Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was used mainly for monumental purposes, like in this painted relief from the Osiris temple at Abydos built by Ramesses II in c. 1270 BCE. The Walters Art Museum, Public Domain.

The Egyptian language is the sole representative of an autonomous branch of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Semito-Hamitic) language family. As such, Egyptian is related to both the Semitic languages of the Levant and the various languages of northern Africa. Ancient Egyptian’s closest relatives include Semitic (such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopic) and Berber. Like the Semitic languages, Egyptian exhibits three sentence types: nominal, adverbial, and verbal, where the predicate is a noun, an adverb, or a verb, respectively.

Now extinct, Egyptian was the mother tongue of ancient Egyptians for more than four millennia, and it ceased to function as a living language only several centuries after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE. To some extent, it was likely read and understood beyond the borders of ancient Egypt, depending on territorial expansion and commercial ties. There clearly were numerous regional dialects of Egyptian spoken across the land, but given the nature of the Egyptian writing system, which is purely consonantal, dialectal variations became fully visible only in its final stage, Coptic, for which Egyptians of the first centuries of Common Era adopted the Greek alphabet. Before Coptic, we have only hints, such as in a letter from around 1200 BCE that has the writer complaining about his correspondent’s language being as incomprehensible as that of a southerner speaking with a northerner.

The elegant, symmetrical hieroglyphs on this alabaster vessel identify its owner as King Pepi I (2276–2228 BCE). They also indicate the jar was used at the Sed-festival celebrating the pharaoh’s 30-year jubilee. The Walters Art Museum, Public Domain.

The history of ancient Egyptian can be divided into two major phases that differ typologically in the nominal syntax and the verbal system: Earlier Egyptian and Later Egyptian. Earlier Egyptian was spoken until 1300 BCE, although in formal religious texts it survived until the second century CE. It expressed gender and number but lacked the definite article; and verbal phrases followed the verb-subject-object pattern (“listen-he to her”). Earlier Egyptian included three distinctive stages: Old Egyptian, Middle (Classical) Egyptian, and Late Middle Egyptian. Although Middle Egyptian gradually morphed into Late Egyptian (see below), it remained the standard hieroglyphic language for the rest of ancient Egyptian history. Used primarily in religious texts, Late Middle Egyptian extended into the Greco-Roman period and included the so-called Ptolemaic Egyptian preserved in extensive temple inscriptions of the period.

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Later Egyptian differs substantially from Earlier Egyptian in that it expressed grammatical categories with prefixes (not suffixes), shifting the verbal pattern to subject-verb-object (“he-listen to her”). It also began to use the numeral “one” as the indefinite article (“a” or “an”) and the demonstrative pronoun “this” as the definite article (“the”). As a written language, Later Egyptian lasted from 1300 BCE to the Middle Ages, and it included Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. As a spoken language, however, its earliest stage, which we call Late Egyptian, emerged already around 1600 BCE and remained in use until about 600 BCE, when it was superseded by Demotic. Demotic developed from Late Egyptian in the mid-seventh century and lasted until the fifth century CE, overlapping with the final stage of the Egyptian language, Coptic, which then survived as a spoken language until about the 11th century.

Inventory tags from Abydos are the earliest examples of hieroglyphic writing. Courtesy Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.

The earliest known examples of Egyptian writing were excavated at Abydos, some 300 miles south of Cairo. They are inventory tags made of ivory and bone and measuring less than 1 inch per side. They each contain no more than three distinctive images, which likely identified commodities, their provenance, and quantity. Scholars generally consider these signs to be proto-hieroglyphs, as some of them later appear in actual hieroglyphic writing and seem to have phonetic value (in contrast to mere pictographs standing for concrete objects). Coming from the site’s extensive cemetery of Predynastic and Early Dynastic kings, these labels date from around 3400 to 3200 BCE and may thus predate the earliest known examples of cuneiform writing.

The Egyptian language was historically written in four distinctive scripts: hieroglyphic, hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic. Except for the last one, none of the writing systems expressed vowels. The earliest of these are hieroglyphs. Termed so by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the hieroglyphs were mostly used to record monumental and sacral texts, such as on temple walls, statues, coffins, and stelae. All hieroglyphs are pictures of real or imagined things, such as legs, a papyrus roll, or a mythical creature. These can be used in three different ways. Hieroglyphic signs can function as ideograms, representing the actual depicted thing (for example, a picture of legs means “legs”). This is how we use emojis or understand “I NY” t-shirts. Hieroglyphic signs can also be phonograms, where these same pictures are used for their phonetic (sound) value, such as when the ground plan of a house (per) is combined with other signs to write such unrelated words as perit, “emergence.” This is how English is written, except that our signs/characters have highly abstract shapes and are limited to 26. Finally, most signs can be used as determinatives, added at the end of a word to help readers determine the general idea of the word written with phonograms and, hence, not representing the depicted thing. For example, three little circles following a word written with the signs for house and mouth indicate that the preceding signs are to be read phonetically to mean “seeds” and that the word has nothing to do with actual houses or mouths.

