Abnormal Interests

I did, however, find an interesting misconception that is worth correcting. For example, Shunya's Site one fines the following title and sub-title: The Lost City of Ugarit, The Birthplace of the Alphabet, Syria and Atlas Tours Web Site says of Ugarit, "it is the kingdom that gave humanity the first alphabet in the world." The problem is that the Alphabet was very likely not invented at Ugarit. Closer to the truth is at HOMS on Line at who claims that the Ugaritic alphabet is in a "hitherto unknown cuneiform alphabetic."

Perhaps a cuneiform version of the alphabet was invented at Ugarit but alphabetic writing is much older. While the archeological history of Ugarit goes back to Neolithic times, all of the written tables from Ugarit in Ugaritic come from the period between 1450 and 1200 BCE. Below is a picture of a clay table written in this alphabet.

This table is in the Syrian National Museum in Damascus. The alphabet on this tablet is written in the same order that one would expect in a Phoenician like alphabet (a, b, g, d, ...). In addition to tablets in the Ugaritic language written on this alphabet, there are many clay tablets from Ugarit written, using syllabic cuneiform, in the Akkadian (Middle Babylonian) language and there are a few tables in Hurrian.

To find the oldest know alphabet and perhaps the origin of the alphabet, one needs to turn to inscriptions in the Proto-Sinaitic Proto-Canaanite and Old Negev. See Harris and Hone, The Origin and Emergence of West Semitic Scripts for a good introduction. Based on pottery finds, Beit-Arieh, (BA, Winter, 1981, pp. 14-15) suggested that the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions found at Mine L. date from ca.1500 BCE and because of the maturity of the script that the oldest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are from around 1700 BCE. These inscriptions are no doubt alphabetic. That the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are alphabetic was established by William Foxwell Albright (The Proto-Sinaitic Inscription and Their Decipherment, Harvard University Press) in 1966. Albright thought they were written between 1525 and 1475 BCE (p. 10). He dated the alphabet Gezer sherd from an offering stand at ca. 17th century BCE and the Lachish dagger as ca. 1600 - 1550 BCE.

The picture below is a drawing of a Proto-Sinaitic inscription from Mine L.

There are no known inscriptions of this type that show the alphabet in alphabetical order. Nearly every letter in this alphabet can be traced to one in our own alphabet by way of the Phoenician alphabet. But that is for another day.

Mature alphabetic inscriptions from Ugarit and the Sinai are from about the same age but the oldest Sinai inscriptions are older than anything from Ugarit; and the Gezer sherd and Lachish dagger dates to about the same age as the oldest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. I wish that the Ugaritic alphabet was the oldest but it is not.