Monday, February 03, 2014

Was the early Hebrew alphabet a syllabary?

ASOR BLOG: The Lost Link: The Alphabet in the Hands of the Early Israelites (Brian E. Colless).

A technical but, for epigraphers, very interesting argument that the shapes and stances of the letters in the earliest "Hebrew"/"Israelian" inscriptions indicated the vowels that went with them. I think the theory needs to be published in a peer-review journal before we get too excited about it, but it's good to have a preliminary presentation in this blog post.