Semitic alphabet

The Indus Valley Script (IVS), used between 2600–1900 BCE, has remained an enduring linguistic mystery. This study provides conclusive evidence that IVS encodes a Proto-Dravidian language, forming the earliest written precursor to Tamil and other Dravidian tongues. Through phonetic reconstructions, corpus analysis, and structural comparisons, we demonstrate that IVS follows a logographic-syllabic system encoding economic transactions, taxation, storage, and religious dedications. The script’s phonetic markers align with Proto-Dravidian lexicon, with Tamil inscriptions from Tamil Nadu confirming a direct linguistic continuity. This paper also examines Tamil ceramic inscriptions with over 60% matching symbols to IVS, proving that Tamil script evolution originates from Indus writing. Our findings challenge the Indo-Aryan-centric linguistic model by showing Tamil’s deep historical roots in the Indus Valley Civilization, reinforcing the theory that IVS represents the earliest written Dravidian language.

Deciphering the Indus Valley Script: A Proto-Dravidian-Elamite Trade and Administrative Language © 2025 by Erik Kiley is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

The Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), one of the world's earliest urban societies (3300-1300 BCE), left behind an undeciphered script found on seals, tablets, and pottery. Despite numerous attempts, the Indus script remains untranslated due to the absence of bilingual texts, its unique symbol structure, and a lack of direct linguistic descendants. This study applies AI-driven phonetic analysis, statistical frequency mapping, and comparative linguistic methodologies to develop a structured phonetic, grammatical, and lexical system for the Indus script. The research proposes a complete phonetic mapping of over 600 symbols, reconstructs grammatical sentence formation, and compiles a comprehensive dictionary of Indus Valley words. Additionally, we validate this framework by applying it to existing inscriptions, analyzing recurring symbols, and cross-referencing with neighboring ancient languages. The findings establish a structured, readable script that allows for further linguistic analysis and historical interpretation of Indus inscriptions.

In recent decades, the Ancient Egyptian realm of pictorial script and meta-textuality has been the focus of many research projects. Foremost among them is the innovative and ground-breaking sub-field that was helmed by Prof. Orly Goldwasser, exploring the study of classifiers and the ways in which Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs mirror the Ancient Egyptian mind. Taking Goldwasser’s pioneering work as its inspiration, this volume draws together contributions from some of the leading voices in Egyptology and neighbouring fields to illuminate different aspects of the use of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, their semiotic value, and of the language that they record, as well as looking more broadly at the use of signs, pictorial systems, script, learning processes, and classifications. Together, these chapters offer a unique and multi-layered picture of the ways in which Ancient Egyptian language and Hieroglyphs emerged within Ancient Egyptian culture, and the means by which they interacted with other script systems and languages.

The workshop, funded by the CENTRAL Network Universities Alliance (Berlin, Budapest, Prague, Warsaw, Vienna), aims to bring together established researchers and Ph.D. students focusing on different aspects of the development of ancient Egyptian society.

by Alessio AGOSTINI, Davide D’IMPERIO, in Res Antiquae 21, 2024.***In the Semitic world, abecedaries, i.e. epigraphic documents that present an ordered succession of letters, constitute a rather composite textual category that can give rise to several interpretations. In this article, an overview of examples from northern and southern Arabia will be given. This vast region presents an almost homogeneous graphic tradition, but with somewhat different social premises and literacy dynamics. First, the main problems concerning certain Safaitic, Thamudic, Hismaic and Dedanitic abecedaries from northern Arabia will be discussed. *** Keywords: Pre-Islamic Arabia; Semitic; Ancient North Arabian; Ancient South Arabian; epigraphy; abecedaries. ***Table of contents and details: http://www.safranpublishers.com/proddetail.php?prod=RANT21

For more than half a millennium after its invention, the alphabet had little effect on the world. This paper argues that there were structural deficiencies in the early alphabet as a writing system that prevented it from finding wider use: the lack of word dividers, the lack of vowel markings, and the picture-like and non-linear shaped signs all would have made the alphabet very difficult to read. Instead, it was used for simple writing that did not need to be ready, such as votive inscriptions and graffiti.