Religious texts and private documents written on papyrus mostly used the cursive script known as hieratic, as in this Book of the Dead from c. 1070–945 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Public Domain.

When written with a reed pen and ink on papyrus or wood, hieroglyphs were produced in a much simpler way called cursive hieroglyphs, although it is still fairly easy to identify the individual shapes of their hieroglyphic counterparts. Early on, however, scribes developed a true cursive version of hieroglyphs that we call hieratic. The hieratic script was used widely to record administrative and religious texts and to write letters or literature. With the emergence of Demotic, in the mid-seventh century BCE, came an even more cursive and abbreviated script. The language of administration and literature, Demotic was written primarily on papyrus. Grammatically, it naturally developed from Late Egyptian, but its script is radically different—a more cursive variant of the hieratic script. One of the most curious examples of Demotic script is written in the Aramaic language to record biblical Psalms. This so-called Papyrus Amherst 63 was found in southern Egypt in the late 19th century and likely originated with the Jewish community on Elephantine.

Hieratic and its hieroglyphic counterpart of a section from the Maxims of Ptahhotep, a Middle Egyptian wisdom text attributed to the vizier Ptahhotep, from c. 2350 BCE. From James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian (2014), p. 7.

While cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, and Demotic were mostly written horizontally from right to left, hieroglyphs could be written in any direction, except from the bottom up. As an example, our first image above reads vertically from the right; the second image reads horizontally from the center to both left and right and then vertically down. Finally, the hieratic text of the papyrus above reads horizontally from right to left, but in the opening vignette, the right four columns of hieroglyphs read vertically from left, while the four columns on the left read vertically from the right. This versatility was useful in producing symmetrical designs and could adapt to any accompanying pictorial elements.

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The last stage of the Egyptian language, Coptic, which emerged in the third century CE, adopted the Greek alphabet. It was initially the language of the Christian church that grew to become the language of official administration, replacing Greek, before it, too, was superseded by Arabic. When the last hieroglyphic inscription was inscribed, in 436 CE, its language was already dead. It had become a mysterious language written with esoteric signs, until 200 years ago, when Champollion succeeded in cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs and began to decipher the language behind them.

Demotic was both the latest form of cursive Egyptian script and a stage of the Egyptian language. Dated to December 6, 127 BCE, this inscribed sherd contains a record of an oath taken by one Patasetat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Public Domain.

For much of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE), Canaan was under intermittent Egyptian rule, and isolated Egyptian incursions into the southern Levant continued well into the early Iron Age. When we also consider the exceptional relevance of Egypt to the biblical traditions of Joseph, the Exodus from Egypt, and the emergence of ancient Israel, the importance for biblical studies of exploring the Egyptian sources becomes obvious. In Bronze Age Canaan, Egyptian presence is attested also in the archaeological record, such as in the destruction of Gezer or in Egyptian statuary found at Hazor.

When Canaan was dominated by Egypt, scarabs and other examples of material culture, such as statues and monumental art, streamed into the region. The most prominent and ubiquitous examples of Egyptian writing preserved in the Levant are scarabs. In Egypt proper, the better known texts relevant for biblical studies include the Bubastite Portal in the temple of Amun at Karnak that celebrates military victories in the Levant of Pharaoh Shoshenq I (biblical Shishak), who campaigned through much of Israel and Judah in c. 925 BCE (see 1 Kings 14:25–26; 2 Chronicles 12:4). BAR readers will also recognize the famed Merneptah Stele excavated at Thebes and containing the first mention of a people called “Israel.” Also important are lists of Canaanite cities conquered by Pharaoh Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425), sculpted on the temple walls at Karnak. To fully engage with this Egyptian evidence, one must read the Egyptian language.

During his 1458 BCE military campaign into the southern Levant, King Thutmose III defeated a coalition of Canaanite city-states, which are listed in this relief in the temple of Amun at Karnak. Hannah Pethen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Students of Egyptian typically begin with Middle (Classical) Egyptian, which preserved a variety of literary works, including wisdom literature and stories like the Tale of Sinuhe and the Shipwrecked Sailor. In English, the most widely used teaching grammar of Middle Egyptian is James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, accessible from the Internet Archive. The handiest dictionary is Raymond Faulkner’s concise dictionary of Middle Egyptian. Finally, Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae is an electronic corpus of a wide variety of Egyptian texts for private study.

For a detailed discussion of the Egyptian sources for the history of Canaan, Donald B. Redford’s Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times is a good starting point, while the edited volume Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt? explores specifically the biblical narratives of Exodus vis-à-vis biblical, archaeological, and Egyptian evidence.

