WRITING, the art and craft of recording and communicating visual and verbal symbols objectively.

I. Expression and communication

Human thought reduced to its molecular aspects begins with electro-chemical interchanges of energy within and without the neural cells of the brain. However, it is well known that through constant repetition the human body can respond to visual and auditory perceptions without apparently framing these sensations into words. Thus the task of ultimately defining what exactly is the nature of expression and communication seems to be a metaphysical rather than an exact scientific pursuit. Therefore the subject of writing is better studied as a historical process of the invention of one of man’s most useful tools based upon one of man’s most central faculties, that of expression. Man can express his individual thoughts through almost every part and function of his body; however, all men of whatever historical period have depended on vision and hearing as the primary tracts for input/output of data. Insofar as one cannot speculate about a nonthinking man, so we cannot conceive of man without expression or communication.

A. Horizontal communication is the transfer of data from one source to one or more receivers in the same time and place. It requires that the speaker and hearer or displayer and observer be in the same place and contemporary in time. The outside limit of effectiveness of this system would be from great-grandfather to great-grandchild, a maximum of about ninety years. To lengthen this span some mechanical transfer, a record, tape or reënactment must intervene to bridge the gap of time. Obviously the plastic arts are most suitable for this and pictures, statues etc. of ancient historical figures can carry us back to at least the 5th millennium b.c., while mechanical recording techniques allow us to recover sounds and voices since the Crimean War (a.d. 1854). Any tradition based on oral communication is then only continuous restatement of horizontal communication. Songs, stories, poems, narratives, sagas and even statistics can be and have been preserved in this way but the accuracy of such is extremely questionable. Often the material is molded and suffused by some mnemonic form into which it is cast so that the original material is effaced by its later literary or artistic form. The myths of classical antiquity are prob. prime examples of such a digression (de Santillana, The Origins of Scientific Thought [1961]). Care must be taken that horizontal communication media of modern primitive social groups are not extrapolated back into pre-history to explain some long lost origin. Such phylogenetic recapitulation is unacceptable.

B. Vertical communication is the transmission of data across time spans beyond the life of the individual or his social group. This is always a mechanistic process and results in thought being embodied in an artifact, a construct, a fabricated article. It goes without saying that the simpler the notion, the more easily and universally it may be communicated; e.g., the rough sketches of supernovae carved by prehistoric American Indians. Since sight-thought was more easily communicated vertically, it was apparent that speech-thought would ultimately have to be attached to sight-thought to gain the same vertical continuity. In effect, this was done by symbols, or semiotic systems.

C. Memory has a number of aspects. Not only is it the repository of individual experience but in some gestalt fashion it is possible to conceive of a corporate memory, a township memory, even to view the city in this sense as a computer. There is basic justification for this in the fact that all ancient writing systems seem to have originated in settled urban food-producing areas. Such social patterns bring about the need for another aspect of communication beyond the horizontal and vertical; they demand display. Display in this sense is the record of the community’s actions as a community set forth for all to see, as for example, law codes, declarative prayers and incantations, annals of the past and building inscrs. Actually all three of these forces, horizontal and vertical communication and display, combined with the emerging urban society and its institutions to produce first the need and then the answer in the technique of writing.

D. Types of Semiotic systems or sets of integrated symbols of various sorts were produced in the first germinal era of writing. In the history of writing the first to appear were not necessarily related to the sound or form of the languages of those who invented them. Such non-phonetic systems are termed semasiographic.

1. The semasiographic systems fall into three categories: a. Pictographs, simple cartoonlike illustrations of universal recognizance value, such as a picture of an animal or structure with its unique characteristics made obvious, e.g. figure 1: a. Phraseographs, usually several pictographs arranged to indicate an action but sufficiently interrelated that in time they become one effective unit, often the verbal or action indicator in pictographic scripts, e.g. figure 1: b. Logographs are word symbols where one word in 1:1 correspondence with one sign is understood although it is neither drawn visually nor indicated phonetically. Often like the other two types it is totally separate from the languages of the writer or reader. Livestock brands, ownership marks, certain ligatured abbreviations and even trade marks fall into this category. Modern examples abound in such logographs as, “&,” “7-UP,” or “$,” none of which have any relationship whatsoever to the words with which they are read, or the notions with which they are associated. Ancient writing systems often contain so many logograms that the meaning of a text is utterly unintelligible. Another disconcerting aspect of logographs is that they become so completely conventionalized and stylized that like some pictographs the original meaning is lost. In some ancient documents the actual word meant is never written out. It is systematically symbolized with a logogram. The result is that the actual word in the language is unknown, as if all “ands” in the Eng. language should be replaced by “&,” and in time the full spelling of “and” became lost. Some representative logographs are shown for comparison 1:c. Along with and slightly after the rise of the semasiographic systems, the language based phonographic systems appeared in the developing writing systems. Ultimately these tend to ward pure symbolic representation of speech but they fall short due to the necessity to economize the number of signs. This economy usually leads to “polyphony” where one sign has more than one phonetic sound attached to it. It is this difficulty which so aggravates Eng. spelling.

2. Again, as with the semasiographic systems three related phonographic systems arose. They are: a. Syllabic in which every sign represents not simply a unitary sound but also a combination of vowel or vowel plus consonant or consonant plus vowel or in the extreme consonant plus vowel plus consonant. Such a system works quite well with certain types of languages which have monosyllabic words; b. Phonemic systems have one sign for one sound, either a vowel or a consonant. Most syllabaries have dispersed within them perfectly sound phonetic alphabets; c. Subphonemic or, as they may be called, prosodic systems are made up of elaborate diacriticals which like musical notations indicate all nuances of the spoken word. The present system of print in use with modern languages utilizes only the phonemic system, but the instantaneous foreshortening of time possible with electronic data processing may make the potential of diacritical prosodic systems an actuality, so that writing would come full circle from universal pictograph to universal : .—...- , and ultimately 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 01...

II. The origin of vertical communication

Ancient Western Asia was not only the cradle of Western civilization but also of the earliest writing systems, and in that geographic and ethnographic region all stages of the semasiographic and phonographic systems have taken place. As with so many other complex social relationships, government, finance, building and trading, so writing suddenly appears with no records or predecessors to indicate its sources. With village settlement and the organization of social institutions requiring vertical communication and display, writing was invented (A. J. Jawad, The Advent of the Era of Townships in Northern Mesopotamia [1965]).

