![]() ![]() Anyone who has learned Hebrew will recognize the names of these letters as part of the Semitic alphabet. The first word contains the letters ayin, bet and dalet while the second begins with the letters nun, pe, and tav. The inscription itself is fragmentary and is thus near impossible to decipher. Dye, Austrian Academy of Sciences/Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd “The proliferation into the Southern Levant,” the authors write, “probably happened during the (late) Middle Bronze Age and the Egyptian Second Intermediate Period, when a Dynasty of Western Asiatic origin (the Hyksos) ruled the northern parts of Egypt.” What this means is “that early alphabetic writing in the Southern Levant developed independently of, and well before, the Egyptian domination and floruit of hieratic writing during the … thirteenth and twelfth centuries BC.” The fact that hieroglyphic symbols are also found on the jar might suggest that whomever produced the inscription was familiar with both hieroglyphic and emergent alphabetic script. Up until 1550 BCE the Hyskos, a group from the Levant, ruled parts of northern Egypt as well as controlling much of the Levant. Höflmayer and his team suggests that the inscription doesn’t just provide another data point, its early date changes how we think about the emergence of the alphabet. Given that it is dated to 1450 BCE (the fifteenth century BCE) the new inscription fills the gap. How and under what circumstances the alphabet was moved from Egypt to Israel was anyone’s best guess. It’s clear that at some point alphabetic writing moved from Egypt to ancient Palestine but-until now-the earliest examples of alphabetic writing from the Levant were dated to the thirteenth or twelfth century BCE, some six hundred years after the Egyptian examples. These important inscriptions were discovered in 1998 in western Egypt and were published by a team led by Yale Egyptologist John Darnell. General scholarly agreement maintains that our oldest examples of alphabetic writing comes from the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt and can be dated to the nineteenth century BCE. Höflmayer said that the “inscription is currently the oldest securely dated alphabetic inscription from the Southern Levant.” The pottery fragment includes a partial inscription that dates to the fifteenth century BCE. In a recently published article in Antiquity, a research team led by Felix Höflmayer, an archaeologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute, describes the discovery of three and a half millennia old milk jar fragment unearthed at Tel Lachish in Israel. ![]() Now, archaeologists in Israel claim that they have discovered a “missing piece” of the puzzle. ![]() For all its importance, though, the limited archeological evidence makes it difficult to tell the history of western. Even if people are divided by language, it’s by writing that ideas and stories are unshackled from individual speakers and can travel and move across space and time. If you roll the wheel to the side, however, the alphabet and different ways of producing and arranging it, like the printing press, have also had a sizeable impact on the course of human history. Professor Paul Strother, lead investigator of the research from Boston College, said: “Biologists have speculated that the origin of animals included the incorporation and repurposing of prior genes that had evolved earlier in unicellular organisms.When it comes to the fruits of human genius the wheel gets a lot of credit as the most important invention in human history. “The discovery of this new fossil suggests to us that the evolution of multicellular animals had occurred at least one billion years ago and that early events prior to the evolution of animals may have occurred in freshwater like lakes rather than the ocean.” ![]() “We have found a primitive spherical organism made up of an arrangement of two distinct cell types, the first step towards a complex multicellular structure, something which has never been described before in the fossil record. Professor Charles Wellman, one of the lead investigators of the research, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, said: “The origins of complex multicellularity and the origin of animals are considered two of the most important events in the history of life on Earth, our discovery sheds new light on both of these. ![]()
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