So much for the way of separating words on the page (or, as the case may be, stone or clay tablet), but what is a word anyway? It turns out that this question is harder to answer than it might first appear, and furthermore, that the ancients had a rather different view than we do.The essay includes a link to the author's 2022 monograph, The Semantics of word division in Northwest Semitic writing systems: Ugaritic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite and Greek (Oxbow). HT Rogue Classicism.
This is the first time I have run across Cambridge University's CREWS (Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems) Project. Their website has lots of valuable material.
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