Egyptian hieroglyphic writing was used mainly for monumental purposes, like in this painted relief from the Osiris temple at Abydos built by Ramesses II in c. 1270 BCE. The Walters Art Museum, Public Domain.

The Egyptian language is the sole representative of an autonomous branch of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Semito-Hamitic) language family. As such, Egyptian is related to both the Semitic languages of the Levant and the various languages of northern Africa. Ancient Egyptian’s closest relatives include Semitic (such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopic) and Berber. Like the Semitic languages, Egyptian exhibits three sentence types: nominal, adverbial, and verbal, where the predicate is a noun, an adverb, or a verb, respectively.

Now extinct, Egyptian was the mother tongue of ancient Egyptians for more than four millennia, and it ceased to function as a living language only several centuries after the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 CE. To some extent, it was likely read and understood beyond the borders of ancient Egypt, depending on territorial expansion and commercial ties. There clearly were numerous regional dialects of Egyptian spoken across the land, but given the nature of the Egyptian writing system, which is purely consonantal, dialectal variations became fully visible only in its final stage, Coptic, for which Egyptians of the first centuries of Common Era adopted the Greek alphabet. Before Coptic, we have only hints, such as in a letter from around 1200 BCE that has the writer complaining about his correspondent’s language being as incomprehensible as that of a southerner speaking with a northerner.

The elegant, symmetrical hieroglyphs on this alabaster vessel identify its owner as King Pepi I (2276–2228 BCE). They also indicate the jar was used at the Sed-festival celebrating the pharaoh’s 30-year jubilee. The Walters Art Museum, Public Domain.

The history of ancient Egyptian can be divided into two major phases that differ typologically in the nominal syntax and the verbal system: Earlier Egyptian and Later Egyptian. Earlier Egyptian was spoken until 1300 BCE, although in formal religious texts it survived until the second century CE. It expressed gender and number but lacked the definite article; and verbal phrases followed the verb-subject-object pattern (“listen-he to her”). Earlier Egyptian included three distinctive stages: Old Egyptian, Middle (Classical) Egyptian, and Late Middle Egyptian. Although Middle Egyptian gradually morphed into Late Egyptian (see below), it remained the standard hieroglyphic language for the rest of ancient Egyptian history. Used primarily in religious texts, Late Middle Egyptian extended into the Greco-Roman period and included the so-called Ptolemaic Egyptian preserved in extensive temple inscriptions of the period.

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Later Egyptian differs substantially from Earlier Egyptian in that it expressed grammatical categories with prefixes (not suffixes), shifting the verbal pattern to subject-verb-object (“he-listen to her”). It also began to use the numeral “one” as the indefinite article (“a” or “an”) and the demonstrative pronoun “this” as the definite article (“the”). As a written language, Later Egyptian lasted from 1300 BCE to the Middle Ages, and it included Late Egyptian, Demotic, and Coptic. As a spoken language, however, its earliest stage, which we call Late Egyptian, emerged already around 1600 BCE and remained in use until about 600 BCE, when it was superseded by Demotic. Demotic developed from Late Egyptian in the mid-seventh century and lasted until the fifth century CE, overlapping with the final stage of the Egyptian language, Coptic, which then survived as a spoken language until about the 11th century.

Inventory tags from Abydos are the earliest examples of hieroglyphic writing. Courtesy Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World.

The earliest known examples of Egyptian writing were excavated at Abydos, some 300 miles south of Cairo. They are inventory tags made of ivory and bone and measuring less than 1 inch per side. They each contain no more than three distinctive images, which likely identified commodities, their provenance, and quantity. Scholars generally consider these signs to be proto-hieroglyphs, as some of them later appear in actual hieroglyphic writing and seem to have phonetic value (in contrast to mere pictographs standing for concrete objects). Coming from the site’s extensive cemetery of Predynastic and Early Dynastic kings, these labels date from around 3400 to 3200 BCE and may thus predate the earliest known examples of cuneiform writing.

