The Tel Siran inscription is an inscription on a bronze bottle (or "situla") found at Tel Siran on the campus of the University of Jordan in Amman). It was first published on 27 April 1972. It is considered the first complete inscription in the "Ammonite language". The bronze bottle is now in the Jordan Archaeological Museum. It is known as KAI 308.
The well preserved bronze bottle is about ten centimeters long and weighs about 280 grams. The clearly legible inscription is on the outside. The archaeological context suggests that the bottle was in use until the Mamluk period. The bottle is considered to have been made in the Iron Age II period, which would suggest use for 2,000 years.
The contents of the bottle were seeds of barley, wheat and grass, as well as unidentifiable metal remains. A C14 analysis found the content to be about 460 BC. [1]
The inscription consists of eight lines of legible text. They are attached in the direction from the opening of the bottle to its bottom. Line four protrudes into this floor, while line 5 only contains a single word. It has been translated as:
| Inscription | Original (Phoenician alphabet) | Transliteration | English translation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line 1 | 𐤌𐤏𐤁𐤃 𐤏𐤌𐤍𐤃𐤁 𐤌𐤋𐤊 𐤁𐤍 𐤏𐤌𐤍 | mʿbd ʿmndb mlk bn ʿmn | The achievement of Amminadab, king of the Ammonites, |
| Line 2 | 𐤁𐤍 𐤄𐤑𐤋𐤀𐤋 𐤌𐤋𐤊 𐤁𐤍 𐤏𐤌𐤍 | bn hṣlʾl mlk bn ʿmn | the son of Hiṣṣalʾel, king of the Ammonites, |
| Line 3 | 𐤁𐤍 𐤏𐤌𐤍𐤃𐤁 𐤌𐤋𐤊 𐤁𐤍 𐤏𐤌𐤍 | bn ʿmndb mlk bn ʿmn | the son of Amminadab, king of the Ammonites; |
| Line 4 | 𐤄𐤊𐤓𐤌 𐤅𐤄 𐤂𐤍𐤕 𐤅𐤄𐤀𐤕𐤇𐤓 | hkrm wh gnt whʾtḥr | the vineyard and the gardens and the pools |
| Line 5 | 𐤅𐤀𐤔𐤇𐤕 | wʾšḥt | and the cisterns |
| Line 6 | 𐤉𐤂𐤋 𐤅𐤉𐤔𐤌𐤇 | ygl wyšmḥ | May he rejoice and be happy |
| Line 7 | 𐤁𐤉𐤅𐤌𐤕 𐤓𐤁𐤌 𐤅𐤁𐤔𐤍𐤕 | bywmt rbm wbšnt | for many days and for years |
| Line 8 | 𐤓𐤇𐤒𐤕 | rḥqt | to come |
F. Zayadine and H. O. Thompson, the first editors, referred to the script as Aramaic script and dated the inscription paleographically to the first half of the 7th century BC. [2] F. M. Cross, on the other hand, sees the inscription as the latest stage of development of the "Ammonite language" and dates it to around 600 BC for paleographic reasons. [4] [5]
The Philistines were an ancient people who lived on the south coast of Canaan during the Iron Age in a confederation of city-states generally referred to as Philistia.
Canaan was a Semitic-speaking civilization and region of the Southern Levant in the Ancient Near East during the late 2nd millennium BC. Canaan had significant geopolitical importance in the Late Bronze Age Amarna Period as the area where the spheres of interest of the Egyptian, Hittite, Mitanni, and Assyrian Empires converged or overlapped. Much of present-day knowledge about Canaan stems from archaeological excavation in this area at sites such as Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, En Esur, and Gezer.
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization.
Dan is an ancient city mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, described as the northernmost city of the Kingdom of Israel, and belonging to the tribe of Dan.
The Moabite language, also known as the Moabite dialect, is an extinct sub-language or dialect of the Canaanite languages, themselves a branch of Northwest Semitic languages, formerly spoken in the region described in the Bible as Moab in the early 1st millennium BC.
Ammonite is the extinct Canaanite language of the Ammonite people mentioned in the Bible, who used to live in modern-day Jordan, and after whom its capital Amman is named. Only fragments of their language survive—chiefly the 9th century BC Amman Citadel Inscription, the 7th–6th century BC Tel Siran bronze bottle, and a few ostraca. As far as can be determined from the small corpus, it was extremely similar to Biblical Hebrew, with some possible Aramaic influence including the use of the verb ‘bd (עבד) instead of the more common Biblical Hebrew ‘śh (עשה) for 'make'. The only other notable difference with Biblical Hebrew is the sporadic retention of feminine singular -t Ammonite also appears to have possessed largely typical correspondences of diphthongs, with words such as ywmt both preserving and showing a shift to, and other words such as yn exhibiting a shift of to ē much like Hebrew.
The Canaanite languages, sometimes referred to as Canaanite dialects, are one of three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Amorite. These closely related languages originate in the Levant and Mesopotamia, and were spoken by the ancient Semitic-speaking peoples of an area encompassing what is today Israel, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, as well as some areas of southwestern Turkey (Anatolia), western and southern Iraq (Mesopotamia) and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia.
Proto-Canaanite is the name given to
The Paleo-Hebrew script, also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in inscriptions of Canaanite languages from the region of Southern Canaan, also known as biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Hebrew Bible due to its similarity to the Samaritan script, as the Talmud stated that the Hebrew ancient script was still used by the Samaritans. The Talmud described it as the "Libona'a script", translated by some as "Lebanon script". 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.
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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 Pakistan, mainly through Ancient South Arabian, 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.
The Philistine language is the extinct language of the Philistines. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survived as cultural loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine five cities, or the ’argáz receptacle, which occurs in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else, or the title padî.
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age. The oldest coherent texts are in Ugaritic, dating to the Late Bronze Age, which by the time of the Bronze Age collapse are joined by Old Aramaic, and by the Iron Age by Sutean and the Canaanite languages.
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM), more commonly called the Cypro-Minoan Script, is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus and at its trading partners during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on Minoan Crete, from which CM is thought to be derived. Approximately 250 objects—such as clay balls, cylinders, and tablets which bear Cypro-Minoan inscriptions, have been found. Discoveries have been made at various sites around Cyprus, as well as in the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast. It is thought to be somehow related to the later Cypriot syllabary.
Phoenicia, or Phœnicia, was an ancient Semitic thalassocratic civilization originating in the coastal strip of the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenicians expanded and contracted throughout history, with the core of their culture stretching from Arwad in modern Syria to Mount Carmel in modern Israel covering the entire coast of modern Lebanon. Beyond their homeland, the Phoenicians extended through trade and colonization throughout the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula.
Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, or KAI, is the standard source for the original text of Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions not contained in the Hebrew Bible.
The Amman Citadel Inscription is the oldest known inscription in the so-called Ammonite language. It was discovered in 1961 in the Amman Citadel, and first published in full in 1968 by Siegfried Horn. At the time of its discovery it was the third longest Semitic stone inscription ever found in the Southern Levant, after the Mesha Stele and the Siloam inscription. The inscription is known as KAI 307. As of 1969, the inscription was on display at the Jordan Archaeological Museum.
Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs, Arameans, Assyrians, Jews, Mandaeans, and Samaritans having a continuum into the present day.
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The Phoenician arrowheads or Phoenician javelin heads are a well-known group of almost 70 Phoenician inscribed bronze arrowheads from the 11th century BC onwards.