The Byblos script, also known as the Byblos syllabary, Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos, a coastal city in Lebanon. The inscriptions are engraved on bronze plates and spatulas, and carved in stone. They were excavated by Maurice Dunand, from 1928 to 1932, and published in 1945 in his monograph Byblia Grammata. The inscriptions are conventionally dated to the second millennium BC, probably between the 18th and 15th centuries BC.
Examples of the script have also been discovered in Egypt, Italy, and Megiddo (Garbini, Colless).
Description of the script
Fourteen inscriptions
The Byblos script is usually written from right to left; word dividers are rarely used. Ten inscriptions were described by Dunand in 1945, named a to j in their order of discovery. They are:[1]
Two rectangular bronze tablets, documents c (16×11cm) and d (21×12cm), with 225 and 459 characters, respectively. Both tablets are inscribed on both sides. The characters were not made by scratching but by hammering chisels into the metal.
Four bronze "spatulas" (documents b, e, f, and i, with 40, 17, 48, and 84 characters, respectively). These spatulas have a more or less triangular shape with a "flower stem" handle at the sharpest angle of the triangle. They are about 5 by 9 centimeters and 1mm thick. It is not known what their function was, but Dunand thinks they are "labels" attached to, for example, votive objects. All spatulas are inscribed on both sides, except spatula e (one side only). The writing is relatively sloppy. The text on the back side of spatula f is the only text known that reads from left to right. Spatulae b and i use short vertical strokes as word dividers.
Inscription on spatula e
Inscription on spatula e. The handle of the spatula has broken off; four possible reconstructions of the damaged leftmost character of the inscription are given.
Four fragments of stone steles: documents a, g, h, and j, with 116, 37, 7, and 13 characters respectively. The characters are carefully carved, with conspicuous interlinear baselines ("monumental style"). Dunand suggests that fragments h and j originally belonged to the same monument; the chemical composition of the limestone of both seems identical. The text on fragment g is written vertically, in five columns. Block j has vertical strokes, apparently as word dividers.
In 1978 Dunand published four more inscriptions on stone slabs, referred to as k to n, with approximately 28, 45, 10, and 20 signs, respectively.[2] A four-line part of inscription l consisting of characters not elsewhere found in Proto-Byblian texts has been interpreted as an Egyptian dating formula in the hieratic script.[3]
Photos and diagrams of all fourteen inscriptions are given by Sass.[2]
Related inscriptions
At least four objects are known with traces of Proto-Byblian inscriptions. They have been studied by Malachi Martin.[4] When such an object was later reused, the original text was largely erased and replaced by an inscription in Phoenician alphabetic characters. Several of these Phoenician inscriptions are dated to the 10th century BCE, which suggests that objects with Pseudo-hieroglyphs may have remained in use longer than is usually assumed.
One of these palimpsest objects is the bronze so-called Azarba‘al Spatula. On its seemingly empty back side many traces are still visible of a Proto-Byblian inscription that Dunand at first thought were random traces made by the engraver trying his stylus.[5] Martin however identified a text of 31 signs in four lines, which he tried to interpret. He concluded that the inscription included seven cases of a consonant written twice, first in a “primitive” form (Egyptian hieroglyph, Proto-Sinaitic script), and then in the proper Proto-Byblian or Phoenician form, and he therefore called the script “mixed” or “developed” Pseudo-hieroglyphic. On the front side of the spatula an erased Proto-Byblian inscription is overwritten with a Phoenician text, but some fifteen signs of the original text are still visible.
Traces of Proto-Byblian characters are also visible on the Ahiram sarcophagus (five signs) and the Yehimilk inscription (at least 26 signs); clearly here too an older inscription was partly effaced and overwritten with a text in Phoenician alphabetic characters.[6]
Finally, traces of ten Proto-Byblian characters are still visible between the lines of a monumental inscription in stone (the so-called “Enigmatic Byblos stone”) that has been found in Byblos. The later text is written in a script that seems intermediate between Pseudo-hieroglyphs and the later Phoenician alphabet: while most of the 21 characters are common to both the Pseudo-hieroglyphic script and the Phoenician alphabet, the few remaining signs are either Pseudo-hieroglyphic or Phoenician.[7][8]
Martin has noted that a particular sequence of four Pseudo-hieroglyphs () appears again and again: it is visible on the Azarba‘al Spatula, the Enigmatic stone, and no less than three times on the Yehimilk inscription, where this sequence is overwritten each time with the city name Gubal (Byblos).[9] This reminds one of the final part of the Ahiram inscription where those who "chisel away" a funeral inscription are cursed.[10]
Isolated characters from the Byblos syllabary have also been found on various other objects, such as axes, a dagger, and pottery.[11]
Sign list
Sign list.