A. Prehistoric writing systems must be projected from the later known to the earlier unknown. The oldest known written documents were excavated at the site of ancient Uruk (Biblical Erech, Gen 10:10), and were inscribed about 3000 b.c. These are Sumer. tablets inscribed with economic texts in the non-Semitic, non-Indo-European Sumer. language. However recent investigation has demonstrated that the writing system of the Uruk and all later Sumer. texts was prob. not the invention of the Sumerians, although they undoubtedly modified and expanded it to fit their essentially monosyllabic language.

1. These unknown literary predecessors of the Sumerians have been called Proto-Euphrateans, from their apparent place of settlement (B. Landsberger, “Mezopotamya ’da Mendeniyetin Doğuṩu,” Ankara Universitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Dergisi [1943-1945]). Some debate has ensued as to who these people were and from where they had come, but until an identifiable Proto-Euphratean settlement is excavated the problems will remain unsolved. However, the discovery in Rumanian Transylvania of an early neolithic village, Tartaria, with a cache of several tablets, all dated by stratigraphy to earlier than 3000 b.c., has enhanced the possibility that the elusive Proto-Euphrateans will be found. A comparison of Uruk and Tartaria signs is shown in figure 2.

2. Perhaps the best solution is simply to denote the Tartaria texts as Proto-Balkan-Danubian. There is little question but that still older and more dispersed written materials will be discovered since the Proto-Balkan-Danubian signs appear to be at least logographic if not already syllabic.

3. Although the Uruk and Tartaria systems are the oldest now known, they were soon followed by a number of scripts of equally unknown origin and as yet quite resistant to decipherment. These all arose in Western Asia and are more hieroglyphic in the sense that the pictographic character of their execution is more obvious. Unlike either of the older systems they seem to be closer to simplified drawings of objects. Also the multiplicity of signs seems to indicate more than a syllabic system, although such a judgment is speculative. Sometime after 3000 b.c., the people of southwestern Iran known as Elamites produced an elaborate writing system called by scholars, Proto-Elamite. The Elamite language is non-Semitic and non-Indoeuropean. It is not related to any other known language, and so the texts as yet defy decipherment. From the placement of what appears to be numerical signs it is judged that they, like the Uruk texts, are economic in content. Dating from a slightly later time, there is a set of symbols on seals and inscribed pottery and metallic sheets. These were fabricated about 2300 b.c. at a group of towns on the Indus River, located at Harappa, Mohenjodaro and Chanhudaro. Specimens of the Proto-Elamite and Proto-Indic signs are seen in figure 3. Hieroglyphics are usually associated with Egypt about whose writing system the name was coined. In the oldest glyptic representations an early almost pictographic form of sign is found. These are on the slate plates, or palettes excavated at Hieraconpolis in Upper Egypt. These palettes yield scenes of the campaigns of ancient prehistoric Egyp. rulers. Although attempts have been made to associate them with known historical figures there is little to base final conclusions upon other than the obvious interpretation of the pictographs (fig. 3). Just what the stages in the later development of the elaborate hieroglyphic system were is now lost but some relationships can be deduced. Before the full blown Egyp. system was completed and, in fact, prior to its founding, the Proto-Euphratean, later Sumer. syllabary had been established and was to be the dominant writing of the Near East from 3000 to 500 b.c. In time the Uruk signs became stylized, and the streamlined and uniform strokes became known as “nail-shaped,” “wedgeshaped” writing in Eng., Keilschrift in Ger., but the French name has stuck as it was derived from the Lat. “cuneus”—“forma.”

III. Cuneiform

A. Sumerian. The predecessor to the classical cuneiform script first appeared in recognizable form on economic documents from the temple area of Uruk, in the stratigraphic layer of the Jemdet Nasr period. Although the majority of the more than 1,000 tablets are small business memoranda, there are some which contain the complex lexica which were used to teach the Sumer. language and writing system for the next two millennia. The signs on these tablets are more pictographic than cuneiformic, but they have the same phonetic values as the later simplified script. Most of the economic texts consist of little more than names, numbers, and commodities, marking a specific period of time and the total business conducted during it. Since many of these tablets were tags attached to the articles involved from which they were long ago separated, it is now impossible to decipher their meaning. In all, there are over 700 discernible signs used on the Uruk tablets as compared to 1,100 signs used in classical Sumer. lit. The Sumer. script may be divided into four chronological periods of development, Archaic-pictographic (3100-2700 b.c.); Ur I & II (2700-2370 b.c.); Gudea of Lagash (2370-2100 b.c.) and Ur III (2100-1950 b.c.). It is probable that the pictographic signs may have originated from the use of stamp and cylinder seals impressed on clay or wax to mark ownership of commodities. The early ledger tablets from Uruk, Jemdet Nasr and Fara show small grids or registers in which names and numbers are written showing the amounts exchanged from the central agency to or from each individual, and on the reverse is the total (fig. 4). In these texts there is very little in the way of speech formulation; they are almost completely semasiographic. However there is a surprisingly effective mixed sexagesimal (to the base sixty) decimal (to the base ten) arithmetical system. The most impressive fact of all is the vital and complicated mercantile economy that produced the texts. After extensive simplification of the signs the very effective syllabary of Ur III was finally reached. With this system metaphysical thought of surprising sophistication could be framed in parallelistic poetry, e.g. the song cycle, Lamentation over the Destruction of Ur (S. N. Kramer, Assyriological Studies No. 12 [1940]) The Sumer. system which served as the pattern for all the subsequent cuneiform syllabaries contained more than just simple syllabic signs. Four types of signs were invented. The most common are the simple syllabic signs, but because of a unique characteristic of the Sumer. language many signs came to have the identical phonetic value. It seems that the Sumer. spoken tongue was tonal as are many modern Afro-Asian languages; i.e. words and meanings are distinguished from one another not merely by the difference in sound but in singing tone, so that daaa at Middle C would be a different word than daaa at F. To distinguish these many similar sounds the Sumerians provided the different syllables with separate signs. The result is a confusing polyphony of many signs to one sound and many sounds to one sign. A sound “A” must be distinguished from all its variants as: a, á, ă, a₄, a₅...a₁₀ & a_x; while a sign “X” may have the readings: be, pè, pì, bad, baṭ, baṭ, pád, pát, páṭ, bít, pít, mid, mit, miṭ, til, tel, tíl, ṭél, ziz, sun, qìt, mát, mút, ti₆, úš, ṩiṩ, gam₅, me₄, bi₄, šum(m)a or zaz. The order of the variants in this list is roughly statistical in regard to frequency, 90% of all citations would be the syllable “be” while perhaps “bi₄” would be the correct reading in only .001% of all occurrences. Just when the shift was made from name of object to sound similar to name (e.g. ten little dots :::::, plus a sketch of a knee = ten-ney) finally came about is impossible to determine, but it was the great impetus to the establishment of cuneiform writing.