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This article was originally published in Bible History Daily on May 3, 2024

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Section of Bodmer Papyrus 66, a near complete codex of the Gospel of John and one of the oldest well-preserved New Testament manuscripts dating to c. 200 CE. Public domain.

Biblical Greek, as it is commonly known, is a dialect of the ancient Greek language known as hēkoinēdialektos (“the common dialect”) or Koine Greek. This dialect became the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean world for almost a millennium.

Unlike other biblical languages, such as Hebrew and Aramaic, Greek belongs to the Indo-European family of languages. This group includes most European languages, as well as Persian, Sanskrit, Basque, and the language of the ancient Hittites. A highly inflected language, Greek encodes the grammatical function and meaning of sentences through variation in word forms rather than by word order. Greek verbs change their endings and even stems to express tense, mood, voice, person, and number; adjectives, articles, pronouns, and nouns can be modified to reflect gender, number, and case.

Clay tablet recording oil quantities in Linear B found at Knossos by Arthur Evans. Vintagedept, CC Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

The earliest written form of Greek was a syllabic script called Linear B or Mycenaean Greek, the writing system of the Mycenaean civilization, attested on Crete, the Cycladic islands, and mainland Greece. Derived from the symbols of the still-undeciphered Minoan Linear A, Linear B originated in the late Minoan and Mycenaean periods (1450–1200 BCE) as a scribal language used by the royal administration. The language used 87 symbols that represented consonant-vowel combinations (e.g., da, do, de, du). Like many others following the Bronze Age collapse, the Mycenaean civilization crumbled around 1200 BCE, and many people groups with Aegean origins (i.e., “Sea Peoples,” such as the Philistines) began to spread throughout the Mediterranean world. This collapse precipitated the so-called “Dark Age” of Greek history (c. 1100–950 BCE) in which Linear B was seemingly forgotten.

Ceramic vessel on which the Dipylon inscription was written. It reads “Whoever of all these dancers now plays most delicately, of him this…” Durutomo, CC Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, 3.0 Unported, 2.5 Generic, 2.0 Generic and 1.0 Generic licenses.

A new form of the Greek language appeared centuries later using an alphabetic writing system borrowed from the Phoenicians—a system that was also used by the Israelites to write Paleo-Hebrew. The earliest evidence for this alphabetic Greek writing was found on a piece of pottery dating to c. 724 BCE known as the Dipylon Jug. It is also at this time that the famous poet Homer is thought to have lived, perhaps first penning his great epics Iliad and Odyssey using this new writing system.

Like most languages, ancient Greek had various regional dialects; however, with the cultural dominance of Athens following their victories over the Persians in the early fifth century BCE, the Attic dialect became the most prestigious. The era of history and literature known as the Classical period (fifth–fourth centuries BCE) saw many famous writers and thinkers emerge from Athens. These included such illustrious poets as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, as well as historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, and the great philosophers Plato and Aristotle.

After Philip II of Macedon (382–336 BCE) defeated the Athenians and Thebans, the king adopted Greek culture and made Attic Greek the official court language of his new Greco-Macedonian empire. After Philip’s son and successor, Alexander the Great, marched his armies eastward and conquered the large Persian Empire, Greek culture spread throughout these lands with the formation of military garrisons and new colonies of settlers from Macedonia and the Greek mainland. The Koine dialect, which was widely used in the military and by the new settlers, quickly spread throughout the kingdoms of Alexander’s successors until it became the language of government, diplomacy, commerce, and education, supplanting Aramaic, which was the lingua franca of the former Persian Empire. Even so, Aramaic continued to be used and spoken throughout these lands. The Judea of Jesus’s day was a multilingual society where much of the population spoke both Greek and Aramaic on a regular basis. It was within this cultural milieu that the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible came to be written. Traditionally thought to have been composed in Alexandria, Egypt, during the reign of Ptolemy II (285–247 BCE), this corpus of Jewish scriptures, translated into Koine Greek, was believed to be the work of 70 scribes, giving rise to its common name, the Septuagint (“the seventy”).

Significant changes occurred with the development of Koine from Attic Greek. These included the vanishing of the dual number (used to specify two of something), the loss of vowel lengths, and the simplification of diphthongs, such as ai, ei, and oi, into monophthons (e, i, and u, respectively). These changes naturally occurred as the language spread to different lands and became more standardized. The language changes are not unlike the differences between the written English of century or so ago, which generally followed more formal grammatical rules, and the English of today, which is employed by many people all over the world, not just by native English-speakers.

Like the Septuagint, the New Testament was also written in Koine Greek, as were the writings of the early Church Fathers. The majority of the New Testament was written in a non-literary form of Koine—the everyday language of the people. It is simple and to the point in its style and makes frequent use of the historical present tense. It also shows a preference for direct rather than indirect speech.