During the 2006 excavation campaign at Ebla a votive deposit was found near the Middle Bronze II temple in Area HH, in the Lower Town east. The deposit contained, among a large amount of pottery and some clay and metal objects, a group of 226 nearly complete and fragmentary figurines made of unbaked clay. The figurines are predominantly female, very schematic, and sometimes difficult to understand, and they do not have comparisons elsewhere. In my contribution, I present this peculiar evidence, also discussing their manufacture and I relate it to the rituals that in my opinion took place in that region of the lower town of Old Syrian Ebla.

It is not clear to me on what count is based Obrador-Cursach's statement (2020a, 38) that the letter no. 20 'occurs twenty-three times in twenty-one different inscriptions'. Somewhat further in the text he mentions only 17 inscriptions (erroneously citing NW-121 twice), including those featuring .

In a time of iconoclasm of accepted results of the past it is important to look at consequences what changes would implicate. Not everything what scholars in the past concluded is wrong.
This article is an estimate of the timespan of the Hyksos rule in Egypt, based on the stratigraphy of the site of Tell el-Dab‘a and the datum-lines within its stratigraphy. The result is between 105 and 112 years for the duration of the Hyksos rule, what is in keeping with the 108 years read by Giulio Farina over 85 years ago for the timespan of the Hyksos in the Royal Canon of Turin. Higher estimates of over 140 years are unlikely, up to 180 years impossible.

— comment on a possible indirect connexion between a Sinai inscription and the protosinaitic inscriptions found by John Darnell in the Western Desert
—Publication of a new protosinaitic inscription that was recently found in South Sinai (survey of South Sinai mining zone - Sorbonne Université / IFAO)

The authors publish a hitherto unknown squeeze made from a North West Semitic inscription. The squeeze originally belonged to the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople and is now hosted by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The inscription, performed in relief, may have been made on a large ornamented stone vessel. Paleographic features of the letters point to the mid‑9th century BC as its approximate date. Both paleographic and linguistic features of the text suggest that its origin is to be sought in Southern Canaan (Palestine).

The discovery of a new inscription of the Neo-Hittite “Great King” Hartapu has renewed the long-standing controversy over his date. He has been variously dated as early as the 13th century BC, because of the Imperial Hittite style of some of his inscriptions, and as late as the 8th century BC because of the Assyrian influenced representation of Hartapu on his rock carving at Kızıldağ in the Tabal region. A midway compromise date is offered here. A date for Hartapu in the early 9th century BC would suit both the historical circumstances and the art historical considerations: it accounts for his reference to the Muški, known to have been near Tabal at that time, and also for the iconography. There remains tension, however, with the standard dates of the Hittite Empire, a problem that has constantly recurred in the chronological studies of the early Neo-Hittite monuments and inscriptions of southern Anatolia and Syria.

The author explores the iconography of the mother of God from Byzantine and early Russian motifs to late medieval Italian images. The Aracoeli Madonna was the most imporant of the Western pictures of the virgin attributed to the evangelist Luke

A review of new evidence allows us to date the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim firmly to a brief period of intensive expeditions under Senwosret III, Amenemhat III, and Amenemhat IV, with considerable evidence for the presence of Semitic speakers. The recent attribution of the bilingual statue Sinai 345 to Senwosret III is confirmed by a survey of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that can be associated with datable Egyptian inscriptions or objects. In the second part, other proposed dates are surveyed and found to be inadequately documented.

The authors publish a hitherto unknown squeeze made from a North West Semitic inscription. The squeeze originally belonged to the Russian Archeological Institute in Constantinople and is now hosted by the St. Petersburg Branch of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The inscription, performed in relief, may have been made on a large ornamented stone vessel. Paleographic features of the letters point to the mid‑9th century BC as its approximate date. Both paleographic and linguistic features of the text suggest that its origin is to be sought in Southern Canaan (Palestine).

Коллективная монография суммирует результат исследований, проводившихся в рамках проекта РНФ № 19-18-00369 «Классический Восток: культура, мировоззрение, традиция изучения в России (на материале памятников коллекции ГМИИ им. А. С. Пушкина и архивных источников)» в 2019–2021 гг. Каждая из глав книги посвящена исследованию памятника или группы памятников египетской и переднеазиатской коллекций ГМИИ им. А. С. Пушкина, а также их аналогов, позволяющих рассмотреть явления древних культур и религий классического Востока.
Для историков древности, студентов исторических факультетов, всех интересующихся историей древнего Египта и эллинистического мира, историей и культурой древности в целом.

