The ABC’s of an Abecedary

An Israelite schoolboy may have practiced his ABC’s—or gba’s—on the bottom line of this sherd from a clay storage jar. The roughly scratched inscription is the oldest extant Semitic abecedary, or alphabet written in the traditional sequence from aleph to taw (with minor deviations).

Written in a late Proto-Canaanite script, the inscription dates to the early 12th century B.C.E., when Israel was emerging in Canaan. Archaeologists discovered the inscribed potsherd, or ostracon, in a silo at ‘Izbet Sartah, an early Israelite settlement, identified by the excavator as biblical Ebenezer (1 Samuel 4:1), in the hills of Ephraim.^a

Unlike modern Hebrew, the letters on the ostracon are written from left to right; writing direction was not fixed until the 11th century B.C.E.^b The scribe apparently used the alphabet as a model for the top four lines of letters. Although these consist primarily of meaningless sequences of letters, the beginning of line 4 may preserve the name of the scribe: “Oreph son of Nahum.”