A discovery from the Tel Lachish excavation in Israel could be the earliest known example of alphabetic writing in Israel and casts doubt on existing hypotheses about the spread of the alphabet, archaeologists believe.
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According to an article published last week in the Cambridge University journal Antiquity, a team of researchers that included Dr. Haggai Misgav of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem discovered a pottery fragment at Tel Lachish that dates from 1,450 BCE that could be the "missing link" in the development of alphabetic writing.
"This shard is one of the earliest examples of early alphabetic writing discovered in Israel," said co-author Dr. Felix Hoflmayer, who noted that the very existence of the inscription prompted them to "re-think" the appearance and spread of alphabetic writing in the Near East.
The fragment was discovered in 2018, but it was only now reported for the first time. The piece is only some 4 cm. (1.5 inches) long, and appears to have been part of the rim of a bowl imported from Cyprus. The inner part of the fragment is inscribed with a group of diagonal letters in a dark ink. Two lines of three letters each have been discerned, the team wrote.
The writing has been identified as proto-Canaanite, whose letters are based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. Although the partial nature of the fragment has presented difficulty in deciphering the writing, the researchers believe that they have identified the words "slave" or possibly a person's name containing the same letters, and the early Hebrew word "nefet" (honey). However, the experts noted that the meaning of the words could change depending on whether they were read from right to left or left to right.
So why does this small bit of Cypriot pottery play such a huge part in our understanding of the development of the alphabet? The new find casts doubt on previous hypotheses that the alphabet was spread throughout the region by the dominant Egyptian culture.
Archaeologists working in Sinai in 1905 discovered a written inscription that they dated to 1,800 BCE, and additional inscriptions dating to 1,300 have been discovered in the Levant. But until the shard from Tel Lachish, there was a gap of several hundred years between the inscription from Sinai and others in the Levant region, from where the alphabet is believed to have spread throughout what we now know as the Middle East and developed into systems of writing that included early Hebrew script.
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