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

This article considers the origins of alphabetic writing, tracing its probable source to ancient Egypt, southern Levant or the Sinai during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (17th century BCE). It supports the view that the earliest scripts were acrophonic representations of a West-Semitic language, whose use developed under the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt but was arrested there with the expulsion of this foreign dynasty at the end of the 16th century BCE. The development is then traced through the Levant, with particular attention given to the emergence of cuneiform alphabetic scripts in Ugarit (c. 1300 BCE). This form of writing disappeared with the fall of Ugarit, but linear alphabetic scripts were preserved in a variety of Near-Eastern languages, notably Aramaic and Phoenician. These two languages, by becoming linguae francae respectively of the Syria-northern Mesopotamia and the Anatolia-Eastern Mediterranean regions, brought about the spread of alphabetic writing up until the 8th ce...

This article considers the origins of alphabetic writing, tracing its probable source to ancient Egypt, southern Levant or the Sinai during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (17th century BCE). It supports the view that the earliest scripts were acrophonic representations of a West-Semitic language, whose use developed under the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt but was arrested there with the expulsion of this foreign dynasty at the end of the 16th century BCE. The development is then traced through the Levant, with particular attention given to the emergence of cuneiform alphabetic scripts in Ugarit (c. 1300 BCE). This form of writing disappeared with the fall of Ugarit, but linear alphabetic scripts were preserved in a variety of Near-Eastern languages, notably Aramaic and Phoenician. These two languages, by becoming linguae francae respectively of the Syria-northern Mesopotamia and the Anatolia-Eastern Mediterranean regions, brought about the spread of alphabetic writing up until the 8th ce...

Revisiting the tradition of Palamedes as inventor of the alphabet Kosmas Theodorides The origin of our current writing system, the alphabet has been debated for centuries. Currently, the theory of Semitic origin is generally accepted (Fischer, 2001), however other theories have been proposed. Most relevant to this work, there has been a hypothesis of Aegean origin put forward by Sir Arthur Evans (Evans, 1909). That hypothesis was formed before the decipherment of Linear B, was based on morphological similarities and historical narrative and Evans seems to have abandoned it later. That hypothesis to my knowledge does not have any other proponents today. I only came across it recently and it was clearly at an early stage of development but it has some historical value. My own observations have led me to form the view that the writing in the broader Aegean was never completely interrupted and indeed the forms of the letters that I use to write this letter bear strong resemblance to the elements used by Mycenaean scribes. It is not only form, but also onomastics of the letters that continue Linear B values. Indeed, upon careful examination, the names of the ancient and contemporary Greek alphabet letters have the same or similar values to those of the Mycenean syllabic script. Furthermore, the internal architecture of the proto-alphabet points with great certainty to a broader Aegean environment invention as the sequence of vowels and consonants follows a certain arithmetic rule, while modern phylogenetic methods reveal a tree of relationships of linear scripts, the Greek alphabet and the Phoenician abjad quite different to the currently accepted paradigm (Theodorides, 2009). It is therefore obvious that someone or some persons familiar with the vowel series of the Mycenaean scripts must have been the inventor(s) of the proto-alphabet since it is clearly structured around the vowels (Figure 1).

In ancient Egypt, an individual's name was of vital importance for defining his identity in society and assuring his survival for posterity. A person might have two or even three names, one of them sometimes being a basilophorous name (a name that incorporates a king's name) adopted by the individual at a certain stage of life. For foreigners, taking an Egyptian name was frequently a means by which they integrated into Egyptian society. Grave crimes would entail damnatio memoriae, a process by which a person's identity could essentially be erased by mutilation and obliteration of the name. Certain personal names also had apotropaic potential, and the names of the sages of the past could even be used in magic.

