 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Byblos syllabary" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(February 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
| Byblos script | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Script type | Undeciphered (probably asyllabary orabugida) |
Period | Estimated between 1800 BC and 1400 BC |
| Languages | Unknown |
| Related scripts | |
Parent systems | |
| This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. | |
TheByblos script, also known as theByblos syllabary,Pseudo-hieroglyphic script,Proto-Byblian,Proto-Byblic, orByblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from fourteen inscriptions found inByblos, a coastal city inLebanon. The inscriptions are engraved on bronze plates and spatulas, and carved in stone. They were excavated byMaurice Dunand, from 1928 to 1932, and published in 1945 in his monographByblia 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, andMegiddo (Garbini, Colless).
The Byblos script is usually written from right to left; word dividers are rarely used. Ten inscriptions were described by Dunand in 1945, nameda toj in their order of discovery. They are:[1]
In 1978 Dunand published four more inscriptions on stone slabs, referred to ask ton, with approximately 28, 45, 10, and 20 signs, respectively.[2] A four-line part of inscriptionl consisting of characters not elsewhere found in Proto-Byblian texts has been interpreted as an Egyptian dating formula in thehieratic script.[3]
Photos and diagrams of all fourteen inscriptions are given by Sass.[2]
At least four objects are known withtraces of Proto-Byblian inscriptions. They have been studied byMalachi 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 thesepalimpsest objects is the bronze so-calledAzarba‘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 theAhiram sarcophagus (five signs) and theYehimilk 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]
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.
The ten main Pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions together contain 1046 characters, while the number of 'signs', that isdifferent 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 asyllabary, 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 (likeUgaritic) and if the number of vowels were three (the original Semitic vowels werea,i, andu) or four to six (if it included ane ando, 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.
It has been observed that some signs, for example
, look like modified commonEgyptian hieroglyphs, but there are many others which do not. According to Hoch (1990), many of the signs seem to derive fromOld 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 forcedar 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 neighbouringUgarit a few centuries later acuneiform alphabet was devised that was easier to use than the complicatedAkkadian 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 laterSemitic abjads derived fromProto-Sinaitic.
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, byEdouard Dhorme, a renowned Orientalist and formercryptanalyst 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)" (Hebrewbišnat), 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.
Harvey Sobelman didn't try to find phonetic values for the various signs, but instead tried to determine word boundaries and find grammatical patterns, using his linguistic techniques. Daniels' judgement is that Sobelman's "result should be taken into account in all future work on these texts."
In 1961 and 1962Malachi Martin published two articles, after anautopsy of all inscriptions then in existence (one tablet had been partly lost when Dunand had tried to remove its thickoxide 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 presumeddeterminatives ("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 fundamentaltype". 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.
In 1985 a new translation attempt was published byGeorge E. Mendenhall from theUniversity 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 valueg (Hebrewgimel), is assumed to have the phonetic valuega. A sign
which resembles an Egyptian hieroglyph
meaning "King of Upper Egypt" is interpreted as "mulku" (Semitic for 'regal'; compare Hebrewmèlekh, 'king'), which furnished the phonetic readingmu. The latter example illustrates that Mendenhall extensively made use of theacrophonic 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.
In 2008Jan Best, aDutchprehistorian andprotohistorian, published an articleBreaking the Code of the Byblos Script.[18] He focused on the long tabletsc andd. Best, who before had presented readings ofLinear A on the assumption that its signs generally had the same sound value as inLinear B, noted that, in turn, several Byblos signs were similar to Linear A signs. He thus read the sequenceswa-ya andu-ya, which appear several times. Best identified them as the Semitic wordwa, 'and', just like in Linear A.[19]
Most Byblos texts do not have word dividers. However, just before the wordwa 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 tabletsc andd 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 occasionallyEgyptian orCretan 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 doubletwa-X-ya-lu / wa-X-ya-le he read aswa-ka-ya-lu/e, Akkadianwaklu, 'overseers'. Thus proceeding, Best successively read some fifty signs. He found that the-u/-e ambiguity seen inwa-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 tabletsc andd.[20]
Best concluded that most Byblos syllables belong to four vowel sequences (likela, 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 (longlī vs. shortli).[20]
Tabletc, according to Best's interpretation, recorded gifts for the dedication of a temple built at Byblos for the Sun godŠuraya, theIndo-Arian equivalent of the Egyptian sun godAmon-Re. At the end of tabletc the conspicuous number 'seven' corresponds with the names of the seven men who oversaw the building project.[21] The larger tabletd 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 monumenta apparently records yet another building project, with three "overseers".[23] The small spatulas are common votive presents (on spatulaf the name of the Sun god Šuraya appears).[24]
The language of the inscriptions isNorthwest Semitic—Best emphasized the similarities in vocabulary,morphology, andsyntax with 18th-centuryAkkadian. However, Byblian also had its own peculiarities, for example archaic uncontracted word forms where Akkadian has acontracted form, or a convention to sometimes write-a- as-a-ya- (likewaka(y)alu >waklu,wa-ya =wa).[25]
Several names in the texts are well-known from Akkadian archives, such as the names of two rulers,Yarimlim (III?[26]), king ofAleppo, andAmmitaku (II?), a petty ruler atAlalakh; and among the seven dedicators on tabletc we encounter a name that sounds familiar:Ya-wa-ne Yu-za-le-yu-su, or 'the Greek Euzaleos'.[27] OccasionallyHurrian 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 Egyptianpharaoh and to tempt him to support Yarimlim and Ammitaku against theHittite kingHattusilis 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 bookHet Byblosschrift ontcijferd (The Byblos Script deciphered) were somewhat mixed. The idea that the syllabicLinear 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, professor of the Department of History and Cultural Studies of theKharkiv 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 theBrahmi letters. As the result a conclusion has been made that the Byblos texts should be read inSanskrit. 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 theMitanni.[31]
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) (academia.edu)