical, yet thoroughly reliable accounts of archaeological discoveries as they relate to the Bible. Authors vwisihing to submit unsolicited articles should write the editors for st3le and format instructions before submitting manuscripts. Editors: Edward F. Campbell, Jr. and 11. Darrell Lance, with the assistance of Floyd V. Filson in New Testament matters. Editorial correspondence should be sent to the editors at 800 West Belden Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614. Art Editor: Robert II. Johnston, Rochester Institute of Technology. Editorial Board:tG. 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Copyright by American Schools of Oriental Research, 1974 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, BY IRANSCRIPT PRINTING COMPANY N. H. PETERBOROUGN(cid:127), Contents The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet, by P. Kyle McCarter ............................. 54 The Christian Remains of the Seven Churches of the Apocalypse, by Otto F.A. Meinardus .. 69 G. Ernest Wright, 1909-1974, by Edward F. Campbell, Jr. .......................... 83 Cover: Proto-Sinaitiinc scriptionfr omt he Widi Nasb.P hotograpcho urtesyo f Dr.G eorgG erster. The Early Diffusion of the Alphabet P. KYLE McCARTER The University of Virginia It is well known that our alphabet is descended more or less directly from a writing system perfected by the Greeks in preclassical times. The quality of that ancient alphabet is amply demonstrated by its durability: centuries of use have required only small adjustments. Indeed an early Greek scribe would recognize most of the uppercase letters used to print these pages, and he in turn could draw only a few forms which would not be famil- iar to an untrained modern reader. It is less well known but now widely agreed that the Greek alphabet was a modified version of a much older system devised under some measure of Egyptian influence centuries earlier. But neither to the Egyptians, who in- spired it, nor to the Greeks, who perfected it, should our thanks go for the invention of the alphabet. This was the achievement of another people, cer- tainly Semitic and almost certainly Bronze age Canaanite, of whose culture the coastal states of Phoenicia preserved the highest form in the Iron age. The Greek historians themselves used to tell the story of Cadmus, a Phoenician 1974, 3) THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST 55 prince, who, though better known as the founder of Thebes and ancestor of Oedipus, was said to have brought the letters from his homeland and in- structed the rude Boeotians in their use. Evidence for the earliest history of the alphabet, therefore, is to be sought in Syria and Palestine-the ancient Canaanite domain-and, after the Phoenicians ventured there, throughout the Mediterranean basin. Modern discovery and excavation in these areas have clarified this history in in- creasing measure. Inquiry into the subject in the present generation, how- ever, has probably benefited more from refinements in methodology than from fresh evidence. These refinements have placed us in a better position than ever before to trace the critical early steps in the diffusion of the al- phabet and its development from a tentative, semipictographic, Middle Bronze signary to the sophisticated national scripts of the Iron age. In ad- dition, we can now reckon with some precision the time and general circum- stances of the crucial transmission of the alphabet from Phoenicia to Greece. A Note on Method The discipline of archaeology is sometimes subdivided into epigraphic and non-epigraphic branches. This classification must have been first pro- posed by an epigrapher. Written remains are characteristically the most meager product of an excavation and can hardly be balanced against the combined yield of architecture, pottery, jewelry, weaponry, and so on. It might be supposed that the information recorded in inscriptions justifies our special regard for them. The handsome catalogue of a recent exhibition of inscriptions at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem is entitled Ktwbwt Msprwt or in English, Inscriptions Reveal. But as a matter of fact it is an unusual in- scription which reveals more than the name of the owner of a broken jug or- at best-the livestock he brought to market on a particular morning in antiquity. This is especially true of texts in alphabetic script. The great stelae are exceedingly rare and reluctant-or so it seems-to come to light unbroken. Yet more than a few scholars are quite happy to spend their time brooding over such cryptic unsatisfying graffiti. There need be no apology for this. The written word permits an intimacy between the archaeologist and his subject as no other artifact can; and the task of decipherment appeals to the most elemental nature of the scholar. In addition-and more to the point-the trained epigrapher can now by the rig- orous application of modern methods derive appreciable information from the most insipid inscription. Language, spelling, and the forms of the letters themselves are all important clues. Since the last of these is the special con- cern of this report, a few comments on paleographic method are in order. The shapes of the letters-or, more correctly, of the graphic signs repre- senting the letters--did not remain the same throughout the early history of the alphabet. Instead they changed gradually in time. The reasons for this process are straightforward enough, as explained below; but in brief the 56 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. 