News on the Beth Shemesh alphabetic cuneiform tablet

NORTHWEST SEMITIC EPIGRAPHY: Enigmatic Canaanite Tablet Turns Out to Be School Exercise, Israeli Researchers Say. Inscription found nearly a century ago in Beth Shemesh was a sequence of letters copied by a budding scribe, and reveals existence of a school there nearly 3,500 years ago (Ariel David, Haaretz).

This research has extracted some important new data from the enigmatic Beth Shemesh (Beit Shemesh) alphabetic cuneiform text, including (not mentioned in the headline above) information on the order of the alphabet in late second millennium Canaanite. Such inscriptions are very rare outside the site of Ugarit.

For more on the Halaḥam ordering of the alphabet, see here.

The underlying article in Tel Aviv: Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University 51, (2024): 3-17 is available for free online:

Archaeo-Material Study of the Cuneiform Tablet from Tel Beth-Shemesh
Cécile Fossé, Jonathan Yogev, José Mirão, Nicola Schiavon & Yuval Goren

Abstract

The Fifth Haverford excavation season at Tel Beth-Shemesh (Ain Shams) in 1933 revealed a fractured tablet bearing a cuneiform inscription dating to the Late Bronze Age. Considered to be the earliest alphabetic cuneiform text uncovered in the Canaanite arena outside of Ugarit, this tablet quickly became the focus of many studies. Later readings suggested that this was the earliest example of a South Semitic Alphabetical sequence. Through petrographic material analysis, the present study examines the possible location of production of the tablet and discusses the implications with regard to the object’s function and cultural context.

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