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Unlike many languages of the ancient world, Greek continued to be used in both written and oral forms through the centuries. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the close of the Byzantine period, the Greek language continued to be employed by the Greek Orthodox Church and various Greek-speaking peoples until the present day. Despite the naturally occurring modifications that take place within any living language, Modern Greek is remarkably similar to its ancient predecessor, Koine.

Many resources are available for learning biblical Greek. Used in seminaries for decades, Machen’s New Testament Greek for Beginners and Stephan Paine’s Beginning Greek: A Functional Approach are both available online at sites like archive.org. Also readily available is A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament. For those ready to dive into Greek texts, many are available at the Perseus Digital Library, and the Society of Biblical Literature has made their critically edited Greek New Testament available for free.

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Coptic Egyptian was superseded by Arabic as the vernacular language of Egypt. This 17th-century bilingual collection of Christian exhortative texts features both languages in parallel columns. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Public Domain.

Coptic is the name of the final stage of the indigenous language of Egypt. A direct descendant of ancient Egyptian, it belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family and is closely related to both the Semitic languages of the Levant and Southwest Asia (such as Akkadian, Hebrew, and Aramaic) and the various languages of northern Africa. First attested in writing in the third century CE, it was primarily associated with the Coptic Church and established itself as the language of Egyptian Christians. Coptic Egyptian was also instrumental in Champollion’s decipherment of hieroglyphs and the ancient Egyptian language.

Coptic Egyptian developed naturally from earlier forms of the Egyptian language once written in the hieroglyphic, hieratic, and Demotic scripts. Unlike those earlier stages, however, Coptic Egyptian was written with alphabetic characters adopted from ancient Greek. Because this set of 24 (or 25) letters could not express all the sounds that existed in ancient Egyptian (e.g., š and č), up to eight more letters were added by adapting characters from the indigenous Demotic script, itself a cursive derivation from hieroglyphs. Like its Demotic precursor, Coptic expressed grammatical categories with prefixes, not suffixes like the earlier stages of ancient Egyptian, and it had the subject-verb-object (“he-listen to her”) verbal pattern. It also retained the definite article (“the”) and expanded the indefinite article (“a” or “an”) to express the plural form (“some”).

Coptic Egyptian uses an alphabet adopted from ancient Greek (line 1), supplemented by eight characters (line 2) to express the full phonetic range of the Egyptian language. Public domain.

The earliest attempts to use Greek characters to spell out Egyptian appear as isolated glosses in hieratic and Demotic papyri already in the first and second centuries CE. These include magical and astrological papyri, where the purpose of using a script with characters for vowels was to render the exact pronunciation of various invocations. More examples come from a temple archive discovered in the so-called “house of the ostraca” near the temple in Medinet Madi (ancient Narmouthis). Dated to about 150–225, some of the ostraca (inscribed pottery sherds) contain Egyptian words in hieratic followed by their Old Coptic transcriptions. Some hybrid texts use Demotic mono-consonantal signs supplemented by Greek signs only for the vowels.

This piece of limestone inscribed with ink records a homily by the great archbishop of Alexandria, St. Athanasius (295–373 CE). Dating to around 600, it was excavated at the Monastery of Epiphanius at Thebes. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Public Domain.

These early examples show a variety of approaches and attest to a period of great experimentation that took place independently at different places. Even when the Coptic alphabet developed into a fully functional writing system, later in the third century, there remained regional differences. During the ensuing millennium, when Coptic was spoken and written as a living language, there never was a unified, universally used Coptic alphabet but rather over a dozen regional or dialectal variants. Like in Greek, Coptic letters also served to record numbers (A for 1, K for 20, P for 100, etc.). And like most ancient (and medieval) writings, Coptic texts generally do not separate words.

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Coptic Egyptian emerged as a distinct language in the third century and for about two centuries it coexisted with Demotic. Although the Old Coptic experiments with the Greek alphabet took place in the circles of traditional (“pagan”) temple administration and education, the alphabetic writing system was embraced and proliferated by the early Church for writing Christian scriptures, likely because it was free from the taint of “paganism.” Coptic eventually replaced Greek as the language of official administration. Apa Shenoute, who shaped the early Christian monastic movement, is credited with elevating Coptic into a literary language in the fifth century. Following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641, Coptic was gradually replaced by Arabic as a spoken daily language, until it generally disappeared in the 11th century. Even then, however, pockets of learned Copts kept it somewhat alive until the early 19th century as an instrument of ethnic and religious identity. Although now dead as a spoken and written language, Coptic is still marginally used in the rituals of the national Coptic Church.