37, change in letter-forms is motivated by the principle of economy that is in- herent in the alphabetic system of writing. That is, the direction of change is generally towards simplification in the scribal execution of the various signs and elimination of ambiguities in stance and direction. This process of morphological development is the good fortune of the paleographer; for although the rate of change cannot be predicted or its direction anticipated, the shapes of the signs can be charted for any period from which sufficient inscriptions have survived. The developing sequence of letter-forms has already been mapped out for considerable expanses of time in the early history of the alphabet though important gaps remain. The result is that new inscriptions as they are recovered can usually be dated quite se- curely on the basis of the appearance of the incised letter-forms alone. Of course this happy situation, arising as it does from such simple principles, is greatly complicated in practice, not only by the irksome gaps in our evidence but also by the frequent branching of the alphabet into subdivisions or oc- casionally, by the existence of distinct scribal traditions even within a single script. Nevertheless, it is the refinement of the typology of the early letter- forms which more than anything else has advanced our knowledge of the his- tory of the alphabet as described below. Alphabetic Origins The oldest known specimens of writing which certainly belong to the direct ancestry of our alphabet are still the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscrip- tions. These comprise a small group of rock-cut graffiti from the ancient tur- quoise-mining community of Ser-ibit el-Khadem in the Sinai peninsula. Less than thirty have survived in a condition satisfactory for modern epigraphic study, and even these are badly eroded. The Proto-Sinaitic material can hardly be listed as a recent discovery. In fact it was apparently these inscriptions which were viewed and recorded by the sixth-century adventurer Cosmas of Alexandria (who navigated as far as India, earning his surname "Indicopleustes") and even earlier travelers. In his monastic old age, Cosmas described the inscriptions as the earliest form of the letters of the alphabet, taught by God to the Hebrews on their journey through the Sinai and later learned from Israel by Cadmus of Tyre (!), who carried them to Greece and thus, eventually, the rest of mankind. This opin- ion was so widely accepted that still in the nineteenth century Serhibite l- Khadem was seldom omitted from guidebooks to the Holy Land. It was not until 1905 that the site received a modern archaeological evaluation during the Sinai explorations of Sir Flinders Petrie, the great British Egyptologist. By his own account it was only in spite of high winds, lumbago, and desert rats with an appetite for his luggage that Petrie managed to recover the bulk of the Proto-Sinaitic material in one season. His assignment of the myster- ious inscriptions to a period some two centuries earlier than current dates for the Exodus was fatal to the hypothesis of Cosmas Indicopleustes. 1974, 3) THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST 57 Petrie himself seems never to have regarded the Proto-Sinaitic writing as more than "a local barbarism," as he later styled it. Instead it was Sir Alan Gardiner who first (in 1915) recognized the genuine significance of the sys- tem and its essential character. It was alphabetic. The individual signs were pictographs assigned to discrete phonemes according to an acrophonic principle. That is, a drawing of a familiar object was used to represent the sound with which its name began. Thus, for example, a picture of a house denoted b since the word "house" (*bayt-) began with that sound. The lan- guage was certainly Semitic (the Egyptian word for "house" being pr), and Gardiner was able to make enough identifications to read at least one word with confidence.1 He went on to suggest-correctly as it now seems-that the first alphabet was similarly pictographic in design and acrophonic in operative principle and that it might have been derived under Egyptian influence since the hieroglyphs exhibited similar characteristics though in a much more com- plicated system. Gardiner's interpretation of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions has since been confirmed and considerably extended, especially by the late W.F. Albright (see the bibliography), though much of Albright's decipher- ment must be regarded as tentative; and, in any case, much remains to be learned. To the inscriptions collected by Petrie and subsequent expeditions to Serhbit, two more were added in 1961 by Dr. Georg Gerster, who recovered them from the nearby Wadi Nasb. One of these new