Byblos syllabary
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| Byblos syllabary | ||
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| Type: | Undeciphered (probably a syllabary) | |
| Languages: | Unknown (Semitic?) | |
| Time period: | Estimated between 1800 BC and 1400 BC | |
| Parent writing systems: | Egyptian hieroglyphs and hieratic/Proto-Canaanite? Byblos syllabary |
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| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
The Byblos syllabary, also known as the Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos. The inscriptions are engraved on bronze plates and spatulas, and carved in stone. They were excavated by Maurice Dunand, from 1928 to 1932, and published in 1945 in his monograph Byblia Grammata. The inscriptions are conventionally dated to the second millennium BC, probably between the 18th and 15th centuries BC.
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[edit] Description of the script
[edit] The ten inscriptions
The Byblos script is usually written from right to left; word dividers are rarely used. The ten known inscriptions, named a to j in their order of discovery, are:
- Two rectangular bronze tablets, documents c (16×11 cm) and d (21×12 cm), with 225 and 459 characters, respectively. Both tablets are inscribed on both sides. The characters were not made by scratching but by hammering chisels into the metal.
- Four bronze "spatulas" (documents b, e, f, and i, with 40, 17, 48, and 84 characters, respectively). These spatulas have a more or less triangular shape with a "flower stem" handle at the sharpest angle of the triangle. They are about 5 by 9 centimeters and 1 mm thick. It is not known what their function was, but Dunand thinks they are "labels" attached to, for example, votive objects. All spatulas are inscribed on both sides, except spatula e (one side only). The writing is relatively sloppy. The text on the back side of spatula f is the only text known that reads from left to right. Spatulae b and i use short vertical strokes as word dividers.
- Inscription on spatula e. The handle of the spatula has broken off; four possible reconstructions of the damaged leftmost character of the inscription are given.
- Four fragments of stone steles: documents a, g, h, and j, with 116, 37, 7, and 13 characters respectively. The characters are carefully carved, with conspicuous interlinear baselines ("monumental style"). Dunand suggests that fragments h and j originally belonged to the same monument; the chemical composition of the limestone of both seems identical. The text on fragment g is written vertically, in five columns. Block j has vertical strokes, apparently as word dividers.
[edit] Related inscriptions
Isolated characters from the Byblos syllabary have also been found on various other objects, such as axes and pottery. Also a spatula is known which has on the front side a Phoenician inscription and on the back side traces of a Proto-Byblian inscription—about half a dozen proto-Byblian characters are recognizable. The Phoenician inscription on this spatula is dated to the tenth century BC which suggests that Pseudo-hieroglyphs may have remained in use longer than is usually assumed.
Also part of a monumental inscription in stone has been found in Byblos in a script that seems intermediate between the Pseudo-hieroglyphs and the later Phoenician alphabet. 21 characters are visible; most of them are common to both the Pseudo-hieroglyphic script and the Phoenician alphabet, while the few remaining signs are either Pseudo-hieroglyphic or Phoenician (Dunand, Byblia Grammata, pp. 135-138).
[edit] Sign list
Each cell in the above table shows a sign (upper left), its Dunand code number (lower left), its frequency (lower right), and indicates (upper right) whether it was used on tablets (T), spatulas (S), or monuments (M). Signs in different cells may actually be writing variants of a single sign; for example, in the top row the signs H6, G17, and E12 are probably the same sign.
[edit] Number of different signs
The ten main Pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions together contain 1046 characters, while the number of 'signs', that is different characters, is given by Dunand as 114. Garbini has noted that the latter number probably is too high, for two reasons. First, Dunand's sign list includes heavily damaged characters for which it is impossible to say whether they really constitute a new sign. Secondly, writing variants clearly existed, for example between the "monumental" style of the steles and the "linear" style of the spatulas and tablets. Taking these variants into account would reduce the total number of signs.
Garbini estimates the actual number of signs to be about 90. This number suggests the script to be a syllabary, where each character was pronounced as a syllable, usually a consonant-plus-vowel combination. If the number of consonants was between 22 (like the later 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 it included an e and o, or a mute vowel), the total number of signs needed would be between 3×22=66 and 6×28=168, which is of the right order of magnitude.
[edit] Relation with other scripts
Some signs, for example 
, look like modified common Egyptian hieroglyphs, but there are many others which do not. Hoch (1990) points out that many of the signs seem to derive from Old Kingdom hieratic, rather than directly from hieroglyhic. It is known that from as early as 2600 BC Egyptian influence in Byblos was strong: Byblos was the main export harbour for "cedar" wood to Egypt, and consequently there was a considerable Egyptian merchant community in Byblos. Thus it is probable that the syllabary was devised by someone in Byblos who had seen Egyptian hieroglyphs and used them freely as an example to compose a new syllabary that was better adapted to the native language of Byblos—just as in neighbouring Ugarit a few centuries later a cuneiform alphabet was devised that was easier to use than the complicated Akkadian cuneiform.
Quite many signs resemble letters of the later Phoenician alphabet: 
. This suggests that the latter was derived in some way from the syllabary. Thus the inscriptions are potentially an important link between the Egyptian hieroglyphic script and the later Semitic abjads derived from Proto-Canaanite. Colless (1998) emphasizes the close relationship to the descendant Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician scripts.
