Among the specialists on the history ofalphabets, there is general agreement that the complex of pre-IslamicArabic alphabets separated from the Canaanite system about the timeof the transition between the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, i.e.,ca. 1200 B.C. (Cross 1979; Naveh 1982). The implications of theseagreements seem to have been missed by some students of Old SouthArabic who still derive the ONA alphabets from the Yemeniscripts.
Actually, the situation, as usual, is muchmore complex historically than present theories would have usbelieve. There is now very good reason to believe that there wasalready in the Late Bronze age a systematic contrast between whatbecame the Phoenician and Arabic alphabetic complexes in the courseof the Iron Age. The same is true of the languages themselves, butthat is subject matter for another discussion. Here we deal simplywith the writing systems.
All recent discussions of the history ofLevantine alphabets attempt to develop a seriation of forms, basedentirely (and necessarily of course) upon the present inventory ofalphabetic inscriptions. So far the inventory of Bronze Agealphabetic inscriptions is far too small to justify the type of rigidseriation that the philologians have created. Instead, as is trueeverywhere else where evidence is available, in the formative periodof writing systems there is a plethora of local alphabets within agiven region, all related to each other, but rarely derivable onefrom another. Thus we have at least 32 different early Greekalphabets, about 14 early Etruscan, and it remains to be seen howmany Bronze Age Semitic local alphabets existed.
Of one fact we can be sure: there was nosuch thing as the "standard Canaanite alphabet" until the 10thCentury B.C., (pace Cross) and even that conclusion rests upon veryslender evidence indeed. Furthermore, that "standard Canaanitealphabet" existed (if at all) for little more than a century beforeit broke down again into a variety of local alphabets. Theconsternation produced by the alphabetic forms of the T. Fekheriyehstele is an amusing example of the fact that theories based uponevidence derived from a very limited geographical and cultural milieu(Palestine & Lebanon) are wrecked on the hard evidence ofinscriptions from a different cultural region. One scholar went sofar as to proclaim the inscription a "fake" because its letter formsdid not conform to the orthodox theory.
Mentioned only in passing or ignoredentirely is the extremely important small corpus of syllabicinscriptions from Byblos for which I published a decipherment in1985. Reviewers have been so shocked by the content that emerged thatthey have virtually ignored the purely formal ties between thesyllabic system and the later alphabets. Those ties are validentirely independent of the question concerning the accuracy of thetranslation of those very difficult texts.
There has been no convincing argumentagainst Dunand's dating of the syllabic inscriptions no later thanthe Egyptian Middle Kingdom period, i.e., before about 1800 B.C. Theinternal evidence that the inscriptions yield is entirely compatiblewith that dating, indeed demands a dating before the Hyksos period.There is good reason to believe that they originated well before 1800B.C. and did not survive into the so-called Hyksos period of Egypt,the MB II period in Palestinian archaeology.
Others (Cross 1979; Naveh 1982) havecollected the evidence for the MB II-LB I alphabetic inscriptions,and so far no inscriptions in the syllabic system later than about1800 B.C. have been discovered. Though some works on the history ofthe alphabet still cite the Balu'ah stele as a later example ofsyllabic writing (Naveh: 1982), Ward and Martin (1964) years agoexploded that myth by demonstrating that it is merely a very badlyeroded Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription. I was very gratified withthis conclusion, since years of work on the Byblos Syllabicinscriptions had already convinced me that there was no connectionwith the Balu'ah stele. An attempt to date the Byblos Syllabic corpusto the LB age by alleging syllabic signs on the reverse of analphabetic spatula is simply illusory (Mendenhall 1985: p.6).
Nineteen of the twenty-nine characters ofthe Sabaean alphabet have prototypes in the Byblos Syllabic system.Of those nineteen, six are signs that are not used at all in thevarious inscriptions regarded as Canaanite, but have the sameconsonantal values in these early syllabic inscriptions. In addition,several signs that do derive from the same source as the Canaanitecharacters have forms that are not likely to have been "borrowed"from the LB Age Canaanite alphabet, but do derive from a earliercommon prototype.
