THE EARLIEST SURVIVING NORTHWEST SEMITIC TEXT?

Hebrew U. presents Semitic snake spells (JTA)
The earliest continuous Semitic text ever deciphered was displayed publicly for the first time Monday at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Richard Steiner, professor of Semitic languages and literature at Yeshiva University, interpreted Semitic passages in Egyptian texts discovered more than a century ago inscribed on the subterranean walls of the pyramid of King Unas at Saqqara in Egypt sometime between the 25th and 30th centuries BCE.

Earlier than PaleoJudaica's usual time frame, but too cool not to mention.

The passages, which were meant to protect royal mummies against poisonous snakes, were written in hieroglyphic characters, but Steiner discovered that they were composed in the Semitic language spoken by the Canaanites in the third millennium BCE, an archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew.

The Canaanite priests of the ancient city of Byblos, in present-day Lebanon, provided these texts to the kings of Egypt.

It's not strictly speaking "Canaanite," since the "Canaanite shift" (original long a changes to long o) didn't happen until the late second millennium BCE. Still, the early third-millennium natives of Byblos would have spoken a dialect that was perhaps very early (proto-?)Northwest Semitic and ancestral to Phoenician and a sort of great-great aunt to Hebrew.

Although the Egyptians viewed their culture as far superior to that of their neighbors, the find shows that their morbid fear of snakes made them open to borrowing Semitic magic.

Snakes. Why'd it have to be snakes?

UPDATE: The story is also covered in the Jerusalem Post (here via the Agade list). Most of the information is the same, but note the following:

"This finding should be of great interest to cultural historians, linguists and Biblical scholars" Steiner said.

"This is a sensational discovery," said Hebrew University Professor Moshe Bar-Asher who is the president of the Academy of the Hebrew Language.

"It is the earliest attestation of a Semitic language, in general, and Proto-Canaanite, in particular."

The texts also shed light on several rare words in the Bible, Steiner said.

Also, Manuscript Boy e-mails with the information that a lecture by Steiner in Hebrew also deals with this text. You can download it from the Hebrew University website as a PDF file here.

Today's Ancient Judaism Seminar in St. Andrews went very well. I'll try to post something on it tomorrow.

I hope Blogger doesn't eat this update again. I thought we were past that!

UPDATE (24 January): Another tidbit from a widely disseminated A.P. article:

The Semitic language of these texts that have now been deciphered was a very archaic form of the languages later known as Phoenician and Hebrew, Steiner said.

The text includes words that have the same meaning as in Hebrew, like "yad" for hand, "ari" for lion, and "beit" for house, he said.

UPDATE: Reader Aaron Koller e-mails:

Following your links, I read Steiner's paper; it seems he thinks the dialect he's found does show the Canaanite shift. The "traditional" dating is based on its non-existence in Ugaritic, but if Ugaritic is outside the Canaanite family anyway, this may simply push the date of the shift back by a thousand years, and clarify to some extent the position of Ugaritic in NWS.

I seem to recall some limited evidence for the Canaanite shift in the Mari Letters in the early second millennium BCE, but to have it nealy a millennium earlier than that would be very interesting.

UPDATE: Nice wordplay at Metafiller: Snakes off a Pharaoh. Good supplementary links too. I thought about this inscription and its location on a wall and was tempted to say "Snakes on a Plane," but I restrained myself. Until now.

UPDATE (26 January): An Egyptologist is skeptical.

UPDATE (27 January): Duane Smith comments on the Canaanite shift over at Abnormal Interests.