The second most common set of cuneiform signs in Sumer. are the logograms. These are single pictographs representing a whole word usually totally removed from the pictograph itself. If the first signs were names of economic institutions and merchants then it is logical that their trademarks would pass into the logographic stage. Less common than the logographs are the determinative signs which indicate the class of objects or persons to which the following word belongs; thus all objects of wood were preceded by the GIS̆ sign which simply meant, “next word a wooden object.” The least common, but possibly the most difficult were numerical and grammatical signs which were not pronounced at all but were simply diacriticals such as the often superflous pl. sign MES̆. All four types appear in figure 5. Since Sumer. is agglutinative, i.e. it adds grammatical and phonetic particles together in long complex chains of words and phrases, in time certain sets of signs became associated with each other in standardized patterns giving much of the lit. a stereotyped quality and forming idioms and figures of speech that are still commonplace. At no time in the long history of cuneiform writing were all the possible syllables of any one language set down in signs. If a grid or table is formulated of all the possible vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel combinations it will be found that a principle of economy was in effect. This principle operated in two ways: 1. the tendency for syllables of one specific vowel and similar consonants to be clustered in one sign as: kab, kap, qáb, qáp, qáb, qáp, > KAB sign. 2. The tendency for one consonant and its full potential set of vowels to be clustered in one sign as: aḥ, eḥ iḥ, uḥ > AḤ sign. Generally the former cluster maintaining the vowel is more common than the latter and when the consonant is maintained it is divided into two sets of vowels a/u vs. e/i which is a general phonemic distribution in the Sumer. language. By the period of Sumer’s greatness, Ur III, the writing system was almost purely phonographic and many of the complex logograms had been reduced to syllabic signs. It is widely accepted upon reasonable evidence that the wedge-shaped characters came about through the use of the reed stylus which, when cut obliquely, would leave an exposed triangular surface culminating in a sharp point. When impressed in damp clay the familiar pyramidial indentation resulted. As with other complex sign systems, the Mayan and Chinese for example, differences in scribal schools and traditions developed and even variations in individual hands are present.

The Sumer. civilization came in time to depend upon writing and to a degree equated literacy with culture and civilization, a notion which still persists in the Western world. In the scribal schools, É.DUB.BA, “Tablet house,” the scribes learned by copying the ancient lit., hymns, epics, laments and lexical texts. These last are of very great interest. The Sumerians seem to have had some notion of organizing the phenomenal world in terms of their precious craft of writing. In order to do this they set down long lists of words, usually names of objects and functions which in turn grew into immense lexical series, commonly described as listenwissenschaft (W. von Soden, “Sumerische und babylonische Wissenschaft,” Die Eigenbegrifflichkeit Der Babylonischen Welt/Leistung und Grenze Sumerischer und Babylonischer Wissenschaft [1965]). These bear strange enigmatic names taken from their first lines such as: ḤAR.RA = ḥubullu and IZI = išatu, although strictly these two are from a much later time when Sumer. lists were equated with their East Sem. synonyms. As part of the scribal collections of learning in inscribed form, sort of encyclopedia editing, all other forms of learning were brought together and extended by the scribes; biological nomenclature, grammatical flexion, dosage forms and mathematical tables are all found on the school tablets. This unification of learning around the practice of the scribal craft is a keystone to the understanding of the urbane Sumerians and their writing system. With the advent of the East Sem. peoples which culminated with the founding of the first dynasty of Accad, Sumer. civilization passed into the hands of the Semites, who, in turn, studied and treasured this heritage passing it on for some 2,000 years. The assimilation of Sumer. culture into Akkad. brought about the use of Sumer. language as a literary medium and the use of Sumer. cuneiform to write the different Akkad. language. The two languages interchanged loanwords in the process, the preponderance going from Sumer. to Akkad.

B. Akkadian came into use as a written language after the conquests of S̆arru-kîn (Sargon) of Agade (Accad), the first great world conqueror who overran central Mesopotamia in 2371 b.c. The Akkad. language fits poorly into the Sumer. syllabary, because it is polysyllabic and it has difficult consonant clusters. The vowels have more complex variations than the Sumer. syllabary could transcribe. The result was that Akkad. cuneiform inscrs. followed closely the forms and conventions of the older Sumer. inscrs. Akkadian cuneiform may be divided into Old Akkad. roughly equivalent to Ur III Sumerian; Old, Middle and Neo-Babylonian; Old, Middle and Neo-Assyrian. The Old Akkad. is quite difficult as it utilizes many Sumer. logograms (Sumerograms) and writes out in full detail refinements and nuances of East Sem. speech which were later dropped from use. The Akkad. syllabary underwent the same paring and economizing processes as Sumer. so that more and more it approached a phonographic system.

1. The next stage in the script, the Old Babylonian, like its contemporary, the Old Assyr. of the Cappadocian merchant colonies, used few logograms and determinatives and wrote out most words syllabically. Still the script did not completely fit the language, as some fractions of the syllables had to be elided to obtain the correct pronunciation. In many instances the same word could be broken up several different ways to yield assimilable syllables. For example, to write the word “Pittsburgh” it is necessary to disassociate the consonant cluster—ttsb—so that it can be written with vowel-consonant or consonant-vowel signs, the choices are: Pi-it-te-es-bu-ur-rg-eh, where all the “e’s” are silent and all double vowels are elided. If consonant-vowel-consonant signs are used it could be written: Pit-tes-bur-geh. Exactly analogous situations occur in all stages of the cuneiform syllabary and many words do appear spelled in a variety of ways. Over the centuries, of course, certain standard forms became conventional. Unlike some other ancient systems no alphabetic system was ever involved at the base of the cuneiform signs. The classical Babylonian syllabary as used by the Kassites (1600-1174 b.c.), after they had overthrown and absorbed Babylonian culture emphasizes the sounds and spellings of the Babylonian dialect of Accad.