Shenoute of Atripe (347–465 CE) was a charismatic early Christian leader and prolific writer. This fifth-century tombstone is inscribed with his name prefixed by the honorific apa, “father.” Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Skulpturensammlung und Museum für Byzantinische Kunst / Antje Voigt, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Like in Earlier Egyptian, there were several regional dialects of Coptic. They differ mostly in phonetics, but to some degree also in their vocabulary and syntax. Obscured in the earlier writing systems, which were purely consonantal, regional differences in the pronunciation of Egyptian are on full display in the Coptic alphabet, which expresses vowels. The modern study of Coptic has identified many different dialects and subdialects that were once spoken across Egypt. The two dominant dialects were Sahidic and Bohairic. Centered in Thebes, Sahidic is attested from the earliest examples of Coptic in the third century and was the dominant dialect until about the tenth century, when it was gradually supplanted by Bohairic. Centered in the north (the Nile Delta), Bohairic is first attested in the fourth century and remains the dialect of the Coptic liturgy. There were four more major dialects: Fayyumic, Mesokemic (or Oxyrhynchite), Lycopolitan (formerly Sub-Akhmimic), and Akhmimic.

In Coptic Egyptian, dialects are on full display due to the use of an alphabetic script reflecting vowels. Public domain.

Thanks to centuries of cultural and political dominance by Greek-speaking elites, a considerable portion of Coptic vocabulary comes from Greek. The influence of Greek on the Egyptian language was furthered by translations into Coptic from Greek.

Since Coptic was the indigenous language of Egypt for almost a millennium, it is attested through a variety of documentary writings of both private and official character, including contracts, accounts, receipts, decrees, school texts, and letters. As a literary language and the official language of the Egyptian national church, it survives in countless religious works, including the Bible, liturgy, biblical commentaries, apocrypha, homilies, hymns and prayers, monastic rules, collections of sayings, lives of saints, martyrologies, and funerary monuments. A good part of Coptic literature consists of translations from Greek—the language used by the educated elites. As Arabic was becoming the dominant language of the country, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641, even liturgical books and manuals for personal devotion were written in a mix of Coptic and Arabic (see first image above), until Arabic superseded Coptic in all aspects of daily life.

Biblical manuscripts are the most numerous examples of Coptic literature. Found in the Theban region and dated to around 600 CE, this slab of wood records the Song of Songs 5:10–7:4. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Public Domain.

First and foremost, translations from Greek include the Bible. The Bible had been translated into Coptic from the very beginnings of the language in the third century: the Old Testament was translated from the Septuagint, and the New Testament from the original Greek versions. No single ancient manuscript, however, contains the entire Bible or even the entire Old or New Testament. Early scientific editions thus usually drew on a single manuscript for individual biblical books, while more recent scholarship tends to collate different available manuscripts in creating what might eventually be a critical edition of the entire Coptic Bible. The Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament, for example, documents all the manuscript evidence and provides digital editions of all Old Testament manuscripts, critical editions of all Old Testament books, and translations into English, German, and Arabic. The Coptic Bible is an online platform that aggregates previous editions of the entire Christian Bible, arranged by individual books of both the Old and New Testaments.

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The oldest complete manuscript of the Book of Psalms is the so-called Pillow Psalter dating to about 400 CE. Probably the most famous ancient collection of Coptic manuscripts was discovered in 1945 near Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt. Known as the Nag Hammadi Codices or the Nag Hammadi Library, they shed light on the diverse religious and philosophical currents of the early Christian period, especially Gnosticism. These manuscripts and their documentation are available digitally from Claremont Colleges Digital Library.

The modern linguistic study of ancient Egyptian languages has resulted in a robust understanding of their development and grammatical system. The most comprehensive grammar of Coptic is Bentley Layton’s A Coptic Grammar. Among the textbooks that are suitable for self-study are Johanna Brankaer’s Coptic: A Learning Grammar (Sahidic) and Layton’s Coptic in 20 Lessons: Introduction to Sahidic Coptic. The Online Coptic Scriptorium offers linguistically analyzed Coptic texts for private study of the language. For a systematic overview of all the major dialects of Coptic, readers can go to James P. Allen’s Coptic: A Grammar of Its Six Major Dialects. The most comprehensive dictionary of Coptic remains Walter E. Crum’s A Coptic Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1939), now also online, although it only contains the indigenous, Egyptian vocabulary. A work in progress, the new Coptic Dictionary Online seeks to provide access to both Egyptian and Greek vocabulary used in Coptic.
 

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The Lion Gate of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire. Courtesy Photo Companion to the Bible.

Excavations at the site of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite empire, have revealed a cuneiform tablet written in a previously unknown Indo-European language. According to the tablet, the language comes from the land of Kalashma, on the northwest edge of the Hittite heartland. This new language joins Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic as one of the oldest recorded Indo-European languages, all of which come from Anatolia.

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Hattusa and the Language of Kalashma

The ancient site of Hattusa (modern Bogazköy in north-central Turkey) has been a treasure trove of archaeological finds for over a century, providing excavators with more than 30,000 tablets. Written mainly in the cuneiform script, these tablets record the history, society, economy, and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbors. Most of the tablets date to the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE), when the kings of Hattusa controlled a vast territory stretching from the Aegean to the Euphrates.

