________________
CANAANITE
20
BRANCH
PHOENICIAN ALPHABET (Fig. 107-109; 114; 122-123)
The importance of the Phoenician script for the history of writing cannot be overestimated. We have mentioned (p. 212f; Fig. 107-109) the earliest Phoenician inscriptions, when dealing with the origin of the North Semitic alphabet. There is a great lacuna between these and the datable monuments belonging to the Hellenistic period (Fig. 122, 2). Less than a dozen inscriptions, mostly short, have been found in Phoenicia proper.
[1]
245
༥༨༤ཤ༥༠༥རིགྷཋཱཙཱ༤༨ཧཱཎཱཾཨཱཨཱཕཀཨསྤྲུལ/རྦ་དྷ5མཱ་ཅཊ་ཀ་༨༠ཛྭ༠ཀ༨༥༽
holy-77777(Kay
party yayy
143
поордохваща на 1991 дарахована рану наля чува трийому уро продажурнуў водещи нах
од на ридов
wash
435
31
Fig. 122
1, Cypro-Phrenician inscription of ca. 700 8.c. 3. The last two lines of a Phoenician stele from Sidon. 3. Part of a Sidonian inscription from Piræus (96 B.C.)
On the other hand, while the early Hebrew inscriptions were almost exclusively discovered in Palestine, Phoenician inscriptions have been found not only in Phoenicia, but also, and particularly, in the whole of the Phoenician colonial empire, in the island of Cyprus (Fig. 122, 1), in Greece (Fig. 122, 3), in northern Africa, in Malta, Sicily, Sardinia, Marseilles and Spain. An extremely important Phoenician inscription (eighth century B.C.) was discovered in 1946 at Ayricatapesi (Karatepe) in eastern Cilicia. We can, thus, distinguish three main sub-divisions of the Phoenician branch (Fig. 114):
(1) the Phoenician script proper, used in the inscriptions already mentioned, found in Phoenicia itself and covering a period of over a millennium, up to the second or even first century B.C.;
