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| ............ | The Earliest
Alphabets 1st of 3 pages
An alphabet is often defined as an ordered set of phonograms The following is a photograph of the earliest evidence for that order The caption [below] repeats and interprets the cuneiform characters
Date: ca. 1400-1200 B.C. Material: Clay Dimensions: ca. 8 in. This small clay tablet was found in the ruins of the ancient city of Ugarit, located near modern Ra's Shamra on the northern Syrian coast, in 1948. Ugarit flourished from 1400 to 1200 B.C. The tablet above was part of a hoard of over 300 clay tablets that have been found since 1929. Most of the tablets were mythological texts but one was an abedediary. The Syrian artifact, shown above, may have been created by an apprentice scribe practicing his ABC's. Three characters appear to be missing. The order is correlated with the lunar asterisms The Ugarit script was simpler than Akkadian [see below] but it never caught on outside of Ugarit. There is no evidence [yet] of a wide geographic distribution for this notation. The older script remained the preferred writing system for international diplomacy for another 500 years. Related Sites:
works only with MS explorer - does not work as well as some of the hieroglyphic transcribers http://www.proel.org/alfabetos.html
outside references |
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| *Permission granted
for re-use of original illustrations for scholarly purposes.
As can be seen in the next chart, many of the Ugarit notations were simplified forms of Akkadian. Because Akkadian, the language of later inhabitants of Sumer, became the language of international communication it was studied in schools throughout the ancient Middle East. The use of cuneiform spread to Asia Minor, Syria, Persia, and, for diplomatic correspondence, to Egypt. [see the amarna tablets]. During the late bronze age, the dominant script was Akkadian cuneiform. The simplified Ugarit cuneiform does not seem to have caught on anywhere other than in this city in northern Syria where over 300 tablets habe been unearthed. A direct influence on the development of the Canaanite-Phoenician script is not known. We know that some of the pictographic nature of the Sinai script [column 4] was preserved in Phonenician [column 3]. Sometimes it was preserved both in shape and name. Beyt [house] preserved the name but not the shape. Daleth [door] preserved the shape but not the original name [dag-fish]. The Phonenician 'alef looks like a modern K and the bet looks like a g. Shapes closer to the Sinai forms are preserved in the southern semitic scripts. The Phoenician H as an E shape related
to the Sinai rejoicing man figure which in turn is related to the middle
Egyptian glyph for hail or priase. There is also an Egyptian glyph
for hut which is also close in terms of sound and shape. [more]
Similar charts for Hebrew/Canaanite letters, Semitic Letters, and Hieroglyphics - 2
Click here to add the large lunar mansions
graphic to the page
¹ "Now the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus, and to whom the Gephyraei belonged, introduced into Greece upon their arrival a great variety of arts, among the rest that of writing, whereof the Greeks till then had, as I think, been ignorant. And originally they shaped their letters exactly like all the other Phoenicians, but afterwards, in course of time, they changed by degrees their language, and together with it the form likewise of their characters. Now the Greeks who dwelt about those parts at that time were chiefly the Ionians. The Phoenician letters were accordingly adopted by them, but with some variation in the shape of a few, and so they arrived at the present use, still calling the letters Phoenician, as justice required, after the name of those who were the first to introduce them into Greece." The History of Herodotus p: 502. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Pantheon/5061/ugarit.html The cadmus myth |
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Links
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| Bibliography
[link now, see longer bibliography
with alphabet
origins p. 2]
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