texts, reproduced here on the cover, seems very archaic, showing the pictographic character of the script especially well. Note, in particular, the "ox-head" and "fish" in column 3 and the "(human) head" in column 4. This may well be the oldest known example of our alphabet and cannot, in any case, stand far after the invention of the system. The Serabit materials date to the beginning of the Egyptian New King- dom and the transition from Middle to Late Bronze cultures in Palestine. Scattered inscriptions of a similar character and from about the same period have been found in Palestine itself; and, although a few older curiosities have been proposed as alphabetic, there is really no sound evidence for the exist- ence of our alphabet long before the beginning of the sixteenth century B.C. We ought now to regard the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions as a very early use of an old Canaanite alphabet which must have been devised much in the fash- ion described by Gardiner sometime late in the Middle Bronze age. The use of a Canaanite alphabet in an Egyptian mining community in the Sinai should come as no surprise. The participation of Asiatics, ap- parently as state slaves, in the operations is well documented. Already in 1. Or rather one word combined with a preposition: Ib'lt, "to Ba'lat," that is, "to the Lady/Mistress ..." This accorded splendidly with the abundant Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions from the site, which included many votive inscriptions to the goddess Ilatbor, who presided over the temple atSerlbq el-Khidem and was routinely referred to as "the Mistress" of one thing or another, including turquoise. Liatbor'si dentification with the Semitic deity Ba'lat, especially of Byblos, is now amply attested. 58 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. 37, Middle Kingdom times Egyptian hieroglyphic texts from Ser-bit and other Sinaitic sites listed workers specifically from Syria and Palestine. On the other hand, the suggestion that Asiatic servants in Egypt or their kinsmen in the Canaanite homeland were responsible for the invention of the alphabet ought to prompt reflection. Historians unanimously praise the appearance of the alphabet as a singular advancement in civilization, antiquating as it did the clumsy excesses of older systems. This view, though vindicated by the passage of time, is in many respects anachronistic. The great merit of al- phabetic writing is its economy, to be sure; but at the time of its invention, it must have been viewed as a completely practical expediency, a modest re- source to correct the lack of an indigenous writing system. While it is true that both Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform required hundred of distinct signs to represent their languages and the Canaanite al- phabet less than thirty, it is difficult to imagine that the new contrivance was regarded as an improvement over the sophisticated and elaborate systems of the great powers. The immediate advantage of the alphabet's economy was accessibility. In Egypt or Mesopotamia the art of writing was necessarily con- fined to professional scribes with extensive training, but there is no reason to believe that either of those societies desired a more generally accessible way of writing and every reason to believe that they did not. If the long-range political significance of the alphabet is immense, insofar as it has made writ- ten communication and the means of preserving articulate records available to the ordinary man, it would nevertheless be hardly proper for us to trace its origin to an egalitarian impulse. Instead the first alphabet should be de- scribed as a makeshift device of inconspicuous genius. Besides, early al- phabetic writing, since it was purely consonantal in character, admitted am- biguities which the older systems avoided by one means or another and which would not disappear entirely until the Greek introduction of vowels centuries later. So it is neither incorrect nor even excessively romantic to describe the origin of our alphabet as humble. The Emergence of the National Scripts The alphabet entered the Late Bronze age as an unceremonious gathering of pictographs and emerged as a highlyconventionalized procession of shapes. The stages of regulation and abbreviation that were passed are in- completely known; but materials for study are steadily coming to light, and we can now trace the refinement of the old Canaanite alphabet tolerably well in general and very well in some particulars. This refinement is illustrated in Figure 1 as it applies to a selection of letter-forms. In broad outline, it was as follows. As in the case of Egyptian hieroglyphic, the old pictographs could be written in vertical columns or in horizontal rows. The rows might proceed from left to right or right to left. Of these options, only the last would remain in the eleventh century; but the elimination of first the vertical and then the left-to-right directions was quite gradual. Inscriptions from the transitional 1974, 3) THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST 59 period, especially the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, exhibit