The Egyptian language was historically written in four distinctive scripts: hieroglyphic, hieratic, Demotic, and Coptic. Except for the last one, none of the writing systems expressed vowels. The earliest of these are hieroglyphs. Termed so by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, the hieroglyphs were mostly used to record monumental and sacral texts, such as on temple walls, statues, coffins, and stelae. All hieroglyphs are pictures of real or imagined things, such as legs, a papyrus roll, or a mythical creature. These can be used in three different ways. Hieroglyphic signs can function as ideograms, representing the actual depicted thing (for example, a picture of legs means “legs”). This is how we use emojis or understand “I NY” t-shirts. Hieroglyphic signs can also be phonograms, where these same pictures are used for their phonetic (sound) value, such as when the ground plan of a house (per) is combined with other signs to write such unrelated words as perit, “emergence.” This is how English is written, except that our signs/characters have highly abstract shapes and are limited to 26. Finally, most signs can be used as determinatives, added at the end of a word to help readers determine the general idea of the word written with phonograms and, hence, not representing the depicted thing. For example, three little circles following a word written with the signs for house and mouth indicate that the preceding signs are to be read phonetically to mean “seeds” and that the word has nothing to do with actual houses or mouths.

Religious texts and private documents written on papyrus mostly used the cursive script known as hieratic, as in this Book of the Dead from c. 1070–945 BCE. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Public Domain.

When written with a reed pen and ink on papyrus or wood, hieroglyphs were produced in a much simpler way called cursive hieroglyphs, although it is still fairly easy to identify the individual shapes of their hieroglyphic counterparts. Early on, however, scribes developed a true cursive version of hieroglyphs that we call hieratic. The hieratic script was used widely to record administrative and religious texts and to write letters or literature. With the emergence of Demotic, in the mid-seventh century BCE, came an even more cursive and abbreviated script. The language of administration and literature, Demotic was written primarily on papyrus. Grammatically, it naturally developed from Late Egyptian, but its script is radically different—a more cursive variant of the hieratic script. One of the most curious examples of Demotic script is written in the Aramaic language to record biblical Psalms. This so-called Papyrus Amherst 63 was found in southern Egypt in the late 19th century and likely originated with the Jewish community on Elephantine.

Hieratic and its hieroglyphic counterpart of a section from the Maxims of Ptahhotep, a Middle Egyptian wisdom text attributed to the vizier Ptahhotep, from c. 2350 BCE. From James P. Allen, Middle Egyptian (2014), p. 7.

While cursive hieroglyphs, hieratic, and Demotic were mostly written horizontally from right to left, hieroglyphs could be written in any direction, except from the bottom up. As an example, our first image above reads vertically from the right; the second image reads horizontally from the center to both left and right and then vertically down. Finally, the hieratic text of the papyrus above reads horizontally from right to left, but in the opening vignette, the right four columns of hieroglyphs read vertically from left, while the four columns on the left read vertically from the right. This versatility was useful in producing symmetrical designs and could adapt to any accompanying pictorial elements.

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The last stage of the Egyptian language, Coptic, which emerged in the third century CE, adopted the Greek alphabet. It was initially the language of the Christian church that grew to become the language of official administration, replacing Greek, before it, too, was superseded by Arabic. When the last hieroglyphic inscription was inscribed, in 436 CE, its language was already dead. It had become a mysterious language written with esoteric signs, until 200 years ago, when Champollion succeeded in cracking the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs and began to decipher the language behind them.

Demotic was both the latest form of cursive Egyptian script and a stage of the Egyptian language. Dated to December 6, 127 BCE, this inscribed sherd contains a record of an oath taken by one Patasetat. Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Public Domain.

For much of the Late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1200 BCE), Canaan was under intermittent Egyptian rule, and isolated Egyptian incursions into the southern Levant continued well into the early Iron Age. When we also consider the exceptional relevance of Egypt to the biblical traditions of Joseph, the Exodus from Egypt, and the emergence of ancient Israel, the importance for biblical studies of exploring the Egyptian sources becomes obvious. In Bronze Age Canaan, Egyptian presence is attested also in the archaeological record, such as in the destruction of Gezer or in Egyptian statuary found at Hazor.

When Canaan was dominated by Egypt, scarabs and other examples of material culture, such as statues and monumental art, streamed into the region. The most prominent and ubiquitous examples of Egyptian writing preserved in the Levant are scarabs. In Egypt proper, the better known texts relevant for biblical studies include the Bubastite Portal in the temple of Amun at Karnak that celebrates military victories in the Levant of Pharaoh Shoshenq I (biblical Shishak), who campaigned through much of Israel and Judah in c. 925 BCE (see 1 Kings 14:25–26; 2 Chronicles 12:4). BAR readers will also recognize the famed Merneptah Stele excavated at Thebes and containing the first mention of a people called “Israel.” Also important are lists of Canaanite cities conquered by Pharaoh Thutmose III (r. 1479–1425), sculpted on the temple walls at Karnak. To fully engage with this Egyptian evidence, one must read the Egyptian language.