2. With the resurgence of Assyria under Ashur-uballiṭ (1365-1330 b.c.) a predominance of signs favoring the Assyrian dialect takes place. The kings of the last half millennium of Akkad. culture down to the time of Cyrus greatly honored the study of cuneiform and preserved the ancient lit. wherever they found it. During the reigns of the Neo-Assyrian rulers, esp. Ashurbanipal (668-631 b.c.) extensive libraries of texts representative of all periods were collected and scribes employed in making new editions of the ancient lit. It is a monument to the genius of its inventors that the kings of the 6th cent. b.c. could decipher tablets then already 2500 years old, and written in cuneiform. Not only was cuneiform used in Mesopotamia proper but it became the international vehicle of the common lingua franca, Akkad. Scribes in the court of the pharaoh, the palace of the Indo-European ruler of Mittani and the chieftains of Syria-Pal. all corresponded in cuneiform script. The iron-clad fixation of the vowels in the system has allowed the restoration of the native speech in several of the geographic localities outside Mesopotamia. Of special importance in this regard is the language of ancient Pal. before the conquest which is represented in portions of the El Amarna letters which passed between the pharaohs of the 18th dynasty and their vassal princes in the Near E. In these and other cuneiform texts occur the phenomenon of “glosses” where the scribe has written a word in Akkad., and then after an oblique wedge used as word divider added the cuneiform transcription of the word in his own language to make doubly sure that the scribe who was to receive and read it before its addressee would know his intention.

3. The script in these peripheral Akkad. texts is usually poorly executed and the grammar and syntax of the language completely at the mercy of the scribe’s mother tongue. From the peripheral Akkad., the script spread further out to other non-Sem. and non-Akkad. language groups who modified it radically to better transcribe their own tongues. In most cases these alterations were definitely advantageous in the direction of a phonographic system. They also resulted in the inclusion of a new set of logographic signs which are best termed “Akkadograms.” Like the Neo-Assyrian scribes these provincial inscribers tended to use the system of writing the Sumer. root or logogram if one existed and then follow it with a phonetic complement giving the form and pronunciation of the native word to be substituted in the context for the Sumerogram. To illustrate, suppose instead of writing Eng. “willing” one puts down the Latin root of the same meaning: “vol-” and then adds the same ending as if it were an Eng. word so that VOL-ing is the result, but it is read as “willing,” likewise the late cuneiform GIG-iṩ for Akad. mahiṩ, “has been smitten” or ERÍN-am for ṩabam, “contingent (direct object).” A comparison of the forms of several representative signs from Uruk through Neo-Assyrian is shown in figure 7. The supremacy of the cuneiform system and the availability of the vast Mesopotamian lit. spurred on the adoption of cuneiform by many other peoples. A Sumerian and Akkadian bilingual is shown in figure 8.

C. Elamite was written in its own peculiar pictographs up until 2500 b.c. when a phonographic system based on Akkad. cuneiform was introduced. In all the new system had only 131 syllabic signs, 25 logograms and only 7 determinatives. Elamite became one of the official languages of the Pers. empire and is represented in the great trilingual inscr. of the rock of Bahistān (Persian Language and Literature, q.v.). In the later period the syllabary was reduced to 102 syllabic signs, 8 logograms and 3 determinatives. Many new sites in Iran have been excavated and a large body of newly discovered and deciphered Elamite texts now await publication.

D. The Hittite language, or as some propose, “Nésite,” is the oldest known Indo-European tongue. Strange as it may seem, cuneiform Hitt. was used simultaneously with another similar language, hieroglyphic Hitt., each written in its respective sign system. The signs, although based on the Sumero-Akkad. system, are quite distinct even though large numbers of Akkad. texts have been excavated from Hitt. sites. One peculiarity of the Hitt. usage is writing unvoiced consonants, t, p, and k doubled to indicate them as over against the voiced, d, b, and g which are written singularly. As with any syllabic system used for writing an Indo-European language with its consonant clusters, many vowels are written just to indicate the enclosed consonant and not for pronunciation. The results are long strings of syllables which defy pronunciation and must be carefully reduced to their actual phonetic transcription, e.g. har-ša-na-al-la—an-da-an = xarsanallantan “take (accusative participle)” or an-tu-uh-ša-an-na-an-za = antuxsanats “mankind (inflected).” The more formal Hitt. lit. such as royal inscrs. were based on Sumero-Akkad. models. In such a text words from three different languages will be mixed to produce one thought, e.g. SAG-du-an, which consists of the Sumerogram SAG = “head” plus the Akkad. phonetic complement which shows that the SAG is to be read as its Akkad. equivalent, qaqqadu, plus the Hitt. inflection an. The Hittites also continued the work of the ancient Sumer. scribal schools and added a Hitt. column to the lexical series.

1. Since the Hitt. empire was a confederacy of a number of petty states and related ethnic groups other lesser languages appear in the archives. One of them Proto-Hattian, Proto-Hittite or simply Hattian seems to have been used as a sacred cultic tongue and occurs only in certain ritual texts where inclusions in the language are preceded by the indicator hattili, “Hattian.” It is not related to Hitt. and is written out fully in the syllabic script with no logograms.

2. A fuller corpus of quotations exists in the Luwian language, which is similar in structure to Hitt. and is the actual tongue employed as “hieroglyphic” Hitt. Passages in the language are always preceded by the indicator, luwili, “Luwian.” As with Hattian it is written exclusively with the syllabic signs. A sub-dialect of Luwian developed into the language of the kingdom of Lycia around the watershed of the Lycus River in the area of Anatolia between Crete and Cyprus. The Lycians called their language, Treknemli, “Treknemlian” in the same fashion as these above.

3. The least known of the Hitt. empire’s polyglot dialects is Palaic introduced by the indicator, palaumnili, “Palaian” it is Indo-European in structure and was written exclusively with the syllabary some of which appears in figure 9.