confusion in the orientation of particular letters. The individual signs were supposed to face in the direction of writing, but the variability of this direction created problems. The epigrapher often finds a form that is reversed, sidelong, or even inverted with respect to its neighbors. There seems to have been a tendency from the beginning to conven- tionalize and simplify the pictographs themselves for facility in drawing. The result was that many of the characters quickly became more abstract than pictorial. This process was so nearly complete by the beginning of the Iron age (ca. 1200) that features reminiscent of the old pictographs already seem quite archaic. Note in Figure 1, for example, the center dot in the round, twelfth-century 'ayin, recalling the pupil in the old "eye" (*'ayn-) pictograph. 6 5 4 3 2 1 t ,. . . .. ....I. vv . ,, Fig. 1. The early development of the alphabet. Top row: Proto-Sinaitic pictographs. Middle row: transitional forms, ca. 1200 B.C. Bottom row: ninth-century Phoenician forms. Letters shown are: (l)'alep ("ox"); (2) kap ("palm"); (3) mem ("water");( 4) 'ayin ("eye"); (5) re! ("head"); (6) Sin ("composite bow"). By about 1100 B.C. a distinctively Phoenician national script was in use in the great port cities north of Palestine. The emergence of new cultures in the rest of Canaan had left Phoenicia the chief heir to the high Bronze age civilization and therefore the legatee of the Canaanite alphabet. To this ex- tent the Phoenician alphabet is not to be considered as a new branch of the old system but instead, its purest Iron age expression. It is also true that the other great national scripts of a later period-Aramaic, Hebrew, and so on- seem to have been mediated to some extent by the Phoenician' in spite of the 2. This is clear for a variety of reasons. For example, Hebrew preserved in the Iron age twenty-three of the Semitic con- sonantal phonemes but Phoenician only twenty-two. The alphabet used by both had only twenty-two signs. This meant that He- brew had to use one sign to represent two distinct sounds (viz., i and i, which in Phoenician had fallen together as 1). Pre- sumably, if the Hebrew alphabet had been derived directly from the older system without Phoenician mediation, it would have kept the signs for both phonemes. 60 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. 37, fact that the Canaanite alphabet had been at home, of course, in the regions occupied by Aram and Israel as well. It follows, then, that except for Phoeni- cian the national scripts of the Iron age are to be described as new branches of the alphabet. By studying the early development of these national scripts, we can see that the advent of such a new branch was not a sudden occurrence. First of all there was a period of preparation during which a particular society would adopt and employ an existing tradition. Then at some later time the writing of the same group would begin to display distinctive features. The new script can soon be distinguished from the parent tradition not only by its innova- tions but also by any features it may have preserved from the moment of its independence which have subsequently disappeared in the parent tradition itself. Such archaisms are a great aid to the paleographer in estimating the time when a particular national script emerged. The Hebrew script, for ex- ample, though the details of its origins remain somewhat obscure, retains features in its early history which recall tenth-century Phoenician forms. On this basis (and others) we should suppose that the national script of Israel, after an initial period of preparation and Phoenician influence, diverged as an independent tradition sometime in the tenth century B.C. The old Aramaic script, incidentally, seems to have had a similar timetable. At least this is suggested by the earliest Aramaic inscriptions which, when they begin to ap- pear in the ninth century, already display features distinctive with respect to Phoenician. The history of the Ammonite script provides an excellent illustration of the development described above. Indeed the recovery of the Transjordanian national scripts is one of the busiest frontiers of the modern investigation of the diffusion of the alphabet. As recently as 1961 George M. Landes, report- ing in this journal on the evidence from modern archaeological activity for the study of Ammonite culture, could only lament the lack of pertinent writ- ten remains. "Our knowledge of the Ammonite dialect," he wrote, "is .. solely dependent upon a few words, mostly personal names, found inscribed on a small collection of Ammonite seals."3 In the few years since the appear- ance of Professof Landes' article, at least three major Ammonite inscriptions have come to light, giving us a complete, if undetailed, picture of the history of the Ammonite script from its divergence to its demise.4 These include: (1) the so-called Amman Citadel Inscription, apparently a fragment of a royal(?) temple dedication of the ninth century B.C.; (2) an interesting wall inscrip- tion from Tell Deir 'Alli5 to be dated early in the seventh century B.C.; and now (3) the inscribed copper bottle from Tell STr~ino n the campus of the University of Jordan as reported in the issue before last of this journal, dating 3. BA, 24 (1961), 65-86; reprinted in BiblicalArchaeologist Reader, 2 (1964), pp. 69-88, esp. 83. 