During his 1458 BCE military campaign into the southern Levant, King Thutmose III defeated a coalition of Canaanite city-states, which are listed in this relief in the temple of Amun at Karnak. Hannah Pethen, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Students of Egyptian typically begin with Middle (Classical) Egyptian, which preserved a variety of literary works, including wisdom literature and stories like the Tale of Sinuhe and the Shipwrecked Sailor. In English, the most widely used teaching grammar of Middle Egyptian is James P. Allen’s Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs, accessible from the Internet Archive. The handiest dictionary is Raymond Faulkner’s concise dictionary of Middle Egyptian. Finally, Thesaurus Linguae Aegyptiae is an electronic corpus of a wide variety of Egyptian texts for private study.

For a detailed discussion of the Egyptian sources for the history of Canaan, Donald B. Redford’s Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times is a good starting point, while the edited volume Did I Not Bring Israel Out of Egypt? explores specifically the biblical narratives of Exodus vis-à-vis biblical, archaeological, and Egyptian evidence.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily

What Is Biblical Hebrew?

What Is Akkadian?

What Is Aramaic?

What Is Hittite?

What Is Biblical Greek?

The Rosetta Stone: Key to Egyptian Hieroglyphs

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You Too Can Read Hieroglyphics

Narmer’s Enigmatic Palette

When Pharaohs Ruled Jerusalem

Pharaoh’s Fury: Merneptah’s Destruction of Gezer

This article was originally published in Bible History Daily on May 3, 2024

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Yahweh Ṣebaot Inscription

Stone block bearing invocation of a curse by Yhwh, Lord of Hosts (BLMJ 4663). Photo: BLMJ Collection.

This limestone inscription from a burial cave in Judah c. 800–750 B.C.E. is written in Paleo-Hebrew script and reads “Cursed be Hagaf son of Hagab by Yahweh Ṣebaot.” The phrase Yahweh Ṣebaot, often translated as “Lord of Hosts,” appears over two hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, especially in prophetic books such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. The museum’s inscription is perhaps the earliest non-Biblical evidence for this name. The name Hagab, which means “grasshopper,” also appears in Ezra 2:46.

Learn more about the Paleo-Hebrew script in “How Ancient Taxes Were Collected Under King Manasseh” and “Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem.”

The Larsa Tablet

Cuneiform tablet recording temple service from the fifteenth to the twenty-third day of the month of Shabatu (BLMJ 3127). Photo: Moshe Caine.

This Akkadian tablet, which contains over 630 lines, comes from the southern Mesopotamian city of Larsa during the second year of King Rim-Sîn’s reign, c. 1821 B.C.E. The tablet registers the rites performed in Larsa’s many temples from the fifteenth until the twenty-fourth day of the month of Shabaṭu, the month identical to the Biblical month of Shebat (Zechariah 1:7). This one-of-a-kind tablet sheds light on the practices of the region from where Abraham is said to have come. For example, on the sixteenth day of the month of Shabaṭu, a cloak, a bright linen and a male slave were given to Enki, the god of wisdom and the creator of humankind.

The Quadrilingual Darius I Jar

Jar with quadrilingual inscription of Darius 1 (BLMJ 1979). Photo: BLMJ Collection.

Darius I of Persia, also known as “Darius the Great,” is mentioned in the Biblical books of Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi, Ezra, Nehemiah and Daniel. The museum has a Persian calcite jar with four inscriptions that praise Darius in four different languages, one more language than the Rosetta Stone. The Old Persian, Elamite and Akkadian inscriptions read “Darius, great king” and the Egyptian hieroglyphs read “King of Upper and Lower Egypt, lord of the two lands, Darius, living eternally, year 36.” Coincidentally, the 36th year of Darius’s reign (486 B.C.E.) was also his last.

The Lion and Calf Bowl

Bowl decorated with recumbent lions and calves before the symbol of the god An (BLMJ 4564). Photo: David Harris.

