Byblos script

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Evidence of the so-called Byblos script (also called Byblic pseudo - hieroglyphics or Byblos syllabar ) were found on various writing media such as stone and bronze tablets from the period between the 18th and 15th centuries BC. And a seal from the 14th century in Byblos (now Lebanon ). The inscriptions were excavated by Maurice Dunand from 1928 to 1932 and published in his book Byblia Grammata in 1945 .

To date there is no reliable decipherment and translation of the inscriptions. Due to the high number of characters (90 to 114 depending on the researcher), however, it cannot be an alphabet font, which means that the "pseudo-hierarchical" Byblos font is neither structurally nor typologically a forerunner of the Semitic alphabet fonts and as an extinct one writing system must be considered.

This (pseudo-hieroglyphic) Byblos script must not be confused with a script dating from the early 1st millennium BC. BC in Byblos occasionally used the own style of the Phoenician linear alphabet, which differs only slightly from the Phoenician standard alphabet .

description

The ten inscriptions

The Byblos script is usually written from right to left; Word separators are rarely used. The ten known inscriptions are named from a to j according to the order in which they were discovered :

  • Two rectangular bronze tablets, marked c (16 × 11 cm) and d (21 × 12 cm), with 225 and 459 characters. Both tables are written on both sides. The letters were not carved into the metal, but rather hammered into place with a chisel .
  • Four wedge-shaped bronze tablets (marked with b , e , f and i , with 40, 17, 48 and 84 characters). These panels are more or less triangular in shape with an ornament in the acute angle of the triangle. They are about 5 by 9 centimeters and 1 mm thick. Their function is unknown, but Dunand suspected that they were "labels", e.g. B. for grave inscriptions . All panels were written on on both sides, with the exception of panel e (only one side). The font was made rather carelessly. The text on the back of panel f is the only known text written from left to right. Tables b and i use short vertical bars as word separators.
Inscription on bronze plaque e
Inscription on bronze plaque e. The tip of the wedge has broken off; four possible reconstructions of the damaged leftmost letter of the inscription are shown.
  • Four stone steles : denoted a , g , h and j , with 116, 37, 7 and 13 characters. The letters are carefully worked out, with striking basic lines (“monumental style”). Dunand believed that fragments h and j originally belonged to the same monument; the chemical structure of the limestone of both seems identical. The text on fragment g is written vertically, in five columns. Inscription j shows vertical strokes that appear to serve as word separators.

Related inscriptions

Individual letters from the Byblos script have been found on many other objects such as axes and pottery . A tablet was also found with a Phoenician inscription on the obverse and traces of Proto-Byblos writing on the reverse; about half a dozen letters in Proto-Byblos script can be made out. The Phoenician inscription on this tablet is dated around the eleventh century BC. Dated. This is an indication that pseudo-hieroglyphics have been in use longer than is usually thought.

A fragment of a monumental stone inscription has also been found in Byblos. The script used seems to represent an intermediate stage between the pseudo-hieroglyphics and the newer Phoenician alphabet. 21 characters are visible; most of them are identical in the pseudo-hieroglyphics and the Phoenician alphabet, while the few remaining characters are either pseudo-hieroglyphic or Phoenician.

List of characters

List of characters

Each cell in the table above shows a character (top left), Maurice Dunand's code number (bottom left), its frequency (bottom right) and indicates (top right) whether it is on rectangular bronze panels (T), wedge-shaped bronze panels (S) or memorials (monuments) (M) was used. Characters in different cells can also be spelling variants of a single character; z. E.g. in the top row the characters H6, G17 and E12 probably represent the same character.

Number of different characters

The 10 pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions contain a total of 1046 characters, while the number of different characters is given by Maurice Dunand as 114. According to Giovanni Garbini , this number is presumably set too high. He gives two reasons for this: First, Dunand's list of characters also contains badly damaged characters for which it is impossible to tell whether they really represent a new character. Second, there were obviously spelling variants, e.g. B. between the “monumental style” on the steles and the “linear” style on the panels. If these variants are taken into account, the total number of characters would be reduced.

