Early Alphabetic Writing at Lachish

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A new inscription from Tel Lachish in southern Israel is the earliest alphabetic writing discovered in the southern Levant.

In 2018, archaeologists found the inscribed sherd among burnt soil and debris from a large building that was part of the site’s fortifications.¹ The fragmentary inscription features a mere handful of letters inscribed on a tiny potsherd, measuring just 1.6 by 1.4 inches. The sherd, part of a painted Cypriot vessel, is dated by radiocarbon to the 15th century B.C.E., or the first part of the Late Bronze Age.

Alphabetic writing was formerly thought not to have appeared in the southern Levant until the end of the Late Bronze Age, around the 13th century B.C.E. By contrast, the earliest alphabetic inscriptions from the Near East—the Proto-Sinaitic texts discovered in the ancient Egyptian turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai—are generally dated to the 19th century B.C.E., more than half a millennium earlier. The new inscription from Lachish helps fill in this chronological gap, providing a critical “missing link” in our understanding of how the alphabet evolved and spread out from Egypt to other parts of the ancient world.

The earlier Proto-Sinaitic texts, which are thought to have been written by Canaanite workers, adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to serve as written symbols for distinct alphabetic sounds.^a The letters in the new Lachish inscription represent a more evolved form of the same early alphabetic script. Initial readings of the two-line inscription have identified the letters ‘ayin, bet, and dalet (‘abd = “servant”), most likely the first part of a Canaanite personal name expressing servitude to a god. The second line features the letters nun, pe, and tav, which could be the word for “honey” or “nectar” (Hebrew: nophet).

The inscription’s early date suggests that the alphabet likely spread from Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (17th–16th centuries B.C.E.), when Egypt was ruled by the so-called Hyksos kings, who were of “Asiatic” or Canaanite descent (see Rachel Hallote’s article). This period may have witnessed more frequent social and commercial interaction between Egypt and Canaan, which would have included the exchange of new ideas and concepts, including the adoption within Canaan of an alphabetic script derived from hieroglyphs.