Some of these signs thus are demonstrated tohave their origin in the Levant before the existence of any knownalphabet and nearly a millennium before any writing at all is knownin the Old South Arabic milieu. Many of the letter forms of the lateralphabets, whether Canaanite or proto-Arabic occur in the syllabicsystem, and can be presumed to have derived from it (Mendenhall 1985,Ch.4). These forms were thus inherited by the later alphabeticsystems, but the syllabic system had three times as many forms as thealphabets needed, so two thirds of the syllabic characters droppedout of use as otiose. The importance of this simple fact lies in thecontrast between the selection of signs that survived in the twoalphabetic systems, for the two did not ultimately select the samecharacter from the series of three that existed in the syllabicsystem for each consonant, namely Ca, Ci, and Cu.
What much later became the mainstreamCanaanite (or Central Alphabet, to use the terminology that seemsmost appropriate) and the complex of pre-Islamic (or Eastern)alphabets had their major source in the Syllabic system of Byblos.Clearly this system was not the only source for both alphabetictraditions, but it is equally clear that contrary to prevailingtheory, neither of the later alphabets can be derived simply from theother. They had inter-related and parallel histories until about the13th century B.C., when the Eastern alphabet tradition became almostentirely separated from the Central tradition by the process ofgeographical removal and social disruption.
The evidence for the historicalreconstruction described above consists of three separate bodies ofevidence. The first is portrayed in Table I, that shows the contrastbetween ONA, OSA and Central traditions in their derivations fromseparate signs of the Byblos signary. In addition to these ninecharacters that were not utilized in the Central Alphabet, there area dozen or more characters that the two alphabetic traditions sharein common. With a very few exceptions, all of these letter forms areattested in the Levant (including the Sinai) in the Bronze Age. Thereshould be little doubt that all the pre-Islamic alphabets exhibit asubstantial continuity from the Syro-Palestinian complex of alphabetsnow attested from the 16th century B.C. to the end of the Bronze Age,and from Lebanon to the Sinai and Egypt (Cross: 1979).
The second body of evidence consists ofinscriptions that are either ignored or dismissed as "by-forms" ofthe alphabet (Cross: 1979). The first example is the ostracon fromTell Jisr in the lower Litani River valley in the Biq`a of Lebanon(Mendenhall: 1971). (Figure 1) Though the sherd has not yet beensecurely dated, the double rope-molding feature is very typical of MBpottery in the middle Euphrates valley of Syria, and my colleague Dr.C. Lenzen informs me that the same features appear on MB pottery atTell Irbid in northern Jordan. (Figure 2) The inscription is verydifficult, but it clearly exhibits both the dâl and thethâ of later Eastern alphabets. If the ceramic evidenceis reliable, the sherd is perhaps older than any other alphabeticinscription so far discovered.
The second example of Bronze Ageinscriptions related to the Eastern Alphabetic tradition comes fromKamid el-Loz, just a few kilometers upstream from Tell Jisr (Figure3). These ostraca published by Mansfeld in 1969 are securely datedto ca. 1400 B.C., and their connections with the Eastern alphabetshave already been noted, and summarily and arbitrarily dismissed byCross (1979, p. 100): "...there is insufficient reason to assign theKamid el-Loz sherds to the Proto-Canaanite corpus." Precisely! Theprevailing theory simply dismisses the evidence that other corporaexisted in the Bronze Age, and that each cultural area had its ownalphabetic heritage, so to speak.
Ostracon 2 from Kamid el-Loz is virtuallypure Arabic. It is true that the forms occur much later in otherregions, and such occurrences simply illustrate a virtually universalprinciple: that relict areas typically exhibit extremely archaicfeatures. The inscription reads from left to right (or top to bottomas the case may be): l mtry. The other ostracon is probably to beread: qr'. Both names occur in ONA inscriptions: mtr, and the fem.form mtrt, on the one hand, and qr'm, on the other. Neither name isin frequent use or has a reasonable explanation from within Arabic,which is another indication of their very archaic origins.
