What makes this discovery important, Seth Sanders, a professor of religious studies at UC-Davis and author of the book The Invention of Hebrew told me, is that it was found in a “securely dated context.” So much of this conversation rests on when we date the composition of various fragments of ancient writing. Not everyone is convinced by Höflmayer’s arguments. Perhaps it is possible that an enslaved person was involved in the production of this inscription we certainly shouldn’t exclude this possibility form the history of writing. What’s particularly interesting, given the way in which many scholars have tied the development of alphabetic script to the history of oppression, is that the letters of the first word (ayin, bet, dalet) spell the word “slave.” Though Höflmayer stresses that this could be purely accidental as these letters form the beginning of many ancient words, some might wish to read more here. Though the early version used in the Arabian Peninsula are visually quite different from the Hebrew alphabet used today, there’s a clear connection between the two. Anyone who has learned Hebrew will recognize the names of these letters as part of the Semitic alphabet. The first word contains the letters ayin, bet and dalet while the second begins with the letters nun, pe, and tav. The inscription itself is fragmentary and is thus near impossible to decipher. Dye, Austrian Academy of Sciences/Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd “The proliferation into the Southern Levant,” the authors write, “probably happened during the (late) Middle Bronze Age and the Egyptian Second Intermediate Period, when a Dynasty of Western Asiatic origin (the Hyksos) ruled the northern parts of Egypt.” What this means is “that early alphabetic writing in the Southern Levant developed independently of, and well before, the Egyptian domination and floruit of hieratic writing during the … thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.” The fact that hieroglyphic symbols are also found on the jar might suggest that whomever produced the inscription was familiar with both hieroglyphic and emergent alphabetic script. Up until 1550 BCE the Hyskos, a group from the Levant, ruled parts of northern Egypt as well as controlling much of the Levant. Höflmayer and his team suggests that the inscription doesn’t just provide another data point, its early date changes how we think about the emergence of the alphabet. Given that it is dated to 1450 BCE (the fifteenth century BCE) the new inscription fills the gap. How and under what circumstances the alphabet was moved from Egypt to Israel was anyone’s best guess. It’s clear that at some point alphabetic writing moved from Egypt to ancient Palestine but-until now-the earliest examples of alphabetic writing from the Levant were dated to the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, some six hundred years after the Egyptian examples. These important inscriptions were discovered in 1998 in western Egypt and were published by a team led by Yale Egyptologist John Darnell. General scholarly agreement maintains that our oldest examples of alphabetic writing comes from the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt and can be dated to the nineteenth century BCE. Höflmayer said that the “inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant.” The pottery fragment includes a partial inscription that dates to the fifteenth century BCE. In a recently published article in Antiquity, a research team led by Felix Höflmayer, an archaeologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, describes the discovery of three and a half millennia old milk jar fragment unearthed at Tel Lachish in Israel. Now, archaeologists in Israel claim that they have discovered a “missing piece” of the puzzle. For all its importance, though, the limited archeological evidence makes it difficult to tell the history of western. Even if people are divided by language, it’s by writing that ideas and stories are unshackled from individual speakers and can travel and move across space and time. If you roll the wheel to the side, however, the alphabet and different ways of producing and arranging it, like the printing press, have also had a sizeable impact on the course of human history. When it comes to the fruits of human genius the wheel gets a lot of credit as the most important invention in human history.
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