According to Isaiah’s prophecy of peace, “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid and the calf and the lion and the fatling [will dwell] together” (11:6). On the museum’s unique serpentinite bowl from southern Mesopotamia c. 3300–2900 B.C.E., lions and calves are depicted lying down peacefully one after the other. The animals are crouched before a bundle of stylized reeds (not shown), much like the reeds carved into a door at the base of the Ziggurat of Anu, one of the oldest and most important Sumerian gods.

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Relief of Ark-like Image

Orthostat showing two tribute bearers carrying a container on a pole and buckets in their hands (BLMJ 1111). Photo: David Moster.

According to Exodus 25:10–16, the Ark of the Covenant was a rectangular box carried on poles. The museum has a Basalt Relief from Arslan Tash (Northern Syria, ancient Hadatu) from c. 800–750 B.C.E. which depicts two men carrying a rectangular box on poles. Notice the buckets, which are found in a number of Assyrian ritualistic reliefs and suggest that the men might be priests. Two key differences between this image and the Biblical description is that the Bible’s ark had its poles at its base, not its top, and that the Bible’s ark had two poles, not one.

The Jonah Sarcophagus

Sarcophagus lid depicting the Jonah cycle (BLMJ 4296). Photo: David Harris

The sarcophagus of a 4th-century C.E. Christian from Rome named Glycon depicts three scenes from the Biblical book of Jonah. On the left Jonah is cast overboard into the mouth of a terrifying fish (Jonah 1:1– 2:1). On the right Jonah is cast ashore (Jonah 2:10), where God provides him with a plant in order to teach him compassion (Jonah 4:4–11). According to Matthew 12:40, Jonah is analogous to the resurrection: “For as Jonah remained in the belly of the sea-monster for three days and three nights, so will the Son of God be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.”

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The Ivory Cherub

Inlay depicting a cherub (BLMJ 3428). Photo: Moshe Caine.

According to the Bible, cherubs were placed in both the Tabernacle and the Temple (Exodus 37:7–9; 1 Kings 6:23–30). While the descriptions about these creatures are vague, the museum has an ivory Phoenician-style cherub from Arslan Tash (Northern Syria, ancient Hadatu) from c. 850–800 B.C.E. This cherub, which was probably called a kuribu in Akkadian (similar to Hebrew kerub [כרוב]), was most likely used to decorate a chair, perhaps the throne of the Hazael, king of Damascus, who is mentioned in the books of Kings, Chronicles and Amos.

The Christogram Sarcophagus

Sarcophagus of Julia Latronilla (BLMJ 1057). Photo: David Harris.

This large Roman sarcophagus belonged to a Christian woman named Julia Latronilla, who died in approximately 330 C.E.—shortly after Constantine’s Edict of Toleration, which allowed Christians to worship freely. The sarcophagus depicts a number of Hebrew Bible and New Testament scenes, e.g., Abraham’s near sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22), the miracle at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine (John 2:1-11), and Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem (e.g., Matthew 21:1–11). The circle in the center is one of the earliest known depictions of the christogram, a symbol that combines the first two letters of the Greek name for Christ, chi (X) and rho (P).

Learn about the earliest image of Jesus on the cross—the staurogram—in Bible History Daily.

The Rab-Shaqeh Stela

Stela of a Rab-Shaqeh, a cupbearer-In-chief (BLMJ 1066). Photo: M. Amar and M. Greyevsky.

In 2 Kings 18:18–37, which recounts the events of 701 B.C.E., an Assyrian official called the Rab-Shaqeh (“Chief Cupbearer”) besieges and taunts the people of Jerusalem. The museum has a stele commissioned by a Rab-Shaqeh who served a century and a half before the Bible’s Rab-Shaqeh, approximately 859–825 B.C.E., during the reign of Shalmeneser III. The inscription commemorates this Rab-Shaqeh’s deeds within his province. The image is that of a seated god with a horned helmet and a sun disk.

The Nile Boat

Model boat (BLMJ 2089). Photo: David Harris.

The Nile plays a prominent role in the Hebrew Bible, especially in the Exodus story. The Pharaoh of Joseph dreams of cows at the river (Genesis 41:1–3), baby Moses is placed in a basket at the riverbank (Exodus 2:3) and the first Egyptian plague occurs when the river turns to blood (Exodus 7:15–24). The museum has a model Nile boat made of wood, plaster and linen that comes from the early Middle Kingdom, c. 2000–1900 B.C.E. The boat has a pilot standing on the prow, a steersmen sitting on the stern and eighteen rowers in between. The boat is currently equipped for sailing downstream (north) but would have also had sails to travel upstream (south). Boats such as these were often placed in tombs for the journey of the afterlife.

