________________
238
THE ALPHABET
(whether enemies or not), by the action of time and climate, and by other factors, known or unknown.
Nevertheless, as Professor Albright pointed out, the long silence of early Hebrew epigraphy has now been broken at least in part, and we can already list some hundreds of inscriptions. Their value as specimens of language and writing is great, so also is their importance for the historian. But this importance is more incidental than primary; the history recorded is, with one or two exceptions, not the history of great events or of striking figures (as some scholars suggest), but the history of everyday life. These little monuments do not palpitate with the life, feeling and thought which render the writings of the great prophets so poignant, but they supply details which are of the utmost value in supplementing those works.
I have already mentioned (p. 212) the most ancient monument extant of early Hebrew writing, the so-called Gezer calendar (Fig. 115, 1),
61 974 7 196429064 theag RWSZE 2
211944242 4224 = 47 447
194
+ Jus
Ras
Aug
1x974 70. 19
.9 MY TAXW3 .7641.** •xq1ns/1
Fig. 115-Early Hebrew inscriptions 1, The Gezer "calendar." 2-4, Ostraca from Samaria
rtf 471xWS M+ tw Fo.
belonging probably to the age of Saul or David (eleventh century B.C.). The majority of the letters used in this inscription are still nearly identical with those of the earliest North Semitic inscriptions, although some signs have already assumed the distinctive early Hebrew character. Thus, for example, the letters kaph, mem, nun, pe are marked by the tendency to bend their main stems to the left. Towards the ninth to eighth century B.C., the transformation becomes almost complete, at least in the northern kingdom, as we see from the ostraca (documents written in ink on potsherds after the vases have been broken), numbering about eighty, which have been found in Samaria (Fig. 115, 2-4). Most of these ostraca were evidently invoices handed in with tributes of oil and wine paid in kind to the king's official within the city.
While the Samarian ostraca provide us with examples of the script