E. Ugaritic,unlike Hittite is the oldest known West Sem. language. It predates Biblical Heb. by nearly 1000 years. It was the first Sem. language to be set down in a purely alphabetic and phonographic script. The signs are based undoubtedly upon the mode and system involved in cuneiform and like cuneiform it was read from left to right. However, no one sign is equivalent to any Akkad. sign that can be determined. The alphabetic principle allows a still further reduction in the number of signs from the more than one hundred in the best syllabaries to only thirty signs. Here, however, an innovation takes place. It is in the nature of Sem. languages that verbs, nouns, adjectives and most other parts of speech can be interrelated through the use of roots which are formed from 1, 2 or 3 consonants. Usually these are triconsonantal and are invariable except for fluxions within specific logical norms. The vowels follow the consonantal patterns and are raised, dropped, heightened or muted in relation to their position and stress in the word. The result is that the spoken and written Sem. languages have many more cognates connected together than in the Indo-European languages, e.g. sentences like, “The smiter smote the smitten to a smithereen” are very common. The OT is filled with examples of precisely this type of formulation. Because of this characteristic the vowels may be wholly excluded in the semiotic system. This reduction of the phonographic transcription to strictly consonants is the basic factor underlying all shorthand systems ancient or modern. However the one difficulty in the Ugaritic system was the use and form of the aleph. In Proto-Sem. and all its derivatives there are a large number of glottal sounds. Usually three are predominant. These appear often at the initial position in words, as Sem. languages reject beginning words with vowels, e.g. the Gr. “Plato” became Aflat on in Medieval Judeo-Arabic and the new first letter was aleph. On the other hand Ugaritic like Akkad. and its dialects had the three long vowels, ā, ū, and e/ī and so it produced three different syllabic signs for aleph-a, aleph-u and aleph-i while reducing all the other signs to an alphabet. Upon close inspection it will be found that certain letters tend to come into frequent proximity with certain vowels so that in effect there is a sense in which the Ugaritic alphabet operates much like a syllabary and here and there throughout the body of Ugaritic lit. the consonantal signs occur in locations where they indicate vowels and vowel quantities. The order of the signs in the alphabet is: *a b g ẖ d h w z ḥ ṭ y m ḏ n ẕ s ’ p ṩ q r ṯ g t i s̱. A word divider and spacing for punctuation are regularly used. The habit of writing consonants and not vowels may have been an Egyp. innovation borrowed by the scribes of Ugarit as there was much political and cultural influence from Egypt in Ugaritic affairs. It is likely that the Sem. had eclecticized the best of the two writing systems, the consonantal economy of the Egyp. and the simplicity of signs found in the cuneiform. The Ugaritic sign list is seen in figure 9.

F. Urartian civilization flourished in the area of Lake Van in northern Anatolia from about 1100-600 b.c. Its language which is related to the Caucasian tongues is called Urarṭian or Vannic. The Urarṭian inscrs. are written in Neo-Assyrian cuneiform script with a large percentage of logographic writings. There are several important bilinguals.

G. Hurrian is one of the oldest languages of the Near E. It was spoken by the inhabitants of the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates as well as northern Syria-Palestine as early as the 2nd millennium b.c. It is this linguistic group which is suspected of being the cultural transmitters of Akkad. civilization to Syria-Palestine and Anatolia. Hurrian texts written in largely syllabic cuneiform with few logograms have been excavated from Hittite, Ugaritic and Mesopotamian sites. The Hurrians were known in the OT as Horites (Gen 14:6; et al.). Their tongue which is agglutinative, non-Indo-European and non-Sem. is written with a syllabic spelling and script which contains very few logograms. The actual form of the cuneiform signs conforms to the Peripheral Akkad. mentioned above. The central Hurrian kingdom was established in the region of the Middle and Upper Tigris and called Mitanni. The Mitannian state consisted of Hurrian commoners and Indo-European nobles which made it like the Hitt. a polyglot confederacy of different ethnic and linguistic groups.

H. Persian is the dominant language of the Medo-Persian empire which came to dominate the Near E and Egypt in the 6th cent. b.c. The Persian empire had three official court languages, Old Persian, Elamite and Akkad., and it utilized Aram. for administrative communications. However, the Pers. cuneiform bears little resemblance to Akkad. It is a syllabary with less than a dozen logograms and determinatives added (see fig. 6) (Persian Language and Literature, q.v.). After the eclipse of Persia cuneiform declined rapidly. After the Alexandrian conquests and the founding of the Hel. kingdoms a brief renaissance of the script took place under the Seleucids. Even then it was not used for economic or business documents but only by the conservative pagan temple administrations. There are extant a few fragments of Sumero-Akkadian lexical texts which had been transliterated into uncial Gr. characters. In the cultural struggles which resulted from the advent of Christianity upon the scene again the pagan priesthood turned to cuneiform but by a.d. 75 the last documents on clay had been written and the knowledge of the script which went back in a direct tradition for 3200 years was forgotten. Probably no other event has so enlarged and altered our historical horizon than the decipherment and study of cuneiform texts.