A very special thank you to Olla Vengerovsky and the staff of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem for their help with this article.

David Z. Moster, PhD, is a Research Fellow in Hebrew Bible at Brooklyn College and a Lecturer in Rabbinics at Nyack College. He is the author of the upcoming book Etrog: How a Chinese Fruit Became a Jewish Symbol (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). His websites are www.929chapters.com and brooklyn-cuny.academia.edu/DavidMoster.

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on January 28, 2015.

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More by David Moster in Bible History Daily

Fruit in the Bible

The 10 Strangest Foods in the Bible

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The Tel Dan Inscription: The First Historical Evidence of King David from the Bible

Puzzling Finds from Kuntillet ‘Ajrud

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The Nag Hammadi Codices and Gnostic Christianity

The post 10 Great Biblical Artifacts at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

WHAT IS COPTIC, AND WHO WERE THE COPTS? Dated to the fourth–fifth century C.E., the Codex Grazier is written in the Coptic language—the fifth and final stage of ancient Egyptian language—and contains part of the Book of Acts (Acts 1:1–15:3).

The Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Even though it looks very different from texts written in Old Egyptian using hieroglyphs, the two are related.

In his article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Leo Depuydt gives a short history of the development of ancient Egyptian language and shows where the Coptic language fits in that timeline, as well as answering the question: Who were the Copts.

What Is Coptic?

The Coptic language developed around 300 C.E. in Egypt. It is Egyptian language written using the Greek alphabet, as well as a couple of Demotic signs. This script was much easier to learn than the earlier writing systems used in ancient Egypt: hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic scripts.

Coptic was the lingua franca of Egypt when Egypt was predominantly Christian. Many assume that the Coptic language was developed primarily to spread Christianity, but Depuydt disagrees. He supports the great Belgian Coptologist Louis Théophile Lefort’s theory that the Coptic language was created by another group—the Jews.

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Who Were the Copts?

Egypt’s Coptic period—also called Egypt’s Christian period—lasted 500 years, from the fourth century to the ninth century C.E., when the majority of Egypt’s population was Christian. The major shift in religion—from the old Egyptian religion to Christianity—occurred in Egypt between 200 and 400 C.E. This change was undoubtedly accelerated when Constantine declared Christianity a legal religion in 313 C.E.

We refer to Egyptian Christians from this period as Copts. (This was not a term they called themselves, nor did they refer to their language as “Coptic.”)

Another shift in religion brought about the end of Egypt’s Coptic period in the ninth century. Arabic-speaking Muslims conquered Egypt in 640 C.E. Although Christianity and Coptic remained the predominant religion and language for several centuries after the conquest, eventually most of Egypt’s population adopted the new religion, Islam, and language, Arabic, of their conquerors.

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Egyptians stopped speaking Coptic between 1000 and 1500 C.E. Depuydt estimates that there were few Coptic speakers in Egypt during the 12th or 13th centuries and that by 1500 C.E., nearly everyone spoke Arabic. However, far from going extinct, the Coptic language survived—as did a Christian minority in Egypt—and is still read by the clergy of the Coptic Church today.

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The Five Stages of Ancient Egyptian Language

As mentioned earlier, the Coptic language is the final stage of ancient Egyptian language. Now that we’ve looked at the end of Egyptian language, perhaps we should look at its beginning.

The Egyptian language holds the record as being the longest written language in the world: It was spoken and written for more than 3,500 years. It is also possibly the oldest written language in the world. The earliest attestations of primitive Egyptian language date to before 3000 B.C.E., making it a potential rival of the oldest form of Sumerian.

Egyptian language can be divided into five main stages, which mark how the spoken language changed over the course of three and a half millennia. These stages are: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian, Demotic and Coptic. Depuydt summarizes the stages:

The first three [stages] are (1) Old Egyptian, (2) Middle Egyptian and (3) Late Egyptian and date roughly to, respectively, the (1) Old Kingdom (2600–2100 B.C.E.), (2) First Intermediate Period, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period (2100–1500 B.C.E.), and (3) New Kingdom (1500–1000 B.C.E.). All three are written either in hieroglyphic writing, which consists of pictures denoting meanings or sounds, or in hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphic writing … The fourth phase of Egyptian is Demotic, written in a highly cursive form of hieroglyphs also called demotic and attested from about 650 B.C.E. onward … The fifth and final phase of the Egyptian language is Coptic, which is written with the Greek alphabet augmented by a handful of signs borrowed from Demotic. Full-fledged written Coptic emerged around 300 C.E. Coptic ceased being spoken sometime between 1000 C.E. and 1500 C.E., but the clergy has remained able to read it (more or less) down to the present day.

