Joseph Naveh

Selected inscribed sealings from Kedesh in the upper Galilee

This article presents and discusses 7 sealings, representing 16 of the 22 inscribed sealings found in the Hellenistic Administrative Building excavated at Kedesh. These sealings comprise most of the nonprivate, official sealings discovered. The sealings derive from floor levels damaged and abandoned shortly after the middle of the second century B. C. E. The archive of documents to which these sealings were attached appears to have been in existence for roughly half a century. Some of the inscribed sealings refer to the Phoenician coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon, and one carries the name of the site itself.

The Scripts of Two Ostraca from Elath

In 1940/1 Nelson Glueck published five ostraca which he found at Tell Kheleifeh. The first that were published 1 consisted of three fragments of Aramaic inscriptions: No. 7094 contained one name; No. 9071, a list of names; and No. 9069 concerned a shipment of wine. The cursive Aramaic script of these ostraca is characteristic of the late fifth, and mainly of the early fourth century B. c. The other two ostraca, which Glueck published about half a year later,2 require further palaeographical discussion.

The Inscriptions from Failaka and the Lapidary Aramaic Script

The article suggests a new reading of the Aramaic inscription from Failaka (kuwait) and dates it, with the Greek inscriptions found on the island, to the third century B. C. This date is corroborated by the revision of the generally accepted view of the latest use of the Lapidary Aramaic script.

The Origin of the Greek Alphabet

The common ancestor of all alphabetic writing systems existing today is the so-called Proto-Canaanite script, which was introduced by the Canaanites, presumably under the inspiration of the Egyptian uniconsonantal hieroglyphic signs, in the first half of the second millennium b.c. Had the Egyptians used only the uniconsonantal signs and let their bi- and triconsonantal pictographic symbols fall into disuse, their writing would have been alphabetic like that of the Semites. However, adhering conservatively to their writing tradition, they were not able to reduce the number of the signs in their script. The revolutionary innovation of reducing the number of signs was made by the Canaanites in ca. 1700 b.c. The alphabetic writing invented in Canaan was a pictographic acrophonic script: thus, the pictures of “house”, “palm of the hand”, and “water”, for example, did not stand for the respective Canaanite words, bet, kaf, and mem, but designated the first consonant of each word: b, k, m. The number of these pictographs was presumably 27. By the thirteenth century b.c. the Proto-Canaanite signs had been reduced to 22, but the pictographic conception still permitted the flexibility of the stances and the writing in any direction: from left to right, from right to left, in vertical columns, and even in horizontal or vertical boustrophedon. Vertical writing disappeared ca. 1100 b.c. At this stage the symbols became more and more linear. Until the middle of the eleventh century b.c. there were still pictographic forms (e.g., the ‘ayin depicting an eye with its pupil), and the letters could have different stances. From the middle of the eleventh century b.c., when all the letters had become linear, most of them had stabilized stances, and they were written from right to left, our terminology changes: the script is no longer called Proto-Canaanite (or Canaanite), but rather Phoenician.

Some Recently Forged Inscriptions

Forged inscriptions have frequently appeared on the antiquities market. These may be papyri, leather documents, seals, or inscriptions on stone and other material. Even reputable scholars have been misled into making claims about the authenticity of such fakes and drawing historical or theological conclusions from them. In this article I would like to trace the work of a modern forger who has succeeded in fooling scholars for several

Hebrew Texts in Aramaic Script in the Persian Period

half of the eighth century B. C. The style of the Sakgag-zii gate reliefs seems to be decisively influenced by the style represented in the group of ivories from room SW7. Therefore, the ivories are earlier in date than the gate reliefs. Accordingly, the group of ivories from room SW7 should be dated to about 800 B. C., or even earlier, to the last quarter of the ninth century B. C. The type of chariot portrayed on one of the ivories agrees with this dating.

The Greek Alphabet: New Evidence

The adoption of the Canaanite alphabet by the Greeks: new evidence suggests the need to revise traditional theories and traditional dates.