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August 24, 2006

Partial Abecedaries from Gezer

As part of my on going project, I've been looking at a number of abecedaries from Palestine and environs. I am mostly interested in the earliest of them but during my search, I ran across something about which I hadn't previously known. Macalister found this at Gezer.

He describes it as an inscribed stone (Gezer II, 276-277) and I guess it dates from the late Second Temple period. Demsky, 16, whose article led me to this object, also thinks it is from the late Second Temple period. Notice that it has ΑΒ(?)ΓΔΕ above the lion(?) on the left. I think I see traces of a lion's mane behind the broken area where the head would be. Get a load of those canines. Or is this "mane" the hair on the gazelle(?) or long necked sheep(?) below it? Is that a zeta under the gamma? And if so, is it more Hebrew like than Greek like? On the right is ΑΒΓΔ above the crudely drawn I know not what. A branch separates the two partial alphabets. Also, notice that the alphas are quite a bit different. The first A is perhaps more reminiscent of a Hebrew aleph than a Greek alpha. But the betas and the deltas also look different from each other and both appear to me to have more of a Greek than a Hebrew morphology. And both alphabets are written from left to right. Are two hands to be seen in this inscription? Or does it only support the same bilingual culture that one sees on the contemporary, or nearly contemporary, Gezer boundary stones? Please note that I haven't looked into any secondary literature on this inscription so my interpretation, however interesting, may be very abnormal.

My guess is that this "inscription" is the work of one or more late Second Temple period graffiti artists. While this inscription has little or nothing to do with my investigation of scribal schools in the Bronze and Iron Ages, it sure is interesting but perhaps not very abnormal. See MUR 10, a palimpsest, one of six containing abecedaries from the Wadi Murabba‘. While these Wadi Murabba‘ abecedaries are likely somewhat more recent than the Gezer inscription, they show the continuing tradition of learning your ABCs

Note: There have been those who have seen another partial alphabet from Gezer. The little line in the "margin" of the Gezer calendar that is usually read אבי, part of a proper name, has on occasion been read אבג. But based on the morphology of the letters, reading a ג instead of a י does not seem supportable.

References:

Posted by Duane Smith at August 24, 2006 9:35 AM | Read more on Scribal Schools |

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