Each cell in the adjoining table shows a sign (upper left), its Dunand code number (lower left, in red), its frequency (lower right), and indicates (upper right) whether it was used on tablets (T), spatulas (S), or monuments (M). Signs in different cells may actually be writing variants of a single sign; for example, in the top row the signs H6, G17, and E12 are probably the same sign.
Number of different signs
The ten main Pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions together contain 1046 characters, while the number of 'signs', that is different characters, is given by Dunand as 114. Garbini has noted that the latter number probably is too high, for two reasons. First, Dunand's sign list includes heavily damaged characters for which it is impossible to say whether they really constitute a new sign. Secondly, writing variants clearly existed, for example between the "monumental" style of the steles and the "linear" style of the spatulas and tablets. Taking these variants into account would reduce the total number of signs.
Garbini estimates the actual number of signs to be about 90. This number suggests the script to be a syllabary, where each character was pronounced as a syllable, usually a consonant-plus-vowel combination. If the number of consonants were between 22 (like the later Phoenician alphabet) and 28 (like Ugaritic) and if the number of vowels were three (the original Semitic vowels were a, i, and u) or four to six (if it included an e and o, or a mute vowel), then the total number of signs needed would be between 3×22=66 and 6×28=168, which is of the right order of magnitude for a syllabary.
Relation to other scripts
It has been observed that some signs, for example , look like modified common Egyptian hieroglyphs, but there are many others which do not. According to Hoch (1990), many of the signs seem to derive from Old Kingdomhieratic, rather than directly from hieroglyphic. It is known that from as early as 2600 BC Egyptian influence in Byblos was strong: Byblos was the main export harbor for cedar wood to Egypt, and consequently there was a considerable Egyptian merchant community in Byblos. Thus it is plausible that the syllabary was devised by someone in Byblos who had seen Egyptian hieroglyphs and used them freely as an example to compose a new syllabary that was better adapted to the native language of Byblos—just as in neighbouring Ugarit a few centuries later a cuneiform alphabet was devised that was easier to use than the complicated Akkadian cuneiform.[12]
According to Brian Colless (2014), several signs resemble letters of the later Phoenician alphabet: , and as many as 18 of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet have counterparts in the syllabary. This would entail that the latter was derived in some way from the syllabary. Colless believes that the proto-alphabet evolved as a simplification of the syllabary, moving from syllabic to consonantal writing, in the style of the Egyptian script (which did not normally indicate vowels). Thus, in his view, the inscriptions are an important link between the Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the later Semitic abjads derived from Proto-Sinaitic.
Attempts at decipherment
Dhorme (1946)
The corpus of inscriptions is generally considered far too small to permit a systematic decipherment on the basis of an internal analysis of the texts. Yet already in 1946, one year after Dunand published the inscriptions, a claim for its decipherment was made, by Edouard Dhorme, a renowned Orientalist and former cryptanalyst from Paris. He noted that on the back of one of the inscribed bronze plates was a much shorter inscription ending in a row of seven nearly identical chevron-like marks, very much like our number "1111111". He assumed this to be a number (probably "seven", though Dhorme took it to be 4×10+3=43 because four marks were slightly larger than the other three), and guessed that the backside inscription as a whole contained a dating of the inscription.
The word directly before the seven "1" marks consists of four different signs: . The first (rightmost) sign, damaged but recognizable, and the leftmost sign resemble the letters 'b' and 't', respectively, of the later Phoenician alphabet. Dhorme now interpreted the whole word ('b-..-..-t') as Phoenician "b(a) + š(a)-n-t", "in the year (of)" (Hebrew bišnat), which gave him the phonetic meanings of all four signs. These he substituted in the rest of the inscriptions, thereby looking for recognizable parts of more Phoenician words that would give him the reading of more signs. In the end he proposed transcriptions for 75 signs.