The tablet with the newly discovered language records a religious ritual of the land of Kalashma. “The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages,” explained Daniel Schwemer of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, an expert in ancient Anatolian texts.

Although experts are still working on deciphering the new language, they already know a great deal based on its use of cuneiform, which allows them to compare it to other Bronze Age languages. From what they have determined, the language is closely related to Luwian, one of the most common languages of the Hittite empire. Based on the text’s Hittite introduction, the team was able to determine that the language was used in the land of Kalashma.

Hittite was the official language of the Hittite empire and is the oldest recorded Indo-European language. It was the most prevalent language found at Hattusa, although many others have been discovered as well, including other Anatolian Indo-European languages, such as Luwian and Palaic, and many non-Indo-European languages as well.

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Oldest Canaanite sentence carved into an ivory comb from Lachish. Courtesy Dafna Gazit, IAA.

The oldest Canaanite sentence has been discovered at the site of Tel Lachish, according to an article published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology. The inscription, carved into an ivory comb, dates to around 1700 BCE, only a century after most scholars believe the alphabet was invented. Written in an archaic Proto-Canaanite script, the inscription sheds incredible light on the early development of the alphabet and the daily life of an important Canaanite city.

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An Ancient Inscription on an Ivory Comb

Although several Proto-Canaanite inscriptions have been found, with some even older than the Lachish comb, this is by far the oldest alphabetic inscription that contains a full sentence. Other ancient inscriptions are generally brief and consist only of the name of the object or its owner.

So what does the oldest Canaanite sentence say? “May this [ivory] tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard,” a fitting inscription to grace a comb. Remarkably, analysis of the comb provided evidence that this inscription, possibly termed a spell, was effective, as the remains of a louse were discovered on one of the comb’s teeth.

Schematic drawing of the letters on the Lachish Comb Inscription. Courtesy Daniel Vainstub.

Crafted of elephant ivory, likely imported from Egypt, the comb would have been a prestige object, owned by a wealthy family. “It would have been like a diamond today, a crème de la crème luxury item. Others likely had lice combs too, but made of wood that would have decayed,” Yosef Garfinkel, Lachish excavator and a co-author of the study, told Haaretz. The tiny size of the comb (it measures just over an inch long) left little room for the 17 Proto-Canaanite letters written on it, which together make up seven words.

According to epigrapher Christopher Rollston of George Washington University, “Of course, this is also an object that was commissioned by, and owned by, a very wealthy family. After all, who else would have the money to commission a scribe to write an inscription on a hairbrush! The high caliber of the script and orthography, the fact that it is written on a prestige object, and the fact that it was found at a strategic military site, combine to make the most convincing conclusion that it was written by a trained, professional scribe.”

Although the teeth of the comb were broken off in antiquity, their bases remain. One side of the comb featured six thick teeth, used to untangle knots. The other side had 14 finer teeth, used to remove lice.

The ivory comb was uncovered during excavations of the famous site of Lachish in the Shephelah region of southern Israel. However, the comb itself was found in a secondary deposit. Because of this, it was not possible to date the comb according to other finds in the area. Instead, the comb’s date was determined through paleography (the form of the comb’s letters). According to the team, analysis of the script showed that it was very archaic, with several features that do not show up in later versions of the Canaanite script.

Close-up view of the comb, with the Proto-Canaanite letter ś highlighted. Courtesy Dafna Gazit, IAA.

Most notable is the presence of the Semitic letter ś. This letter is a sibilant that disappeared in most North Semitic languages shortly after the invention of the alphabet. Those languages where the “ś” sound was preserved, like Hebrew, typically did not represent it with a separate letter but rather used the letter shin for both the “sh” and “ś” sounds. The presence of this letter, along with other paleographic clues, indicates that the script was used quite early in the development of the alphabet. The comb inscription, therefore, uses an early form of both the letters, which are more pictographic in style, and the Canaanite language, before the ś letter had fallen out of use.

Although there is much that remains unknown about the people who used the comb and wrote its inscription, they can confidently be associated with the same Canaanites whose kings would later appear in the Amarna Letters and whose cities were listed in the reliefs of Egyptian pharaohs. Beyond providing a peek into ancient history, however, the Lachish comb inscription also provides invaluable new information about the development of the alphabet. “This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write,” shared Garfinkel.

Lachish and the Alphabet

Lachish, now the site of the oldest written Canaanite sentence, is an especially interesting site in the history of the alphabet. A major Canaanite city in the second millennium BCE, excavations at Lachish have revealed at least ten Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, much more than any other site in Israel. Clearly, the site was a major center for the use and preservation of the alphabet between its invention and the end of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1200 BCE). The site has likewise supplied an unusual cache of Hebrew texts dating to the Iron Age (c. 1200–586 BCE), when it was one of the most important cities in Judah.