To learn more about Egypt’s Coptic Christian period and the Coptic language, read Leo Depuydt’s full article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” in the November/December 2015 issue of BAR.

Subscribers: Read the full article “Coptic—Egypt’s Christian Language” by Leo Depuydt in the November/December 2015 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Ancient Amulets with Incipits

Is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife a Fake?

“Down the Rabbit Hole”: Owner of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Papyrus Unmasked

The Sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas

The Gospel of the Lots of Mary

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

The Gospel of Thomas: Jesus Said What?

The Saga of ‘The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife’

Did Jesus Marry?

The Gospel of Thomas

The Gospels that Didn’t Make the Cut

Nag Hammadi Codices Shed New Light on Early Christian History

This Bible History Daily feature was originally published on November 22, 2015.

The post What Is Coptic and Who Were the Copts in Ancient Egypt? appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

The first of the clay cylinders discovered during a dig at the ancient city of Umm el-Marra. The engraved symbols may be part of the earliest known alphabet. Courtesy Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University.

Four small clay cylinders, discovered at the site of Umm el-Marra in northwestern Syria, may be etched with the oldest alphabetic writing ever discovered, predating the previous record holders by half a millennium. Coming from a sound archaeological context of securely dated materials, these cylinders may rewrite what we know about the early history of the alphabet.

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Rewriting History

Discovered in 2004 by a team from Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Glenn Schwartz and Hans Curvers, the inscribed cylinders have only recently caught the attention of the wider archaeological and linguistic community. The four cylinders were discovered in a wealthy tomb, which included six individuals, gold and silver jewelry, cookware, a spearhead, and an intact pottery vessel. The cylinders were crafted out of clay and engraved with a simple tool, probably a reed. All four are hollow and possibly once hung on a string. Each is broken on at least one end, suggesting they could have been part of a longer inscription or were originally one piece. Based on the finds, as well as radiocarbon samples, the contents of the tomb date to around 2400 to 2300 BCE. However, some have suggested that the cylinders may have been intrusive to the burial despite the excavation team firmly rejecting this.

It is precisely their date that makes the cylinders so remarkable. While writing first began in Mesopotamia and Egypt at the very end of the fourth millennium—with the invention of cuneiform and hieroglyphs, respectively—the writing at Umm el-Marra comes from neither of those scribal traditions. Instead, it bears noticeable similarities to early alphabetic inscriptions.

A second of the clay cylinders from Umm el-Marra. Courtesy Glenn Schwartz, Johns Hopkins University.

“The writing on these cylinder seals seems to be alphabetic writing, and I don’t really have any doubt about that,” Christopher Rollston, Professor of Biblical and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at George Washington University, told Bible History Daily. “It’s hard for me to consider them anything but alphabetic writing since the morphology of the letters on the cylinder seals often parallels reasonably well that of the existing corpus of early alphabetic writing.”

Drawing of one of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. Drawing by Marilyn Lundberg, West Semitic Research, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

If the cylinders do indeed contain alphabetic writing, it would drastically alter the history of the alphabet, the beginnings of which most scholars previously dated to the 19th or 18th centuries BCE. Not only does this change the dating for the invention of the alphabet, but it also raises new questions about its origins, as the previous earliest alphabetic inscriptions—the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadem inscriptions—come from Egypt, although they were likely written in a Semitic language. Despite the difference of half a millennium and over 400 miles, the Umm el-Marra inscriptions belong to the same alphabetic tradition, even if they are not a direct ancestor of the later inscriptions. “In essence, I consider these cylinder seals to be a fledgling attempt in early alphabetic writing,” said Rollston. While some of the signs, such as the letter ayin, are remarkably similar to later alphabetic inscriptions, other signs remain ambiguous.

With each cylinder containing only a few signs, it remains impossible to determine what they originally meant or what they were used for. But that does not mean there are no theories. “The cylinders were perforated,” said Schwartz, the director of the Umm el-Marra excavation, in a press release. “So, I am imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label. Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to. Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate.”

