PLATE 3Proto-Sinaitic
Scratched signs at Serabit el-Khadim take Egyptian pictures and use them for sounds, which is the whole idea in embryo.
Entry 01.2 · The Alphabet
ENTRY 01.1The Alphabet
The Ras Shamra abecedary
A clay tablet from Ugarit carrying the letters in order — the oldest known alphabet sequence, and the reason we know the order is that old.
Ras Shamra · 35.60° N, 35.78° E · excavated from 1929 by Claude Schaeffer
PLATE 1
PLATE 2Also in the register
Every entry →PLATE 3
PLATE 4Uluburun
A Late Bronze Age wreck off the Turkish coast carrying copper and tin ingots, glass, ivory and resin — a single ship's manifest of an entire trade system.
Entry 06.1 · Cargo
PLATE 5Schaeffer at Ras Shamra
Claude Schaeffer began work in 1929 after a farmer's plough hit a tomb roof, and ran the excavation for decades.
Entry 07.1 · Excavators
Section 02 · Sites
Where the record actually is
| No. | Site or holding | Material | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Ras Shamra (Ugarit)Tell and palace archive, Syrian coast | Alphabetic cuneiform tablets; the abecedary | 35.6019 N 35.7817 E |
| 02 | Byblos (Jbeil)Headland occupied since the Neolithic | Ahiram sarcophagus; royal shaft tombs | 34.1233 N 35.6519 E |
| 03 | Sidon (Saïda)Double harbour, dye and glass | Murex shell mound; monumental tombs | 33.5571 N 35.3729 E |
| 04 | Tyre (Sour)Island city, joined to the shore | Crushed murex deposits | 33.2705 N 35.2038 E |
| 05 | Serabit el-KhadimTurquoise mines and temple of Hathor, Sinai | Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions | 29.0386 N 33.4592 E |
| 06 | Wadi BrissaGorge in the northern Lebanon range | Two rock panels of Nebuchadnezzar II | 34.2500 N 36.4000 E |
Section 03 · Purple
A dye worth more than gold.
A gland the size of a fingernail, thousands of shells for a few grams of colour, and law to decide who was allowed to wear the result. The waste is still on the ground outside Tyre and Sidon.
03.1
Murex
Hexaplex trunculus and Bolinus brandaris, a gland the size of a fingernail, and thousands of shells for a few grams of dye.
03.2
The shell mounds
Crushed murex heaps outside Tyre and Sidon are the industrial waste of the trade.
PLATE 6Seventeen of the letters, drawn from the Phoenician forms. They are the only ornament this publication uses.
Section 04 · Glass
PLATE 7Blowing turns a luxury into a household object.
A hollow iron rod, a metre long, appears on this coast in the first century BC. Within a generation a glass vessel costs almost nothing to make.
Section 05 · Cedar
PLATE 8Three thousand years of export.
Straight, resinous, rot-resistant and thirty-five metres tall. Egypt was buying it before the pyramids at Giza were finished, and the forests did not survive the demand.
Where the reading is argued
Three questions the register carries unresolved
The date of the Ahiram inscription
Montet's stratigraphy pointed to the thirteenth or twelfth century BC; palaeography, following Albright, favours the eleventh or tenth. Neither side has resolved the other's evidence.
The range for the Sinai signs
The Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions are placed broadly in the eighteenth to fifteenth century BCE, and the precise range is contested. Some proposed readings are disputed too.
Proto-Byblian, still unread
The pseudo-hieroglyphic texts from Byblos have no accepted decipherment, and their relationship to Phoenician proper remains contested.
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