Aerial view of the site of Tel Lachish. Courtesy Emil Aladjem.

As Rollston notes, “Lachish was a fortified military site that was consistently connected with officialdom, that is, with kings, governors, and military officials. And as the Hebrew Bible itself attests, trained scribes in the ancient Near East were routinely stationed with royal militaries (e.g., 2 Kings 25:19; Jeremiah 52:25). In other words, at strategic military sites in the ancient Near East, it was not all that difficult to find a well-trained scribe.”

A Brief History of the Alphabet

Although the earliest writing systems—those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and possibly India—date back to the fourth millennium BCE, they were non-alphabetic and in some instances included more than a thousand signs. It was not until around 1800 BCE, according to most scholars, that the first alphabet was invented. This alphabet, commonly referred to as Proto-Canaanite, was invented by Semitic-speaking peoples who were familiar with the Egyptian writing system and modified certain signs to fit into their own language.

“There is a wide misconception in the general public that the Phoenicians invented the alphabet. They didn’t. They adapted and standardized the alphabet several centuries after it was invented,” said Rollston. It was only after this that the ancient Israelites adopted the alphabet, developing their own version from the standardized Phoenician alphabet. The Arameans and Greeks would similarly adopt the Phoenician version of the alphabet, adapting it to form their own scripts. “The alphabet was only invented once, in around 1800 BCE, and all subsequent versions of the alphabet derive, ultimately, from that first alphabet,” Rollston concludes.

Ed. Note: Christopher Rollston is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Biblical Archaeology Review.

This article was originally published in Bible History Daily on November 11, 2022.

Learn more about hieroglyphs in Bible History Daily:

Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem

Three Takes on the Oldest Hebrew Inscription

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How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs

Breaking the Missing Link

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The post Oldest Canaanite Sentence Found appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

Perforated stone containing a Linear Elamite text. Jean-Vincent Scheil (1858-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the progress made deciphering ancient scripts over the past two centuries, a few remain tantalizingly out of reach, including the ancient Iranian script, Linear Elamite. Or is it? According to an article in the journal Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, this 4,000-year-old script, which recorded the language of Elam, has finally been almost completely deciphered. While a few questions remain, this is a massive step in understanding the language of the powerful Elamite kingdom that would eventually become the Persian Empire.

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The Journey to Deciphering an Ancient Script

Like the Indus Valley script, the Minoan Linear-A script, and a few others, Linear Elamite has puzzled scholars since it was first discovered in excavations at the city of Susa (biblical Shushan) in 1903. A likely descendent of Proto-Elamite, another still undeciphered script, Linear Elamite was the main script of the Elamite language in southern Iran from 2300 until 1880 B.C.E., when it was replaced by Mesopotamian cuneiform.

Map of Elam and Mesopotamia. Elamite cities marked with stars. Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Rosetta stone, containing an inscription in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. © Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia commons.

Many ancient scripts have been deciphered using artifacts that feature both the unknown script and at least one known script which records the same message as the unknown. This was the case for Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were unlocked by the famous Rosetta Stone that contained the same text written in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. The decipherment of Linear Elamite, however, was a far more complex process. Although some artifacts contain both Linear Elamite and cuneiform, the two scripts never seem to translate each other. Such occurrences did allow a handful of signs to be deciphered, but it was a far cry from the smoking gun of the Rosetta Stone.

Recognizing these limitations, a team of scholars decided to take a different path. The team recognized that a group of silver beakers with Elamite inscriptions could be related to a second group of beakers that contained inscriptions written in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Although the texts are not in themselves identical, the extremely standardized nature of these inscriptions allowed the team to consider these objects much like the Rosetta Stone. With these texts, the team was able to identify numerous personal, geographic, and divine names in the Linear Elamite inscriptions, as well as Elamite phrases, clauses, and even sentences known from cuneiform texts. Working out from there, they succeeded in slowly unlocking the script sign by sign.

Bilingual inscription of King Kutik-Inshushinak in Linear Elamite and Akkadian. Jean-Vincent Scheil (1858-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Through their breakthrough, the team identified and deciphered 72 different signs. While this does not account for all signs present in the Linear Elamite inscriptions, the remaining undeciphered signs are fairly rare. According to the team, it is possible that several of the undeciphered signs may be no more than graphic variants of already deciphered signs.

As further excavations in Iran are carried out, the team hopes that additional Linear Elamite inscriptions will be discovered that can unlock the remaining signs. For now, however, over 95 percent of sign occurrences are represented in the team’s list of deciphered signs. Several scholars not associated with the research told the Smithsonian Magazine that they were quite convinced by the decipherment, even if some details are still being ironed out.

