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A Is for Ancient, Describing an Alphabet Found Near Jerusalem
(JOHN
NOBLE WILFORD, 11/09/05, NY Times)
http://brothersjudd.com/blog/ The Zeitah
Excavations
More on the Tel Zayit
Abecedary (www.biblearchaeology.org)
On the last day of the dig, after long stretches of work under the
blinding light of the Israeli sun, excavators spotted what appeared to
be an inscription on a 40-pound stone wedged into a 3,000-year-old wall.
http://jewishexponent.com/ViewArticle.asp?ArtID=1667
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002659.html
In the 10th century B.C., in the hill
country south of Jerusalem, a scribe carved his A B C's on a
limestone boulder - actually, his aleph-beth-gimels, for the string
of letters appears to be an early rendering of the emergent Hebrew
alphabet.Archaeologists digging
in July at the site, Tel Zayit, found the inscribed stone in the
wall of an ancient building. After an analysis of the layers of
ruins, the discoverers concluded that this was the earliest known
specimen of the Hebrew alphabet and an important benchmark in the
history of writing, they said this week.
If they are right, the stone bears the
oldest reliably dated example of an abecedary - the letters of the
alphabet written out in their traditional sequence. Several scholars
who have examined the inscription tend to support that view. [...]
The inscription was found in the
context of a substantial network of buildings at the site, which led
Dr. Tappy to propose that Tel Zayit was probably an important border
town established by an expanding Israelite kingdom based in
Jerusalem.
A border town of such size and culture,
Dr. Tappy said, suggested a centralized bureaucracy, political
leadership and literacy levels that seemed to support the biblical
image of the unified kingdom of David and Solomon in the 10th
century B.C.
"That puts us right in the middle of
the squabble over whether anything important happened in Israel in
that century," Dr. Stager said.
A vocal minority of scholars contend
that the Bible's picture of the 10th century B.C. as a golden age in
Israelite history is insupportable. Some archaeological evidence,
they say, suggests that David and Solomon were little more than
tribal chieftains and that it was another century before a true
political state emerged.
Dr. Tappy acknowledged that he was
inviting controversy by his interpretation of the Tel Zayit stone
and other artifacts as evidence of a fairly advanced political
system 3,000 years ago.
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