Garbini estimates that the actual number of characters is roughly 90. Given this number, the Byblos script appears to have been a syllabic script . Each character was pronounced as a syllable , usually a combination of a consonant and a vowel . If the number of consonants was between 22 (like the newer Phoenician alphabet) and 28 (like Ugaritic ) and if the number of vowels was three (the original Semitic vowels were a , i and u ) or four to six (if there was an e and o included or a silent vowel), the total number of characters required would be between 3 × 22 = 66 and 6 × 28 = 168, which roughly corresponds to the number of different characters found.

Relationship to Other Scriptures

Some characters, e.g. B. Byblos syll egypt.gif, look like slightly altered Egyptian hieroglyphs , but there are many others that show no similarities. James E. Hoch suspects that many of the characters are derived from the hieratic script of the Old Kingdom rather than directly from the hieroglyphics. It is known that in Byblos already in the year 2600 BC. There were strong Egyptian influences: Byblos was the main export port for cedarwood to Egypt, and as a result there was an influential Egyptian trading community in Byblos. So it is very likely that the Egyptian script was used as the basis for a new script in Byblos and that new sounds were added, which the language in Byblos could express better. Similarly, a few centuries later, a cuneiform script was designed in neighboring Ugarit , which was easier to use than the difficult Akkadian cuneiform script.

Attempts to decipher

Dhorme (1946)

The existing written material is generally considered to be too small to be able to carry out a systematic decipherment on the basis of a text analysis . However, as early as 1946, a year after Dunand published the inscriptions, a first attempt was made by Édouard Dhorme , a famous orientalist and former cryptanalyst . He analyzed the short inscription on the back of a bronze plaque that ends in a series of seven almost identical lines, similar to "1111111". He assumed it was a number (presumably "seven"). Dhorme, on the other hand, assumes the number 4 × 10 + 3 = 43, since four lines are slightly larger than the other three. It is believed that the back of the inscription as a whole represents a dating of the inscription on the front.

The word in front of "1111111" is straight from four different characters: Byblos syll bsjnt.gif. The first (rightmost) damaged but recognizable character and the leftmost character are similar to the letters b and t of the newer Phoenician alphabet. Dhorme now interpreted the complete word ( b -..-..- t ) as Phoenician b (a) + š (a) -nt "In the year of", which enabled him to assign the sounds for all four signs. He replaced these characters in the remaining inscriptions and looked for recognizable parts of other Phoenician words in order to be able to assign further characters. In the end he was able to suggest sound assignments for 75 characters.

Sobelman (1961)

Harvey Sobelman did not try to find phonetic values for the different characters, instead he tried to find word boundaries and identify grammatical patterns . The result of Daniels' research is that Sobelman's "results should be taken into account in all future work on these texts."

Martin (1962)

Malachi Martin categorized the various characters into 27 "classes". After he had published "Volume 1" of his decryption, there was no sequel.

Mendenhall (1985)

In 1985, a new attempt at translation by George E. Mendenhall of the University of Michigan was published. Many characters that reappear in the newer Phoenician alphabet were assigned a similar sound value by Mendenhall. For example, the sign Byblos syll e19.gif, which has the value g in Phoenician ( gimel in Hebrew ), is assigned to the sound ga . A sign Byblos syll b9.gifthat Byblos syll eg nsw.gifresembles an Egyptian hieroglyph meaning "King of Upper Egypt" is interpreted as "mulku" (Semitic for royal ; compare also Hebrew mèlekh , 'king') and assigned to the sound mu . The last example illustrates that Mendenhall makes extensive use of the acrophonic principle, in which the sound value of a syllable sign is taken as the starting tone of the (Semitic) word for the object represented by the sign.

Mendenhall assumed that the language is a very early Proto-Semitic language, from a time when Semitic was not yet divided into Northwest Semitic ( Phoenician , Hebrew ) and South Semitic ( Arabic ). He dates the texts to the year 2400 BC at the latest. Chr.

The translations suggested by Mendenhall are often incomprehensible: “Adze that Yipuyu and Hagara make binding. Verily, in accordance with that which Sara and Ti.pu established we will be surety ". Likewise: “with Miku is the pledge.” The text with the seven dashes '1111111' (see above) is interpreted by Mendenhall as a marriage contract in which the dashes are supposed to represent the “ signatures ” of seven witnesses .