IV. Hieroglyphic

Strictly speaking, the term hieroglyphic as coined by the Gr. historians refers only to the pictographic form of the Egyp. signs. However, in usage it has developed the added connotation of a mixed pictographic-logographic and syllabic script. The monumental carvings in which hieroglyphic inscrs. were often executed were never used except for functions of the religious state. Since the Pharaonic office was divine its speech and proclamations were set in an otherworldly genre. If, as is alleged, the slate palettes from Hieraconpolis do contain fully developed syllabic writing and not simply pictographs, then the origin of the Egyp. hieroglyphic must be put back to at least 3000 b.c. If not, which seems rather to be the case, then the Egyp. system must be dated back no earlier than 2900 b.c. It is generally assumed that the impetus for the invention of the Egyp. system came from Sumer. Many features are held in common. Essentially, the hieroglyphic system is a syllabary of the type mentioned above as a development from Sumerian. That is, one in which the consonants are rigid but the vowels are only vaguely expressed, e.g. in the Sumero-Akkad. syllabary where the AḤ sign also may be read: eḥ, iḥ or uḥ; in the Egyp. syllabary where no specific vowel is understood and a sign ka is actually k^x, the x representing a, u, o, e or i so that the ka sign can be read as ka, ku, ko, ke or ki, as long as some vowel is pronounced. As with the Sumero-Akkad. syllabary, there are not only consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant signs, but also combinations. In fact, there are monoconsonantal, biconsonantal and triconsonantal signs. Needless to add, all of those above one element could have been reduced thus yielding an alphabet but in the long history of hieroglyphic writing this never occurred. Buried under the expanse of hundreds of signs there was a set of simple consonants plus the x or o element. They were: ’ í y c w b p f m n r h ḥ ẖ ẖ s š ḳ/q ḳ g ṯ t d ḏ. The biconsonantal signs were: ^c’ p’ h’ s’ t’ w’ m’ h’ š t b ḥ s signs were: ^c’ p h s t w m’ h’ š’ t’ b’ ḥ’ s’ k’ d’ mí (in three forms) ní tí ^c ’w íw nw rw ḥw ȟw sw šw dw ’b nb wp kp nm ḥm km gm tm ín wn mn nn ḥn hn sn šn ír wr pr mr nr rḥ hr dr bḥ pḥ mḥ nḥ ms ns gs ís ḥs ^ck sk mt ht st šd kd ḏd dd ^cd wḏ nḏ ḥd. It can easily be seen that the signs with glottals and the aleph predominate and these prob. also acted as the three alephs in Ugaritic as vowel indicators. The triconsonantal signs, since the Sem. words have three root consonants, are little different from logograms. Needless to add there were many of them appearing and being modified over the centuries. In one feature, the Egyp. system far outstripped the Sumer. and that was in the thousands of determinatives. These little pictographs are added to many words which have been spelled out syllabically so that there is in effect a redundance of both phonographic and semasiographic signs. Specimens of all types in the Middle Egyptian orthography are shown in figure 9. On close account all four sign types, syllabic, logographic, determinative and grammatical-diacriticals can be demonstrated in both the Sumer. and Egyp. writing systems. The theory of the two systems is identical. In the Old Kingdom period (2900-2160 b.c.) the epigraphic inscrs. are elaborately engraved and often colored attractively. The Pyramid Texts from this period have their own slightly variant dialect and signs. Unlike Akkad. Egyp. changed internally over the centuries so that new grammatical and syntactical features were added and old ones eliminated. Middle kingdom Egyp. developed from the Old kingdom system with some popular speech modifications. During the early part of this period (2000 b.c.) an inked form of the letters came into vogue. This sign system which could be more easily written on papyrus sheets and clay ostraca is called hieratic script. Late Egyp., a successor to the Middle kingdom Egyp., incorporated many new linguistic and syntactic features radically altering the future development of the language. By 700 b.c. a still more simplified form of hieratic had appeared which was not merely a semiotic variation but marked a new grammar, vocabulary and writing system. The last phase was the Coptic, which appeared after the Pers. conquest, 6th cent. b.c. It is written in a modified Gr. alphabet but still retains the basic system of the ancient syllabary. It is divided into four major dialects, Sahidic, Boharic, Fayyumic and Akhmimic. These utilize the same sign system, but show divergences in vocabulary and transcription due to colloquial variations in speech. However, on the basis of the Demotic and contemporary with the Coptic another script arose in the former Ethiopian dominions at the island of Meroë. There a double set of signs emerged, the one much like simplified hieroglyphic was used for epigraphic monumental inscrs.; the other far less complex was used on papyri and ostraca. Specimens of all the Egyp. scripts and their development are shown in figure 11. After the advent of Ptolemaic government (323 b.c.) hieroglyphic usage declined rapidly. Unlike cuneiform the hieroglyphic system was not borrowed directly by any other linguistic group. Only the Meroitic language, as yet still undeciphered, was written in it. Egypto-Meroitic reduced the system below the number of signs until prob. copying Gr. it developed a straightforward alphabetic script of only twenty-three signs, some of which were pure vowels. All the other derivative systems from hieroglyphic were indirect and only the W Sem. and Afro-Sem. have survived.

C. Hittite,although usually written in its modified cuneiform, was in its dialectal variations written in a hieroglyphic script invented totally independently. Although the impetus may have come from Egyp., the forms of none of the signs are distinctly Egyp. The hieroglyphic Hitt. flourished between 1500 and 700 b.c. It developed several styles, an earlier pictographic style and a later stylized cursive system. It is a syllabary with some sixty signs. All of the signs are invariably of the consonant-vowel type which necessitated the writing of redundant and unpronounced sounds. Phoenician-hieroglyphic bilinguals have been found at Karatepe and other Turkish sites of former petty kingdoms of the 12th to 8th centuries b.c. The syllabary is shown in figure 9. The origins of the Hitt. syllabary are more than likely to be found in the Aegean area where still a third ancient writing system had appeared. Toward the end of the 3rd millennium b.c., the same migrations which had brought the Indo-Europeans into Iran and Anatolia caused a sweep of new peoples into the N shores of the Mediterranean Sea. In later centuries these epoch voyages would be remembered in the Homeric poems. The civilization thus founded is known as Minoan and flourished from 2400 to 1400 b.c. Attempts have been made to associate these Minoan inhabitants with the Ugaritic and Canaanite civilizations of the Syrian coast, but the evidence deduced is still highly controversial (C. H. Gordon, Evidence for the Minoan Language [1966]; M. C. Astour, Hellenosemitica [1965]).

V. West Semitic and Greek

Although the two language families represented by W Sem. (i.e Ugaritic, Canaanite, Phoen. and Heb.) and Gr. are quite distinct, the writing systems they employed over the millennia are dependent upon each other. In regard to the semiotic systems involved they must be considered as a unit.

A. Cretan pictographic,or hieroglyphic is known from tablets discovered in Crete, at Knossos, Hagia Triada and elsewhere and at various sites on the Gr. peninsula proper. The characters may have developed from stamp seals and other ownership marks. Such seal impressions date back to about 2500 b.c., while the initial pictographic system of writing appears about 2000 b.c. in the early part of the cultural phase known as “Middle Minoan I.” There were two variations of this pictographic syllabary introduced, “A” in use from 2000-1875 b.c. and “B” 1875-1700 b.c. The Cretan people were merchant adventurers who established thalassocratic, maritime city states on the rocky shores of the islands and peninsulas of the E Mediterranean Sea. In time their commerce grew sufficiently to force a simplification of the elaborate pictographs. By 1700 b.c. the cultural phase known as “Middle Minoan III,” a simplified cursive script, had come into use and was, in turn, superseded by a still more abstract one. They are known as Linear “A” and “B” respectively. Only the Linear “B” has successfully been deciphered, although work and insight are presently bringing evidence of a “breakthrough” in the decipherment of Linear “A” and the Cretan pictographs. In all forms the Cretan system is a syllabary with a large number of logograms which double as determinatives. However there are some interesting peculiarities in Linear “B” which may also apply to the older forms. In certain diphthongs the vowel “i” is expressed, in others it is not while final position l, m, n, r and s in vowel-consonant syllables is omitted. There are less than a hundred signs in all which fit into a neat grid or table of vowels vs. consonants. The Linear “A” contains somewhat over eighty signs and what appear to be the logographic-determinatives. M. Ventris, a young British architect, proved in 1956 that the language of Linear “B” was Gr., strangely spelled, archaically written in syllabic forms which like Hittite cuneiform contained many redundancies and unpronounced vowels. The language of Linear “A” is most certainly not Gr. and there is little likelihood that it is any other Indo-European language. It remains to be seen if the scholar who equated it with Akkadian, Ugaritic or Phoenician will be justified by the final decipherment. The four classes of Cretan scripts are shown in figure 12. While Egyp. and hieroglyphic Hitt. retained the full form of the individual pictographs except for certain cursive adaptations, Cretan passed rapidly into a linear phase. On the other hand Late Egyp., esp. Meroitic, abstracted the signs according to an alphabetic principle. There is no indication that Cretan ever did. Later offshoots did develop from the Cretan system. In fact not a year goes by without some new texts being excavated written in an unknown derivative of the Cretan script. The chief ones are: Cypriote, a late Cypro-Minoan, Eteo-cretan and the script of Phaistos and Byblos. Specimens of some of these are shown in figure 12. The overall importance of the Cretan system in the history of writing is its rigid consonant-vowel syllabary and its reduction to simple linear signs which could be used alike for epigraphic inscrs. or inked on the more perishable papyrus and parchment.