Sobelman (1961)
Harvey Sobelman did not try to find phonetic values for the various signs, but instead tried to determine word boundaries and find grammatical patterns, using linguistic techniques. Daniels' judgement is that Sobelman's "result should be taken into account in all future work on these texts."
Martin (1961-1962)
In 1961 and 1962 Malachi Martin published two articles, after an autopsy of all inscriptions then in existence (one tablet had been partly lost when Dunand had tried to remove its thick oxide crust[13]). The first article[14] was devoted to vague, half-erased traces of Proto-Byblian signs on several objects, already hinted at by Dunand.[15] The clearest signs were on the back side of the Azarba‘al Spatula. Martin there saw parallels with Egyptian hieroglyphs, Phoenician consonantal signs, and also two presumed determinatives ("to pray, speak" and "deity, Lord (of)"). He identified four Semitic words, but refrained from an all-out translation. He also described the vague signs he detected on three stone monuments (the Yeḥimilk and Aḥiram inscriptions and the Enigmatic Stone).
In his second article, in two parts, Martin first presented corrections to Dunand's readings.[16][17] Subsequently, he proposed a categorization of the various signs into 27 "classes". The signs in each class he considered either "identical", or "variants of the same fundamental type". Variants he attributed to the different writing materials (stone, metal), or achievement and freedom of individual engravers. His 27 classes seem to suggest that Martin thought it possible that the syllabary might be an alphabet, but he did not draw this conclusion explicitly. After publishing this part of his analysis he never published a sequel.
Mendenhall (1985)
In 1985 a new translation attempt was published by George E. Mendenhall from the University of Michigan. Many signs that reappear in the later Phoenician alphabet were assumed by Mendenhall to have a similar phonetic value. For example, the sign which in Phoenician has the value g (Hebrew gimel), is assumed to have the phonetic value ga. A sign which resembles an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "King of Upper Egypt" is interpreted as "mulku" (Semitic for 'regal'; compare Hebrew mèlekh, 'king'), which furnished the phonetic reading mu. The latter example illustrates that Mendenhall extensively made use of the acrophonic principle, where the phonetic value of a syllabic sign is assumed to be equal to the initial sound of the (Semitic) word for the object that is depicted by the sign.
Mendenhall took the language to be very early ("Old Coastal") Semitic, from before the split between the Northwest Semitic (Phoenician, Hebrew) and South Semitic (Old South Arabian) language groups. He dated the texts to as early as 2400 BC. As noted earlier, James Hoch (1990) sees the source of the signs in Egyptian Old Kingdom characters (c. 2700–2200 BC) and so this West Semitic syllabary would have been invented in that period.
The translations proposed by Mendenhall are often cryptic: "Adze that Yipuyu and Hagara make binding. Verily, in accordance with that which Sara and Ti.pu established we will be surety. Further: with Miku is the pledge." (Spatula document F, which includes three witness marks). The text with the seven '1' marks, referred to above (Bronze Tablet C) is interpreted by Mendenhall as a marriage contract, where the marks are the "signatures" of seven witnesses. For Mendenhall, Document D (the longest text) is a covenant document between a king and his vassals. The decipherment should not be judged on the basis of Mendenhall's translations but on the plausibility of the texts his system reveals, and also whether his table of signs and sounds produces credible results on other inscriptions that were not included in his decipherment procedure.
Brian Colless (1992, 1998) supports Mendenhall's decipherment, and argues that the Megiddo signet-ring confirms it, reading (according to Mendenhall's identifications for the signs): "Sealed, the sceptre of Megiddo". This is just one indication that use of this script was not confined to Byblos. Inscriptions employing this West Semitic syllabary have also been found in Egypt.
Jan Best (2008)
List of Byblos sign values according to Jan Best.
In 2008 Jan Best, a Dutchprehistorian and protohistorian, published an article Breaking the Code of the Byblos Script.[18] He focused on the long tablets c and d. Best, who before had presented readings of Linear A on the assumption that its signs generally had the same sound value as in Linear B, noted that, in turn, several Byblos signs were similar to Linear A signs. He thus read the sequences wa-ya and u-ya, which appear several times. Best identified them as the Semitic word wa, 'and', just like in Linear A.[19]
Most Byblos texts do not have word dividers. However, just before the word wa a curved sign ")" was present several times. Best interpreted it as a punctuation mark, a "comma". He also interpreted the double "))" as a "semicolon", an A-shaped sign as a "colon", and a circle "O" as a "full stop".[19]
On tablets c and d several sequences are present multiple times, and there are also many near-repeating sequences (where only one sign differs). These could be interpreted as spelling variants, especially of proper names.