See also

literature

  • Brian E. Colless: The Canaanite Syllabary. In: Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Vol. 35, 1998, pp. 26-46, doi : 10.2143 / ANES.35.0.525767 .
  • Peter T. Daniels : The Byblos Syllabary. In: Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (Eds.): The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press, New York NY et al. 1996, ISBN 0-19-507993-0 , pp. 29-30.
  • Édouard Dhorme : Déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudo-hiéroglyphiques de Byblos. In: Syria. Vol. 25, No. 1, 1946, ISSN  0039-7946 , pp. 1-35, doi : 10.3406 / syria.1946.4447 .
  • Maurice Dunand: Spatule de bronze avec épigraphe phénicienne du XIII e siècle. In: Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth. Vol. 2, 1938, ZDB -ID 215108-X , pp. 99-107.
  • Maurice Dunand: Byblia Grammata. Documents et recherches sur le développement de l'écriture en Phénicie (= Etudes et documents d'archéologie. 2, ZDB -ID 1444347-8 ). République Libanaise - Ministère de l'Éducation Nationale, Beirut 1945.
  • Giovanni Garbini: Review of Mendenhall 1985, in: Rivista di Studi Fenici. Vol. 16, 1988, ISSN  0390-3877 , pp. 129-131.
  • James E. Hoch: The Byblos Syllabary: Bridging the Gap Between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Semitic Alphabets. In: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. Vol. 20, 1990, ISSN  0383-9753 , pp. 115-124.
  • Jirku, A., The decipherment of the Gublitischen script by E. Dhorme: FF 26 (1950) 90-2 (1 fig.).
  • Anton Jirku , vocabulary and grammar of the Gublitic inscriptions. Journal of the German Oriental Society Vol. 102 (nF 27), No. 2 (1952), pp. 201-214
  • Malachi Martin : Revision and reclassification of the Proto-Byblian signs. In: Orientalia. NS Vol. 31, No. 2, 1962, ISSN  0030-5367 , pp. 250-271, JSTOR 43073693 , and NS Vol. 31, No. 2, 1962, pp. 339-363, JSTOR 43073707 .
  • George E. Mendenhall: The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos. The American University of Beirut, Beirut 1985.
  • Harvey Sobelman: The Proto-Byblian inscriptions: a fresh approach. In: Journal of Semitic Studies. Vol. 6, No. 2, 1961, ISSN  0022-4480 , pp. 226-245, doi : 10.1093 / jss / 6.2.226 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Maurice Dunand: Byblia Grammata. 1945.
  2. ^ P. Kyle McCarter, Robert B. Coote: The Spatula Inscription from Byblos. In: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research . No. 212, 1973, pp. 16-22, doi : 10.2307 / 1356306 ; Correction. In: Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. No. 214, 1974, p. 41, doi : 10.2307 / 1356103 .
  3. ^ Giovanni Garbini: Review of Mendenhall 1985, in: Rivista di Studi Fenici. Vol. 16, 1988, pp. 129-131.
  4. ↑ James E. Hoch: The Byblos Syllabary: Bridging the Gap Between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Semitic Alphabets. In: The Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities. Vol. 20, 1990, pp. 115-124.
  5. ↑ Edouard Dhorme: Déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudo-hiéroglyphiques de Byblos. In: Syria. Vol. 25, No. 1, 1946, pp. 1-35.
  6. ^ Harvey Sobelman: The Proto-Byblian inscriptions: a fresh approach. In: Journal of Semitic Studies. Vol. 6, No. 2, 1961, pp. 226-245.
  7. ^ Peter T. Daniels: The Byblos Syllabary. In: Peter T. Daniels, William Bright (Eds.): The World's Writing Systems. 1996, pp. 29-30.
  8. ↑ Malachi Martin: Revision and reclassification of the Proto-Byblian signs. In: Orientalia. NS Vol. 31, No. 2, 1962, pp. 250-271, and NS Vol. 31, No. 2, 1962, pp. 339-363.
  9. ↑ George E. Mendenhall: The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos. 1985.

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