B. Proto-Phoenician syllabic is actually a theoretical construction of a system which served as intermediate between the E Sem.-Ugaritic on one hand and the Egyp. on the other. The earliest texts in Pal. yet known are problematic fragmentary inscrs. on potsherds dated by some to the late 18th and early 17th cent. b.c. and discovered at Gezer, Shechem and Lachish. They vary in form of characters from cursive pictographic reminiscent of the Aegean syllabaries to stark linear flowing cursives. It is important to note that this series of syllabic “experiments” took place during the Hyksos period when the nomadic tribes of the Near E and the settled petty kingdoms of the river valley civilizations were in constant conflict. The connection between these undeciphered Palestinian texts and the Paleo-Sinaitic fragments is only speculative. The fragments were inscribed by the Pharaonic expeditions sent to work the copper and turquoise mines of Serābiṭ el-H̱adem in the Sinai Peninsula. The inscrs. have just barely been deciphered but the principle upon which they are written is to use the initial sound of an Egyp. logogram as an independent letter or character with the x or o element as vowel. This is a great advance toward an alphabet, but it is not a full and complete step. A few samples of this writing appear in figure 13. It is evident that they are abstracted from the hieratic or late Egyp. hieroglyphic. A set of remotely similar texts has been found in the Egyp. Fayyum, the date of which is still under debate. From some one of these inscriptional systems or a derivative of them the oldest fully represented system, Old Phoenician, developed. The earliest complete and decipherable inscr. is the Byblian inscr. from the tomb of ’Aẖirâm, dated about the 12th cent. b.c. Byblos has produced other older writings but they must be classed with the Proto- and Paleo Pal. fragments mentioned earlier. The important fact is that a number of writing systems were in practice in Pal. 500 years before David was crowned and that any or all had been or could have been used for the Heb. language.

C. Phoenician is the language of the ’Aẖirâm, inscr. and it continued to be one of the dominant languages of the Near E throughout the Hel. and Rom. period down to the Early Medieval period. The Phoen. system is a syllabary with the addition of some few vowel letters as the aleph which like its Ugaritic predecessor can be used as a vowel or consonant or both simultaneously. The thin line between syllabic writing and alphabetic writing is never crossed by the Phoen. system. The subject of North and South Sem. epigraphy is the study of the two great divisions of the scripts that developed from the Phoen. writing. A small number of complete Heb. inscrs. are known which are written in characters much like the Phoen. The earliest of these is the Gezer Calendar, a short seven line poetic composition relating the months of the agricultural year. It is dated to the 9th cent. b.c.

D. Old Hebrew,then, is the script and language of the inscrs. which occurred before the Captivity under Babylon. It is similar to the linear Phoen. of its time. There is little doubt that the oldest copies of the Biblical books were written in such a character. South Sem. developed along different lines and soon became quite distinct. Its roots may go back to the Paleo-Sinaitic script as it is contained for a considerable period in the Arabian Peninsula. In the N part of the area there developed the Safaitic, Lihyanitic, Dedanitic, Thamudenic and other lesser known scripts. While in the S of the Arabian area there developed the Minaean, Sabaean, Himyaritic, Qatabanic and Hadramautic scripts. However, it was in Ethiopia that these developments came into their own.

E. South Arabian is therefore a separate system of cursive offshoots of the general W. Sem. branch. By a.d. 300 these Arabian scripts had died out ultimately to be replaced by the classical Arab. writing system dispersed through the world by the rise and spread of Islam. Often scholars have assumed that in some way classical Arab. language and script had some influence or maintained some position relative to the Heb. of the Bible. This is, of course, untrue because of the simple fact that the earliest of all classical Arab. in the Meccan dialect appears some 500 years after the last book of the OT. Like Old Heb. and Phoen. the South Arabian scripts were essentially syllabaries wherein the consonants contained an x or O element of indeterminate vocalic value. The proof is in the fact that when exported by the Arab merchants to the E coast of the Red Sea and the E coast of central Africa these same scripts developed into full-fledged syllabaries with clearly identified vocalic signs. Had they been true alphabets this would have been an impossible reversion to a more primitive condition. Ethiopic, the official language of the Christian kingdom of Axum in the Early Medieval period, is better known as Ge’ez, the ritual tongue of the Ethiopian Coptic church. It was developed from a S Arabian dialect with an E African substrate. The writing system is a derivative of the Sabaean script which contained twenty-nine characters. With some editions it is the modern script in which the manifold Sem. languages of Ethiopia are written. The official one is Amharic but the same applies to Tigré, Tigrin̂a, Harari, Gafat, Guragé and Argobba and a host of lesser dialects. The Sabaean script and the Ge’ez appear in figure 14.

F. Aramaic is an E Sem. language closely associated with Akkad. in its middle period. It was one of the dialects which developed after the E Sem. peoples began to advance W. Its origins can certainly be traced to the Amorite tongue which had wide dispersion throughout the area of Mesopotamia and Syria-Palestine sometime before the 2nd millennium b.c. From 1750 b.c. on, E Sem. in the form of Amorite and the W Sem. languages can be distinguished from textual remains. Certainly by 1400 b.c. Hebrew, Phoen. and Aram. were all distinct from one another.

