AN ANCIENT ABECEDARY has been discovered carved in a stone at Tel Zayit in Israel.

A Is for Ancient, Describing an Alphabet Found Near Jerusalem

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD (New York Times)
Published: November 9, 2005

In the 10th century B.C., in the hill country south of Jerusalem, a scribe carved his A B C's on a limestone boulder - actually, his aleph-beth-gimel's, for the string of letters appears to be an early rendering of the emergent Hebrew alphabet.

Archaeologists digging in July at the site, Tel Zayit, found the inscribed stone in the wall of an ancient building. After an analysis of the layers of ruins, the discoverers concluded that this was the earliest known specimen of the Hebrew alphabet and an important benchmark in the history of writing, they said this week.

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The date is not certain, but evidently both ceramic typology (from the stratum at the site) and epigraphic considerations point in that direction. The inscription is already being brought into the minimalist/maximalist debate, perhaps prematurely.

A few other comments:

The two lines of incised letters, apparently the 22 symbols of the Hebrew alphabet, were on one face of the 40-pound stone. A bowl-shaped hollow was carved in the other side, suggesting that the stone had been a drinking vessel for cult rituals, Dr. Tappy said. The stone, he added, may have been embedded in the wall because of a belief in the alphabet's power to ward off evil.

I'm having trouble picturing this. Was the stone originally part of the wall or reused later as a wall stone? Is the inscription on the same side as the bowl (so you could review your ABCs while you took a drink at the water fountain between classes?) or on the other side (the outside of the wall?)? What is the evidence that the use was cultic rather than, say, in a classroom for a scribal school?

Another baffling peculiarity is that in four cases the letters are reversed in sequence; an F, for example, comes before an E.

F before E? What does that mean? The Pe before the Ayin maybe? Or the Vav before the He?

The ANE list has had rumors of this inscription in recent days. I look forward to Ron Tappy's paper on it in the ASOR/AAR/SBL meetings in Philadelphia later this month.

UPDATE (12 November): More here.