[edit] Attempts at decipherment
[edit] Dhorme (1946)
The corpus of inscriptions is generally considered far too small to permit a systematic decipherment on the basis of an internal analysis of the texts. Yet already in 1946, one year after Dunand published the inscriptions, a claim for its decipherment was made, by Édouard Dhorme, a renowned Orientalist and former cryptanalyst from Paris. He noted that on the back of one of the inscribed bronze plates was a much shorter inscription ending in a row of seven nearly identical chevron-like marks, very much like our number "1111111". He assumed this to be a number (probably "seven", though Dhorme took it to be 4×10+3=43 because four marks were slightly larger than the other three), and guessed that the backside inscription as a whole contained a dating of the inscription.
The word directly before the seven "1" marks consists of four different signs: 
. The first (rightmost) sign, damaged but recognizable, and the leftmost sign resemble the letters 'b' and 't', respectively, of the later Phoenician alphabet. Dhorme now interpreted the whole word ('b-..-..-t') as Phoenician "b(a) + š(a)-n-t", "in the year (of)" (Hebrew bišnat), which gave him the phonetic meanings of all four signs. These he substituted in the rest of the inscriptions, thereby looking for recognizable parts of more Phoenician words that would give him the reading of more signs. In the end he proposed transcriptions for 75 signs, but due to the arbitrariness of the way he isolated and recognized Phoenician words his decipherment is generally not considered valid. Besides, Dhorme's translations of the inscriptions as a whole look suspiciously odd, for example, because they include so many Egyptian names.
[edit] Sobelman (1961)
Harvey Sobelman did not try to find phonetic values for the various signs, but instead tried to determine word boundaries and find grammatical patterns, using linguistics techniques. Daniels's judgement is that Sobelman's "result should be taken into account in all future work on these texts."
[edit] Martin (1962)
Malachi Martin squeezed the various signs into 27 "classes", apparently trying to make the script into an ordinary alphabet. After publishing "part one" of his decipherment he never published a sequel, which suggests that this attempt was not successful.
[edit] Mendenhall (1985)
In 1985 a new translation attempt was published by George Mendenhall. He never really described his decipherment technique, but apparently he based his decipherment on resemblances between the Byblos signs and Egyptian hieroglyphs as well as signs from Phoenician and other Northwest Semitic writing systems. Thus many signs that reappear in the later Phoenician alphabet were assumed by Mendenhall to have a similar phonetic value. For example, the sign 
which in Phoenician has the value g (Hebrew gimel), is assumed to have the phonetic value ga. A sign 
which resembles an Egyptian hieroglyph 
meaning "King of Upper Egypt" is interpreted as "mulku" (Semitic for 'regal'; compare Hebrew mèlekh, 'king'), which furnished the phonetic reading mu. The latter example illustrates that Mendenhall extensively made use of the acrophonic principle, where the phonetic value of a syllabic sign is assumed to be equal to the initial sound of the (Semitic) word for the object that is depicted by the sign.
Mendenhall took the language to be very early ("Old Coastal") Semitic, from before the split between the Northwest Semitic (Phoenician, Hebrew) and South Semitic (Arabic) language groups. He dated the texts to as early as 2400 BC.
Mendenhall's transcriptions have generally been received very critically. They yield a text that is often very unlike ordinary Phoenician, full of rare and obscure words. It is full of unexplained and strangely varying pre- and suffixes. The translations proposed by Mendenhall are often without a clear sense: "Adze that Yipuyu and Hagara make binding. Verily, in accordance with that which Sara and Ti.pu established we will be surety. Further: with Miku is the pledge." The text with the seven '1' marks, referred to above, is interpreted by Mendenhall as a marriage contract, where the marks are the "signatures" of seven witnesses.
[edit] Literature
- Colless, Brian, The Canaanite Syllabary, Ancient Near Eastern Studies 35 (1998), 26-46.
- Daniels, P.T., 'The Byblos syllabary', in: P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems (New York/Oxford, 1996).
- Dhorme, Édouard, 'Déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudohiéroglyphiques de Byblos', in: Syria 25 (1946-1948).
- Dunand, Maurice, 'Spatule de bronze avec épigraphe phénicienne du XIIIe [actually: Xe] siècle', in: Bulletin du Musée de Beyrouth 2 (1938) 99–107. (Spatula with traces of Proto-Byblian writing)
- Dunand, Maurice (1945). Byblia Grammata: Documents et recherches sur le développement de l’écriture en Phénicie. Beirut: République Libanaise, Ministère de l’Éducation National des Beaux-Arts.
- Garbini, Giovanni, [review of Mendenhall's book], in: Rivista di Studi Fenici 16 (1988), 129-131.
- Hoch, James E. (1990). "The Byblos Syllabary: Bridging the Gap Between Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Semitic Alphabets". Journal of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities 20: 115–124.
- Martin, Malachi, 'Revision and reclassification of the Proto-Byblian signs', in: Orientalia 31 (1962) 250-271, 339-363.
- Mendenhall, George E., The Syllabic Inscriptions from Byblos, Beirut, The American University (1985), Syracuse University Press (1986), ISBN 0-8156-6077-4.
- Sobelman, Harvey, 'The Proto-Byblian inscriptions: a fresh approach', in: Journal of Semitic Studies 6 (1961) 226-245.
- Thiollet, Jean-Pierre, Je m'appelle Byblos, H & D (2005), ISBN 2-914266-04-9.