O presente artigo busca caracterizar o sistema de escrita alfabético em relação à diversidade de sistemas existentes. Seu objetivo é aproximar designers tipográficos que projetam em múltiplas escritas de temas da linguística e da gramatologia, exigidos nesse campo de trabalho. Como estratégia de abordagem são analisadas as concepções do filósofo Vilém Flusser e do classicista Eric Havelock em contraposição às do linguista Peter T. Daniels e do historiador John Man. Do embate dessas quatro visões são extraídos alguns dos critérios que consideramos essenciais para subsidiar o design tipográfico multiescrita em seus aspectos linguísticos e gramatológicos.

There were a number of academic debates over the superfluous sounds in the orthography of Amharic. Some of the scholars in the area were pro while the others against the possible reforms in the orthography. The over-differentiated sounds were said to have been adopted from Ge'ez, and had sociological significances. As they are used currently, their sociological values are neutralized, and are used more randomly. The superfluous sounds have been adopted by other Ethiosemitic languages, such as Guragina and Tigrinya. Thus, the purpose of this article is to find out whether the over-differentiated sounds in the orthography of Amharic are problems or not in language teaching, software development and dictionary preparation. The research methodology followed was mixed methods; survey and text analysis. Data were obtained through the existing literature and questionnaire. The participants in the survey were teachers who taught at different levels: kindergarten to university. About twe...

В данной работе рассматривается произведение знаменитого русского писателя
А.П.Чехова Чёрный монах. Некоторые литературоведы считают эту повесть Чехова
единственным неудачным рассказом, который выходит за привычные рамки его
творчества. Целью данной работы является достижение восприятия повести как
литературного произведения, в котором находит место врачебная практика Чехова и
описывается душевное расстройство, а также понимания того, что данное
произведение является продолжением повести Палата номер 6. Более того, эту повесть
можно воспринимать как оценку врача понятия великий человек.

The term epigraphy refers to the science that studies the written texts (epigraphs) of the different civilizations of the past in the different historical periods to understand the history of the ancient world. Greek epigraphs of the archaic and ancient periods contain many different variations of each symbol; moreover, each of them is often written imperfectly or ruined by time. The goal of epigraphs is to associate these archaic symbols with the correct modern Greek letters. This work is a contribution in the direction of providing ICT facilities in the context of cultural heritage. More specifically, the paper presents a multiclass classifier for the recognition of symbols belonging to the archaic Greek alphabet. The Machine Learning technique used for our classifier is that of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The name chosen for the tool is Teiresias, that in Greek mythology was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a wom...

The term epigraphy refers to the science that studies the written texts (epigraphs) of the different civilizations of the past in the different historical periods to understand the history of the ancient world. Greek epigraphs of the archaic and ancient periods contain many different variations of each symbol; moreover, each of them is often written imperfectly or ruined by time. The goal of epigraphs is to associate these archaic symbols with the correct modern Greek letters. This work is a contribution in the direction of providing ICT facilities in the context of cultural heritage. More specifically, the paper presents a multiclass classifier for the recognition of symbols belonging to the archaic Greek alphabet. The Machine Learning technique used for our classifier is that of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The name chosen for the tool is Teiresias, that in Greek mythology was a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes, famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a wom...

This paper seeks to characterize the alphabetic writing system in relation to the diversity of existing systems. Aims to approximate typeface designers who work in multi-script to fields such linguistics and grammatology, required in design area. As an approach strategy to analyze the conceptions of the philosopher Vilém Flusser and the classicist Eric Havelock in contrast to the ideas of the linguist Peter T. Daniels and the historian John Man. From the clash of these four views are extracted some of the criteria that we consider essential to subsidize the typeface multi-script design in their linguistic and grammatological aspects.

This discussion takes as a case study three curses written in Coptic on mammalian rib bones, dating to the ninth or tenth century CE. These curses call upon the Powers of Death, psychagogues known from Christian literary texts, to remove the victim's soul, before adjuring the spirit of the dead person with whom the curses were deposited to make the victim su er alongside it in hell. These manuscripts, known in one case to have been buried in a Pharaonic grave, demonstrate the ways in which Egyptian Christians reconstructed their 'pagan' past, and that their knowledge of this past could be used as a tool in the social conflicts which led to the production of written curses.

The 15th letter in the Canaanite Alphabet, was first called 'Semech', a facility made of wood on which garden plants climbing on. In the ancient inscriptions, we see a Vertical center pole to which three horizontal sticks are connected at equal intervals.