Best started by assigning to several Byblos signs a phonetical value on the basis of their similarity with signs from Linear A (or occasionally Egyptian or Cretan hieroglyphs). If a longer sequence with one unknown sign could be interpreted as an appropriate Semitic word or name, this yielded a guess for the value of that unknown sign. For example the doublet wa-X-ya-lu / wa-X-ya-le he read as wa-ka-ya-lu/e, Akkadian waklu, 'overseers'. Thus proceeding, Best successively read some fifty signs. He found that the -u/-e ambiguity seen in wa-ka-ya-lu/e, which is also known in Linear A (where the same word is spelled sometimes ending in -u, sometimes in -e), was quite common on tablets c and d.[20]
Best concluded that most Byblos syllables belong to four vowel sequences (like la, le, li, lu—an -o series -*lo seems to be absent). In addition there is an -im series (lim). In a few cases a different sign is used to indicate a long vowel (long lī vs. short li).[20]
Tablet c, according to Best's interpretation, recorded gifts for the dedication of a temple built at Byblos for the Sun god Šuraya, the Indo-Arian equivalent of the Egyptian sun god Amon-Re. At the end of tablet c the conspicuous number 'seven' corresponds with the names of the seven men who oversaw the building project.[21] The larger tablet d is similar, but more elaborate, recording the construction of a larger temple for Šuraya also at Byblos, for which there were no less than nine overseers.[22] And stone monument a apparently records yet another building project, with three "overseers".[23] The small spatulas are common votive presents (on spatula f the name of the Sun god Šuraya appears).[24]
The language of the inscriptions is Northwest Semitic—Best emphasized the similarities in vocabulary, morphology, and syntax with 18th-century Akkadian. However, Byblian also had its own peculiarities, for example archaic uncontracted word forms where Akkadian has a contracted form, or a convention to sometimes write -a- as -a-ya- (like waka(y)alu > waklu, wa-ya = wa).[25]
Alalakh and Aleppo threatened by the Hittites, ca. 1650 BCE.
Several names in the texts are well-known from Akkadian archives, such as the names of two rulers, Yarimlim (III?[26]), king of Aleppo, and Ammitaku (II?), a petty ruler at Alalakh; and among the seven dedicators on tablet c we encounter a name that sounds familiar: Ya-wa-ne Yu-za-le-yu-su, or 'the Greek Euzaleos'.[27] Occasionally Hurrian loanwords (pi-ta-ki-, 'to build [a ritual building]', a Hurrian technical term) and proper names (Tišedal) are present, testimony of Hurrian influence.[25] Best surmised that the building of the three temples for the Sun god, with rich temple gifts (gold, oil, rituals), may have been meant to propitiate the Egyptian pharaoh and to tempt him to support Yarimlim and Ammitaku against the Hittite king Hattusilis I who threatened to attack the region around 1650 BCE. Only a few years later would Hattusilis indeed capture Alalakh,[28] Byblos was destroyed, and the Byblos script inscriptions became buried in its ruins.[29]
Reviews of Best's 2010 book Het Byblosschrift ontcijferd (The Byblos Script deciphered) were somewhat mixed. The idea that the syllabic Linear A Script from Crete had a number of Semitic characteristics encountered some resistance among those scholars who specialised in Ancient Greek. These scholars tended to believe that Crete was linked with the origins of the Hellenistic culture.[30]
Ihor Rassokha (2017)
Ihor Rassokha, professor of the Department of History and Cultural Studies of the Kharkiv National Academy of Municipal Economy wrote the article "Indo-European origin of alphabetic systems and deciphering of the Byblos script." He interpreted the Byblos alphabetic (abugida) script to be based on the Brahmi letters. As the result a conclusion has been made that the Byblos texts should be read in Sanskrit. It is generally accepted that in the Ancient East a spread of battle chariots happened together with the penetration of Indo-Aryans which led to the Indo-Aryan dynasties’ ruling and the Indo-Aryan domination in the Hittite state and the Mitanni.[31]
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets.
