Re: [hebrew] Re: Ancient Northwest Semitic Script (was Re: why Aramaic now)

From: Elaine Keown (elaine_keown@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Dec 26 2003 - 12:13:41 EST

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          Elaine Keown
          still in Texas

    Dear Michael Everson, Dean Snyder, and Lists:

    I am grateful that Michael Everson chose to share his
    thinking (and, I guess, that of Rick McGowan and Ken
    Whistler) on Semitic alphabet(s) with us. I had been
    wondering for a long time where the Roadmap ideas came
    from.

    > >If you are thinking of chronology and mean that
    > > Phoenician came first, most scholars would agree
    > > with you.

    As I wrote a few days ago, I think there's a period of
    time--- ~1,700 B.C.E.-~1,150 B.C.E.---where there's a
    great deal of arguing by real epigraphers over what
    happened with the scraps of alphabetic text they found
    in many places.

    But they have now found alphabetic texts in Syria (the
    cuneiform Ugaritic), the southern Sinai, and in Wadi
    el-Hol of the Egyptian Western Desert (west of the
    watered, rich triangle of the Nile Delta). I think
    they're all about 1,800-1,600 B.C.E.

    The alphabetic items from southern Sinai were
    discovered about 1915 and have been greatly argued
    over--was this really a script? what direction was it
    written in? Etc. I have only heard that they had
    different opinions at Harvard and at UChicago. I
    don't know (sorry) how these texts are viewed at Johns
    Hopkins.

    But in 1993 Egyptologists discovered more, longer
    textual material like the Sinaitic material at Wadi
    el-Hol. I believe they think the Wadi el-Hol material
    is from Aramaeans who were soldiers in the western
    desert.

    So it's quite possible that the real grandmother
    alphabet was invented in Egypt or Sinai, which means
    that the Phoenicians used a pre-existing script.

    I am NOT an epigrapher--I can read pointed square
    script and some modern Israeli stuff (street signs,
    very very simple newspaper articles, menus). I feel
    like I am climbing further and further out on some
    limb when I write these things. I hope that Dean
    Snyder and other fully trained Semitists will chime in
    and comment.

    Elaine

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