1. After the establishment of the First Commonwealth there were a number of dialects recognizable in Pal. proper: Heb., Phoen., Aram., Moabite and some S Arab. derivatives. All the N and W dialects were written in the Phoen. script. However, it appears that it was the Aram. that introduced the familiar square script. This was one of the common administrative languages of the Pers. empire and Daniel, Ezra and Nehemiah all were schooled in it as their books abundantly prove. This has been called “the Persian chancellery hand” (F. M. Cross, “The Development of the Jewish Scripts,” The Bible and the Ancient Near East [1961], 136ff.) and the evidence of the DSS and Elephantine Papyri shows the rapid spread of this “square script” throughout the area of the W Sem. languages. Since Syria-Palestine was under a series of foreign administrations from the Hel. age until the brief revolts which brought about the Rom. conquest, it stands to reason that not only the speech but also the writing would be affected. One of the most important of these effects was the addition of vowel indicators to the previously x or O element. This began before the Christian era and continued rapidly afterward until the Aram. and Heb. script was in fact a full alphabet. The various systems of signs called “pointings” or “vowel signs” came together in the Medieval renaissance of Jewish learning first in Babylon where the Talmud was written and later after the Arab conquest in Spain. As the Judeo-Arab scholars of Spain studied the Heb. grammar it was brought more and more into accord with the work of the Arab. grammarians.

2. In time, Aram. ceased to be spoken in its original form and passed into Syriac and its later Christian dialects. Syriac has been written in several different writing systems including Aram. “square script” and Arab. cursive. An off-shoot of this development is Mandaean, the language of a quasi-Jewish sect of Iran which developed its own “square script.” After the division of the Rom. empire and the founding of the Oriental Gr. church the Nestorian missionaries went to Asia and Eurasia with the Christian message. Their Syriac script became the first alphabetic system to be used for many Ural-Altai languages such as Soĝdian. Syriac inscrs. have been located on stone stele in Western China as early as the 7th cent. a.d.

3. In accord with the diacritical vowel systems utilized in Aram. and Heb. the derivative systems added them after the 1st cent. a.d. and when it rose to be the dominant power in the Near E the Islamic culture adopted the practice resulting in the complex set of vowel signs used in Arab. and all the scripts of the Afro-Asian world which it affected. Since both the Heb. Bible and the Arab. Quran contained prohibitions against the making of “graven images” and “likenesses” the script itself became an artistic and ornamental device. The carved wooden screens and lattices of much of the Islamic golden age are covered with hundreds of running scrolls of Arab. script. In the same fashion the Heb. alphabet was made an end in itself and covered in rich symmetry the silver and gold vessels of the Medieval synagogue. Contemporary to this fanciful artistic usage of the script there arose an interpretation of the alphabet as a message in and of itself. This notion of the Heb. script as the subject of magical and mystical interpretation produced a vast folklore of the text and even vowel pointings of the OT. Because the characters were also used as numbers a florid numeristics developed. In time the actual history of the Heb. text was forgotten along with the traces of its numerous VSS and textual traditions. To the rabbinate of the late Medieval and Early Modern periods the Heb. text stood with all of its massoretic notes, a vast monolithic construction with little evidence of its long and dramatic historical background in view. When the study of the Heb. language and lit. were revived in the Renaissance, J. Reuchlin (1455-1522) and his followers had little choice but to begin with the myths and legends of the Jewish tradition. As late as the 17th cent. a.d. Heb. scholars such as the Swiss Buxtorfs firmly believed in the originality and inflexibility of the vowel points, and discus sions about their importance to the doctrines of inspiration and inerrancy were commonplace. The Heb. writing system is one of the oldest still in use and the only Sem. character to survive the Hel. age. It is also the most economic with only twenty-two signs. In the Rom. period, the Phoen. language degenerated into a vernacular N African dialect used in Carthage and called Punic and in its final decline, Neopunic. This tongue was written with the standard Phoen. characters in its early phase but came under the influence of Aram. and the square script. However, a system of using the old gutturals and glottals as pure and simple vowel signs was introduced. Thus aleph became “a,” ’ayin “e,” and waw served for “us,” yod for “i.” The result was a short and highly efficient alphabet in the fullest phonographic sense. In time Medieval Heb. followed the same processes and produced the Yiddish character system which reproduces and transcribes the phonetics of Ger. in Heb. square script by using certain of the old signs for purely vocalic equivalents. The shades of meaning and nuances of words in the Heb. Bible are inextricably bound up with the excellent though ancient writing system, the vehicle and component of God’s Word written. The Heb. syllabary comprises vertical communication at its highest and most important form, and, in doing so has had a profound influence on Western civilization.

G. Greek,as noted above, was first set down in an elaborate and uneconomical syllabary which later developed into a highly cursive and abstract form. Interestingly enough the classical authors of Athens and Ionia never mention this early nearly hieroglyphic phase of the writing of Gr. The Gr. traditions are unanimous in presenting the Gr. script as derived from the Phoen. However just when and where this great cultural transmission took place is not at all clear. Between the syllabic script of Linear “B” on the Pylos tablets and the earliest full-fledged alphabetic inscrs. from Greece proper there is only about 450-500 years from 1200 b.c. to or after 750 b.c. In this period there is little evidence extant and none showing the stages of development. In the oldest Gr. alphabetic inscrs. the forms of b g d l m n and r are the same as in some types of Phoen. Since the same phonemes are found in both Gr. and the Sem. languages the sounds are doubtless identical. The direction of all the derivatives of the W Sem. writing systems is right to left and indeed the oldest known Gr. inscrs. such as the Athenian Dipylon vase inscr. read from right to left. By the end of the 9th cent. b.c. the Phoen. characters had been adopted by Gr. speaking cities on the Attic peninsula and the islands off W Anatolia. These individual adoptions caused the proliferation of a variety of forms of the script. Texts from the 6th cent. b.c. are often written in a peculiar left to right then right to left manner known as Gr. bōūstrophedon, “as an ox plows a field” (fig. 16). The sounds of the Gr. language which did not occur in Sem. were indicated by newly invented signs and among these were the full set of vowels. The initial sign of the Sem. systems, aleph, was utilized as the sound of “a” and the name alpha was retained. The Phoen. and Heb. gutt ural “ḥ”/“h,” hê was utilized as “e” and termed eta, while the ancient ’ayin, was used for “o”