Writing is the act of creating a persistent representation of human language. A writing system uses a set of symbols and rules to encode aspects of spoken language, such as its lexicon and syntax. However, written language may take on characteristics distinct from those of any spoken language.
Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct characters. Cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphic writing, as was the Proto-Sinaitic script that later evolved into the Phoenician alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system. Moreover, owing in large part to the Greek and Aramaic scripts that descended from Phoenician, the majority of the world's living writing systems are descendants of Egyptian hieroglyphs—most prominently the Latin and Cyrillic scripts through Greek, and possibly the Arabic and Brahmic scripts through Aramaic.
The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Hieratic is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BCE until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BCE. It was primarily written in ink with a reed brush on papyrus.
The Phaistos Disc or Phaistos Disk is a disk of fired clay from the island of Crete, Greece, possibly from the middle or late Minoan Bronze Age, bearing a text in an unknown script and language. Its purpose and its original place of manufacture remain disputed. It is now on display at the archaeological museum of Heraklion. The name is sometimes spelled Phaestos or Festos.
Byblos, also known as Jebeil, Jbeil or Jubayl, is an ancient city in the Keserwan-Jbeil Governorate of Lebanon. The area is believed to have been first settled between 8800 and 7000BC and continuously inhabited since 5000BC. During its history, Byblos was part of numerous cultures including Egyptian, Phoenician, Assyrian, Persian, Hellenistic, Roman, Genoese, Mamluk and Ottoman. Urbanisation is thought to have begun during the third millennium BC and it developed into a city making it one of the oldest cities in the world, if not the oldest. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Ugaritic writing system is a cuneiform abjad with syllabic elements used from around either 1400 BCE or 1300 BCE for Ugaritic, an extinct Northwest Semitic language. It was discovered in Ugarit, modern Ras Shamra, Syria, in 1928. It has 30 letters. Other languages, particularly Hurrian, were occasionally written in the Ugaritic script in the area around Ugarit, although not elsewhere.
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform scripts are marked by and named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions which form their signs. Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system and was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia.
The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, including pre-Biblical and Biblical Hebrew, from southern Canaan, also known as the biblical kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script; the Talmud states that the Samaritans still used this script. The Talmud described it as the "Livonaʾa script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". However, it has also been suggested that the name is a corrupted form of "Neapolitan", i.e. of Nablus. Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" is due to a 1954 suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script.
The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.
The history of the alphabet goes back to the consonantal writing system used to write Semitic languages in the Levant during the 2nd millennium BCE. Nearly all alphabetic scripts used throughout the world today ultimately go back to this Semitic script. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language. This script was partly influenced by the older Egyptian hieratic, a cursive script related to Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Semitic alphabet became the ancestor of multiple writing systems across the Middle East, Europe, northern Africa, and South Asia, mainly through Phoenician and the closely related Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and later Aramaic and the Nabatean—derived from the Aramaic alphabet and developed into the Arabic alphabet—five closely related members of the Semitic family of scripts that were in use during the early first millennium BCE.
In epigraphy, a multilingual inscription is an inscription that includes the same text in two or more languages. A bilingual is an inscription that includes the same text in two languages. Multilingual inscriptions are important for the decipherment of ancient writing systems, and for the study of ancient languages with small or repetitive corpora.
Many undeciphered writing systems exist today; most date back several thousand years, although some more modern examples do exist. The term "writing systems" is used here loosely to refer to groups of glyphs which appear to have representational symbolic meaning, but which may include "systems" that are largely artistic in nature and are thus not examples of actual writing.
The Ahiram sarcophagus was the sarcophagus of a Phoenician King of Byblos, discovered in 1923 by the French excavator Pierre Montet in tomb V of the royal necropolis of Byblos.
The Byblian royal inscriptions are five inscriptions from Byblos written in an early type of Phoenician script, in the order of some of the kings of Byblos, all of which were discovered in the early 20th century.
Frederik Christiaan Woudhuizen was a Dutch independent scholar who studied ancient Indo-European languages, hieroglyphic Luvian/Luwian, and Mediterranean protohistory. He was the former editor of Talanta, Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society.