4. These discoveries are reviewed with bibliography and a full discussion of the Ammonite script in a forthcoming issue of BASOR by F.M. Cross. My brief sketch here is heavily dependent on this article, entitled "Notes on the Ammonite Inscription from Tell STr5n,"w hich Professor Cross has kindly made available to me in manuscript form. 1974, 3) THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST 61 to the early sixth century. To these we shall soon be able to add an eleven-line docket of provisions for the royal house from Heshbon. This inscription, Heshbon Ostracon No. 4, was found last year and will soon be published by F.M. Cross. These new materials clarify many tnings which were quite opaque only a few years ago. For example, it is now beyond doubt that the affiliations of the Ammonite language were purely Canaanite-that is, Ammonite belonged to the same language group as Phoenician and Hebrew. The Ammonite appropriation of the alphabet is now thoroughly under- stood. As the Amm n Citadel Inscription shows, the Ammonites in the ninth century still used the standard Aramaic lapidary script. After this period of preparation, a distinctively Ammonite national script diverged from the Aramaic parent tradition sometime in the mid-eighth century, as surviving archaic forms in the seventh-century script of the Deir 'Alld inscription suggest. There then began an age of independent development of which the Sirin bottle is a late exemplar, displaying a number of Ammonite peculiar- ities. Finally the Aramaic script returned in the late sixth century as the imperial hand of the Persian age, and the Ammonite episode in the history of the alphabet was over. It was surely no accident, incidentally, that the use of a national script corresponded to the period of greatest Ammonite prosperity, as the contents of Iron II tombs in and around Ammin had already suggested to Landes and as recently confirmed by the discovery of pottery of high quality at Heshbon. This period in Jordanian history must have been one of considerable political independence, in spite of the nominal suzerainty of Assyria. We expect a priori that the features peculiar to a distinct national script would be most likely to develop in a society with sufficient cultural autonomy to suspend scribal adherence to external models. Indeed it is reasonable to suppose that the growth of a national script was a natural by-product of the rise of national identity. Thus the emergence of national scripts in Iron age Syria and Pales- tine may have corresponded directly to the new nationalism that was sup- planting the old city-state ideology of the Bronze age. It is true, at least, that our paleographic estimates of the antiquity of the various national scripts seem to correspond in general with important junctures in political history. These correspondences include: (1) the derivation of a distinctively Phoeni- cian script to the rise of imperial Tyre at the beginning of the Iron age; (2) the divergence of the Hebrew script to the period after the transition from tribal league to nation-state in Israel; and (3) the divergence of the Aramaic script to the consolidation of the Aramaean kingdom in Damascus after the demise of the Solomonic Empire. The Transmission to Greece The propagation of the Canaanite alphabet in Syria and Palestine and its variety of early expressions in the national scripts of the Iron age are re- latively new areas of research. Until about a generation ago, in fact, early 62 THE BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGIST (Vol. 37, inscriptions in any of the Northwest Semitic languages-Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and so on-were commonly regarded as specimens of a single, more or less homogeneous script. Scholars have learned to distinguish these only lately. The refinement of modern paleographic method to the extent that an early inscription might confidently be dated within general boundaries is al- most as recent a development. As might be expected, these new areas of re- search have greatly influenced older areas. One of the constant stumbling blocks of Semitic and Hellenic epigraphers alike has been the origin of the Greek alphabet; and here the influence of recent research has been especially salutary. fit- ?, Ra tA: Wi W IA i? u~i vy, 1V x, i A 4A Fig. 2. Phoenician tomb inscription from Cyprus, early ninth century B.C. From Bulletin de Correspondance Hell'nique, 92 (1968), pl. 21. Courtesy of the Cyprus Museum. That the Greek alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenician at some point in antiquity has never been in serious doubt. The Greek letters are ar- ranged in the Phoenician order and bear the Phoenician names. Early inscriptions from the two alphabets display clear similarity in the forms of corresponding letters. Moreover, the ancient Greek historians freely acknow- ledged this debt to the Phoenicians; and the letters themselves were some-