The Nature and History of Linear Elamite

Before this breakthrough, very little was known about Elamite scripts, and the language itself is still poorly understood. Now, however, it can be determined that Linear Elamite was quite distinct from the scripts of other cultures at the time, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs. While other scripts utilized logographic or logo-syllabic scripts, Linear Elamite was an alpha-syllabary. As such, each sign represented a specific phonetic value. Unlike alphabetic scripts, however, these values typically included both a consonant and vowel sound (such as “ka,” “bi,” or “mu”), although some signs could represent a consonant or vowel alone. This system allowed for a significantly smaller number of signs than logographic or logo-syllabic systems. According to the team, Linear Elamite likely only had a little over 100 signs, while cuneiform had over 600. Meanwhile, most alphabetic systems, which first appeared in the Levant in the second millennium B.C.E., have between 20 and 30 signs.

General map of the origins of various Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean scripts. Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Elamite language was the lingua franca of the Elamite kingdom, eventually falling out of use towards the end of the first millennium B.C.E. when it was replaced by Persian. A language isolate, there are no known languages related to Elamite, although several hypotheses have attempted to connect it to either the Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, or Caucasian language groups.

Proto-Elamite clay tablet. Louvre Museum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The earliest attestation of writing in Iran is the still undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, which was first written at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., making it one of the oldest scripts in the world, alongside Sumerian cuneiform and the undeciphered Indus Valley script. The Proto-Elamite script went out of use around 2900 B.C.E., and it was not until around 2300, with Linear-Elamite, that an indigenous script is once again documented in ancient Iran. Although it is not certain that Linear-Elamite was a descendant of Proto-Elamite, the team that deciphered Linear Elamite is quite confident that it is. They hope that their recent work will eventually lead to the key that will unlock Proto-Elamite as well.

The team of scholars included François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi

Editor’s note: This article was lightly modified after discussions with the original scholars.

Read more in the Bible History Daily:

Site-Seeing: Surprising Susa

A New Light for the World’s Oldest Unknown Script

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Scrolls, Scripts and Stelae

Deciphering Cretan Scripts

The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts

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This article was first published in Bible History Daily on August 12, 2022.

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Etched bone from the Middle Paleolithic, 120,000 years ago. Photo: Marion Prévost

A bone fragment, marked with symbols, was found in early 2021 in the Ramie region of Israel. At approximately 120,000 years old, it is possibly the earliest evidence of human use of symbols ever found. As such, it is an important clue to how symbolic expression developed.

The bone is from an auroch. Aurochs were fierce, wild cattle, closer in size to modern elephants than cows, but the ancestors of modern, domesticated cattle. Aurochs are mentioned several times in the Bible, sometimes translated as “wild ox.” Attempts were made to save the Aurochs, including restrictions on hunting, but they  went extinct in Poland in 1627. This was probably the first extinction that humans observed and tried to prevent.

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The find came from an excavation by archaeologists from the Hebrew University, University of Haifa, and the Le Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France. Dr. Iris Groman-Yaroslavski explains that the team used three-dimensional imaging, reproduction of the engravings, and analysis of miscroscopic elements, to determine that “people in prehistoric times used a sharp tool fashioned from flint rock to make the engravings.” They were also able to determine that the markings were made by a right-handed human in a single sitting.

The researchers note the importance of the artifact: “This engraving is very likely an example of symbolic activity and is the oldest known example of this form of messaging that was used in the Levant. We hypothesize that the choice of this particular bone was related to the status of that animal in that hunting community and is indicative of the spiritual connection that the hunters had with the animals they killed.” It is the oldest symbolic engraving ever found in the Levant. They hope further research can reveal what the symbols were meant to convey.

Read more about early language in Bible History Daily:

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Recreating the Origins of Language

Epigraphers have a hard enough time tracing the evolution and spread of ancient writing systems. How do linguistic scholars conceive of the languages of our preliterate ancestors? After identifying patterns in the evolution of language, linguists can reverse the process to recreate ancient sound systems. This involves analysis of large quantities of “Big Data;”

The Oldest Hebrew Script and Language

In the BAR article “What’s the Oldest Hebrew Inscription,”* epigraphy scholar Christopher Rollston asks a seemingly straightforward question: What is the oldest Hebrew inscription? His examination requires him to address the fundamental questions of epigraphy. Is a text written in Hebrew script necessarily in the Hebrew language? And was the Hebrew language originally written in an alphabet that predates Hebrew script? Christopher Rollston examined four contenders for the oldest Hebrew inscription—the Qeiyafa Ostracon, Gezer Calendar, Tel Zayit Abecedary and Izbet Zayit Abecedary—to explore the interplay between early Hebrew script and language.

Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem

This Jerusalem Proto-Canaanite inscription precedes the development of the Paleo-Hebrew script, which was used by the Israelites until the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. When the Judean exiles returned from Babylon, they brought back the square Aramaic script, which ultimately replaced the Paleo-Hebrew script. Both the Paleo-Hebrew and the square Aramaic scripts, however, were used together for hundreds of years.

The post Earliest Human Symbol Found? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.