Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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SYLLABIC SYSTEMS OF WRITING
165 (5) The number of signs is about one hundred (Dunand has classified some identical signs as distinct symbols).
(6) With some rare exceptions, in the script of Byblos there is no connection between the shapes of the signs and their consonantic or syllabic value. For instance, the eye does not represent the 'ayin, but a shin; the pupil of the eye is a sin or samekh, and so forth.
(7) The engravers or scribes of Byblos gave to the hieroglyphic signs meanings proper to their tongue, without taking into consideration their origin. The texts are in pure Phoenician.
(8) My starting-point was the last line of the tablet (here, Fig. 82, 2), in which the last sign written seven times is a numeral (3 + 40 or 3 + 4), preceded by the word b sh n 1, "in the years." Hence, nkhosh. "bronze," in the first line: mzbh, "altar," in the 6th line; btms, "in Tammuz," in the 14th line, etc., etc.
Cypriote Syllabary
ANCIENT CYPRUS AND HER SCRIPT
The island of Cyprus was a great metallurgical centre of the ancient world; it was the coveted outpost in the Mediterranean of Asia Minor, the nearest point of which is forty-four miles distant, and of Syria, about seventy miles away, and it was situated within a few days' sail of Egypt and the island of Crete. Cyprus was the country which can be said to have had the only pure syllabic writing of the Old World, apart from the pseudo-hieroglyphic script of Byblos.
The classical Cypriote script was mainly deciphered in the last twentyfive years of the nineteenth century, thanks to the fact that the majority of the Cypriote inscriptions extant, numbering about 183, are couched in Greek. On the whole, the Cypriote syllabary seems to have been employed from the sixth to the third century B.C., and even later. The inscriptions belong mainly to the fifth and fourth centuries B.e. The rarity of Cypriote inscriptions in the earlier periods is not easy to explain.
The Cypriote signs are purely linear and are composed of combinations of strokes which are straight or only slightly curved. Some have an external resemblance to North Semitic or Greek letters, but their phonetic value is quite different. The deciphered Cypriote syllabary, which is still fragmentary, consists (Fig. 88) of about fifty-five symbols, each representing an open syllable (such as pa, ko, ne, se) or a vowel. The script had been created for a non-Greek speech and the representation of the Greek sounds is rather imperfect,
We do not know whether the Cypriote script was better suited to the speech for which it had been created, as the indigenous language is not yet deciphered. Anatolian affinities, especially Phrygian and Carian, have been suggested; anthropological deductions indicate that the Bronze Age population of Cyprus belonged to the "Armenoid," brachycephalous