The Byblos bronze spatulas are a number bronze spatulas found in Byblos, two of which were inscribed. One contains a Phoenician inscription and one contains an inscription in the Byblos syllabary.
References
↑ Dunand, Maurice (1945). Byblia Grammata: Documents et recherches sur le développement de l'écriture en Phénicie. Beirut: République Libanaise, Ministère de l’Éducation National des Beaux-Arts. pp.71–84. The reading of a dozen signs was revised in: Martin, Malachi (1962). "Revision and Reclassification of the Proto-Byblian Signs". Orientalia (Nova Series). 31 (2): 250-271: pp. 254-260. JSTOR43073693. Retrieved 8 January 2023.
1 2 B. Sass (2019), The pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions from Byblos, their elusive dating, and their affinities with the early Phoenician inscriptions, in: Abrahami, Ph.; Battini, L. (2019). Cultures et sociétés syro-mésopotamiennes. Mélanges offerts à Olivier Rouault. Oxford. pp.157–180. Retrieved 13 January 2023.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) (academia.edu)
↑ "Avant de se mettre à l'œuvre, le graveur a exercé son style au revers de la plaquette. (...) les traits incohérents dominent et aucun mot ne se dégage.": Dunand, M. (1938). "Spatule de bronze avec épigraphe Phénicienne du XIIIe siècle". Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth. 2: 99–107: p. 100.
↑ "if he shall erase [Ahiram's] inscription, his long <royal> robe will tear (be torn)": in: Krahmalkov, Charles R. (2000). Phoenician-Punic Dictionary. Leuven: Peeters & Departement Oosterse Studies. p.262. ISBN90-429-0770-3.
↑ Ugarit-Forschungen 40 (2008) pp. 129-133; reprinted in: Best, Jan (2017). How to Decipher the Byblos Script. Wien: Lit. pp.59–64. ISBN978-3-643-90963-3.
↑ Rassokha I. Indo-European origin of alphabetic systems and deciphering of the Byblos script. // Word 63. — 2017. — PP. 181—191
Literature
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Best, Jan (2017). How to Decipher the Byblos Script. Wien: Lit. ISBN978-3-643-90963-3.
Best, Jan, 'Suruya in the Byblos Script Corpus', Ugarit-Forschungen 40 (2009), 135-41 (reprinted in Best (2017) pp.65–72)
Best, Jan, 'Breaking the Code of the Byblos Script', Ugarit-Forschungen 40 (2009), 129-133 (reprinted in Best (2017) pp.59–64)
Colless, Brian, "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet", Abr-Nahrain/Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 (1992), 15-62
Colless, Brian, "The Canaanite Syllabary", Ancient Near Eastern Studies 35 (1998), 26-46.
Colless, Brian E., "The Origin of the Alphabet: An Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis", Antiguo Oriente 12 (2014) 71-104.
Daniels, P.T., "Pseudo-hieroglyphs of Byblos", in: P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems (New York/Oxford, 1996), 29-30.
Dhorme, Édouard, 'Déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudohiéroglyphiques de Byblos', in: Syria 25 (1946–1948).
Dunand, Maurice, 'Spatule de bronze avec épigraphe phénicienne du XIIIe [actually: Xe] siècle', in: Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth 2 (1938) 99–107. (Spatula with traces of Proto-Byblian writing)
Dunand, Maurice (1945). Byblia Grammata: Documents et recherches sur le développement de l'écriture en Phénicie. Beirut: République Libanaise, Ministère de l’Éducation National des Beaux-Arts.
Garbini, Giovanni, [review of Mendenhall's book], in: Rivista di Studi Fenici 16 (1988), 129-131.
Hoch, James E. (1990). "The Byblos Syllabary: Bridging the Gap Between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Semitic Alphabets". Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. 20: 115–124.
Martin, Malachi, The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vol. 1, Bibliothèque du Muséon 44, Publications Universitaires, Louvain, 1958
Martin, Malachi, The Scribal Character of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Vol. 2, Bibliothèque du Muséon 45, Publications Universitaires, Louvain, 1958
Mendenhall, George E., The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos, Beirut, The American University (1985), Syracuse University Press (1986), ISBN0-8156-6077-4.
Sobelman, Harvey, 'The Proto-Byblian inscriptions: a fresh approach', in: Journal of Semitic Studies 6 (1961) 226-245.
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