Whether you text, type, scrawl chicken scratch onto a doctor’s pad, or inscribe calligraphy in your bullet journal, everyone who shares a language uses the same alphabet. But where does it come from? And who invented it? Even as our own alphabet changes and we devolve into the pictorial non-syllabic communication of emojis, tracing the history of writing is its own form of investigative journey.
And now archaeologists have found another piece of the puzzle: excavations in Israel have unearthed a 3,200-year-old Canaanite temple that once served the city of Lachish, the last Canaanite city. The discovery promises to shed light on the political and religious relationship between the Canaanites and Egyptians, ancient Canaanite religion and deities, and even the Israelite conquest. But among the most important discoveries at the site was the earliest example of the proto-Canaanite letter “samekh” a letter that would survive in Hebrew and Aramaic, find its way into ancient Greek, and enjoy an afterlife in 21st century technology.
The discovery was made by a team jointly led by Prof. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Prof. Michael Hasel at Southern Adventist University in Tennessee. Though the temple was unearthed two years ago, it has taken several years for the finds and evidence to be analyzed and news of the discovery only emerged this week.
In the Bible, Lachish is mentioned several times; in particular with the conquest of the land of Canaanites by the Israelites (Joshua 10:3, 5, 23, 31-35). According to the book of Joshua, Japhia, the King of Lachish, was one of five kings who tried to push back the Israelite invasion. After being caught unawares by a surprise attack, Japhia and his allies took refuge in a cave, were captured, and then executed. Joshua then launched a siege of Lachish that lasted for two days before the city fell and Joshua had the inhabitants of the city exterminated. The city and land surrounding it was then assigned to the tribe of Judah. If all of this sounds like a war crime to you, then you’re correct: the Israelite conquest narratives are stories about divinely mandated and supported genocide. The city is mentioned again on a variety of occasions; the prophet Jeremiah names it as one of the last cities to fall to the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, for example.
The city itself is located in central Israel about 25 miles southwest of Jerusalem in the Shephelah (“lowlands”) region of Israel between Mount Hebron and the Mediterranean coast. In both the Canaanite and Judahite periods Lachish was second in importance only to Jerusalem. For an ancient city, Lachish is remarkably well-documented in our historical records. It appears in ancient Assyrian, Egyptian, and Biblical texts and is even referred to on stone panels found in Nineveh (modern day northern Iraq). The earliest literary reference to Lachish is in Egyptian sources: the so-called Amarna letters, a set of clay tablets that document correspondence between Egypt government and their representatives in Canaan. These everyday administrative letters reveal that Lachish was an important and powerful city in the foothills of Judea.
Even before the arrival of the Israelites, the city had had a violent history: It first rose to prominence in 1800 BCE and, for some 400 years thereafter, it flourished and prospered. It was then destroyed by Pharaoh Thutmose III in 1550 BCE as part of the 18th Dynasty’s expansion into Canaan. The city was rebuilt and destroyed on multiple other occasions throughout its history but the newly discovered temple dates from the city’s resurgence between roughly 1200-1150 BCE. Garfinkel calls this incarnation, “the last Canaanite city.”
The structure of the temple is unusual for the Late Bronze age: The entrance, which featured two towers and pillars, led to a large rectangular hall. Garfinkel told Haaretz that this kind of structure was more common in earlier temples found in Syria. But the style appears to have influenced the first Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon which, according to the Bible, also featured pillars, towers and a central hall.
As we would expect for an urban center with close ties to Egypt, many of the artifacts found at the site revealed Egyptian influence in the region. In addition to bronze cauldrons, axes, and daggers adorned with bird heads and scarabs, the team found a gold-plated bottle inscribed with the name of Rameses II. They also discovered an amulet that references the goddess Hathor, an Egyptian bovine deity who might also have been local to Canaan. In Egyptian mythology Hathor was associated with music, fertility, love and sex and was often charged with greeting the dead in the afterlife. The discovery of Egyptian religious traditions at the temple at Lachish is evidence of the contact between and mutual influence of Canaanite and Egyptian culture on each other.
Also discovered within the Temple, however, were religious elements that would not have been found in either ancient Egypt or ancient Israel. In particular, the discovery of two small statues of the god Baal—one of the God of Israel’s principle competitors in the Bible—reveal that this was unambiguously a center of Canaanite religious life.
Arguably the most stunning revelation from the temple was the discovery of an early Canaanite inscription on a shard of pottery. Among the letters etched into the clay was the proto-Canaanite letter samekh. This letter resembles a mirrored capital letter “E” (a vertical line crossed by three perpendicular shorter lines). The example from Lachish is the earliest example of samekh that we have and thus adds to our understanding of the development of alphabet writing systems. Many scholars believe that ancient writing began in ancient Sumer (Mesopotamia) with the development of pictographic writing forms such as that found on the limestone Kish tablet. The Kish tablet is often seen as a bridge or transitional example between proto-writing systems (symbolic systems of communication that arose independently in various regions of the ancient world) and syllabic writing systems; in the case of the Kish tablet cuneiform, a system of wedge-shaped marks.
Whether one is willing to name the Sumerians as “first” (and some aren’t) it’s clear that ancient writing systems developed in the Early Bronze Age in a variety of places including Sumer (cuneiform), Egypt (hieroglyphics), Crete (hieroglyphs), China (logographs), the Indus Valley (Indus/Harrapan Script), and Mexico (Cascajal block). The aleph-bet-gimmel semitic writing system known as proto-Canaanite that would eventually develop into Hebrew and Aramaic emerged in 1800 BCE and can be seen in early examples from Egypt and Sinai. In the Lachish temple example we see for the first time how the proto-Canaanites wrote the letter samekh. Garfinkel told Haaretz “[Other examples of proto-Canaanite writing] had the other letters, het and resh and shin and so on, but not samekh.” Scholars were able to identify the letter because sometime between 1000 and 950 BCE the Phoenicians adopted the proto-Canaanite alphabet, refined it, and formalized it into a more structured and organized system and in the Phoenician system this is exactly how samekh looks. Now we know for sure where they got it from.
The discovery at Lachish helps us chart the shifts and changes from proto-Canaanite to Pheonecian and then to Hebrew and beyond. Dr. Robert Cargill, an archaeologist and professor of ancient Judaism and Christianity at the University of Iowa told me the samekh “has an odd history” because even though it is a somewhat redundant sibilant (a hissing sound, to you and me), it “persists in Hebrew and Aramaic, and even in the Greek alphabet via the Phoenician alphabet.” In other words, even though it was somewhat redundant, the influence of this letter is felt in a number of important writing systems. In Greek it gave rise to the letter Xi, which continues to be used (outside of just the Greek and old Cyrillic alphabets) in mathematics and science where it has over a dozen applications. Perhaps most strangely it is a monetary unit of Ethereum, a cryptocurrency that some have claimed is used by criminals to run Ponzi schemes and investment fraud. From ancient temple pottery to sophisticated Ponzi schemes, this letter has come a long way.