From the transition between LB and EarlyIron Ages comes another possible connection between the EasternAlphabet tradition and those of the North. In this case it is thestill undeciphered and controversial clay tablet from Der'alla in theJordan Valley. The character composed of a vertical stroke with acircular hole punched at its upper end is identical in form with theyod of the Eastern Alphabets, for which there has never been aconvincing derivation. The vertical stroke, however, does represent/i/ in a number of Anatolian alphabets, and a very similar formoccurs with similar phonetic connections in the hieroglyphic Luwiansignary. If this isomorph stood alone, it would not be convincing,but there are a number of other illustrations of connections betweenthe Eastern alphabets and those of Anatolia (and Greece) includingsome evidence still unpublished.
Another indication of a continuity ofalphabetic tradition in the inland area is furnished by the ONAalphabets that exhibit an 'alif that cannot be derived from the OSAform. (Figure 4)
The Safaitic form that is used also in therelatively late Thamudic inscriptions occurs already in the late 7thcentury building inscription from the Umm Ruj‚m cistern, justNorth of Amman. Its form in multiple variations (as usual) derivesfrom the 10th century 'alif from Byblos; there is no other reasonableexplanation for it.
A third witness to the northern origin ofthe OSA literacy is the Beth-Shemesh tablet in Ugaritic cuneiform,which has now been proven to be an abecedary with the OSA order ofletters of the alphabet, but with the typical Iron Age inventory ofonly 22 characters (Ryckmans 1988). It is clear that not only theforms of the Eastern alphabet characters were derived independentlyof the Central Alphabet from the Late Bronze Age of the Levant, butalso that there existed in that region a tradition of the order ofletters of the alphabet that was independent of the Canaanite order.There can now be little doubt that an Eastern Alphabet system,together with its order of letters existed in the Syro-Palestinianregion in the 13th century B.C., and was subsequently transmitted andpreserved in the Arabian peninsula until the rise of Islam.
For a half-century or more, there seems tohave been a hermetically sealed academic compartmentalization betweenAncient Near Eastern and Arabic studies. This is illustrated by twoworks of a past generation: first, my own teacher's presidentialaddress at the SBL in 1938, in which he maintained that there waslittle or no continuity between the ancient Near East and the Islamicculture. Second, the influential and massive work by R. Dussaud on Lapénétration des arabes.... It is also amusinglyillustrated by the "Instructions for Contributors to the Bulletin ofthe American Schools of Oriental Research" issued in 1976. This sixpage manual gave detailed instructions for transliteration ofvirtually every ancient language, but didn't even mention Arabic(BASOR 222:81-87). Both of these works, perhaps unconsciously,assumed the accuracy of the old 19th century concept of successivewave of cultureless barbarian nomads penetrating into the civilizedregions of the Fertile Crescent, bringing with them nothing butanother branch of the Semitic language family, the hypothesisdescribed succinctly by J. Kupper as late as 1957 (p. xiv). Thistheory that underlays the concept of the common features thatconstitute the evidence for the entire Semitic language family is nowabsurd.
Those common features, especiallyvocabulary, were not created by the Dewey Decimal classificationsystem of a university library, nor even by the great decipherers ofthe 19th century. They were created by populations in contact at someremote period that doubtless extends far back into pre-historictimes. The place of contact can no longer be found in the ArabianPeninsula, but in the areas of high density of population in theSyro-Palestinian area, where sedentary village peoples are wellattested from the end of the Old Stone Age into the historic period.
E. A. Knauf (1988) has presented a scenariothat describes the historical processes underlying the relationshipsbetween those peoples of the Fertile Crescent, and the Semiticspeaking populations of the Arabian Peninsula. He places thepenetration of Semitic into the Yemen at the EB/MB transition period,but the evidence is extremely tenuous. It is a priori more likelythat the population of that region at that time was related to theHamito-Semitic peoples of Africa, and these peoples furnished thesub-stratum that introduced a number of innovations into the entireSouth Semitic/Ethiopic linguistic corpus. On the other hand, theevidence for the LB/EI transition is massive and detailed as pointedout above.
The history of the Semitic languages is thehistory of the populations of the Fertile Crescent, and that ischaracterized by an almost constant process of fission and fusion,the breaking down into local dialects (a language is simply a dialectwith an army and a navy), and the production of a succession oflingua francas. Tracing this in more detail will be the rewardingtask of future generations of scholars sensitized to the processes ofhistorical and social linguistics.