The Umm el-Marra cylinders likely represented a Semitic language–as is the case with inscriptions such as the Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadem inscriptions from Egypt–although which dialect is unknown. Given their date and location, it is possible they represent ancient Amorite, a Semitic language that has been identified in just two texts, both of which date several hundred years later. However, they could have just as easily recorded an as yet unknown Semitic language. There is also the chance that the cylinders were not meant to represent a language at all, but were instead a syllabary, a simple list of letters like the ABCs.

Recording History

The written word first sprang up at the end of the fourth millennium BCE, likely first in Mesopotamia with the invention of cuneiform, and shortly later–if not simultaneously–in Egypt with hieroglyphs. These two scripts dominated the early history of writing for at least a millennium, and both would continue to be used into the first few centuries of the Common Era. While Egyptian hieroglyphs were almost exclusively used for ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian cuneiform was adopted and used for a wide range of languages, including Sumerian, Akkadian, and Hittite.

While many scripts were used throughout the ancient Near East, cuneiform and the alphabet were the only two to see extensive use outside of their place of origin. Biblical Archaeology Society.

It was into this bi-script world that the alphabet was born. Traditionally, the invention of the alphabet has been attributed to Semitic-speaking people living in Egypt in the 19th or 18th centuries BCE who borrowed concepts and signs from hieroglyphs to craft a script for their own language. This early alphabetic script—also called Proto-Sinaitic or Proto-Canaanite—would eventually become the forbearer of nearly all later alphabetic scripts. As put by Rollston, “The alphabet was invented once, and all subsequent attempts at alphabetic writing derive from the original alphabet.” Nevertheless, the early alphabetic script would give rise to the later Canaanite scripts, including Paleo-Hebrew, as well as Aramaic and Phoenician, and even Greek and Latin.

The discovery of the Umm el-Marra cylinders alters the traditional reconstruction in interesting ways, if indeed the dating of the excavation team is correct. While the cylinders push the invention of the alphabet back nearly half a millennium, the script of the cylinders is still clearly influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs despite the fact that Syria was predominantly within the cuneiform sphere at the time. This could indicate that the alphabet is perhaps even older than these cylinders would suggest, and that alphabetic writing emerged closer to Egypt, perhaps even in Canaan. But even if the alphabet was invented in Syria, this could be explained by the large amount of trade that existed between Egypt and the Levant at the time. “After all,” says Rollston, “they only had two scripts to choose from.”

The creation of the alphabet was a monumental invention in the ancient world, as previous scripts utilized hundreds of signs in highly complex ways. “Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite. Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated,” said Schwartz. Rollston, however, is a little more subdued about the impact of the alphabet on the ancient world. “Alphabetic writing systems are easier to learn than non-alphabetic writing systems, but writing was primarily an elite activity, even after the invention of the alphabet. Potters, shepherds, farmers, and blacksmiths didn’t really have the need to write, and they didn’t have the time to learn to write.”

Read more in the Bible History Daily:

Oldest Canaanite Sentence Found

Who Really Invented the Alphabet—Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates?

Early Alphabetic Writing Found at Lachish

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs

The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts

An Alphabet from the Days of the Judges

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The early alphabetic inscription, dated to the mid-15th century B.C.E., was preserved on a tiny sherd of painted Late Bronze Age pottery imported from Cyprus. Image credit: Austrian Archaeological Institute/Austrian Academy of Sciences.

An inscription from Tel Lachish, discovered in 2018 and published in 2021, is the earliest alphabetic writing discovered in the southern Levant. The fragmentary inscription features a mere handful of letters inscribed on a tiny pottery sherd, measuring just 4 by 3.5 cm. The sherd is dated by radiocarbon to the 15th century B.C.E., or the first part of the Late Bronze Age.

Alphabetic writing was formerly thought not to have appeared in the southern Levant until the end of the Late Bronze Age, around the 13th century B.C.E. By contrast, the earliest alphabetic inscriptions from the Near East—the Proto-Sinaitic texts discovered in the ancient Egyptian turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in Sinai—are generally dated to the 19th century B.C.E., more than half a millennium earlier. The inscription from Lachish helps fill in this chronological gap, providing a critical “missing link” in our understanding of how the alphabet evolved and spread out from Egypt to other parts of the ancient world.

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The earlier Proto-Sinaitic texts, which are thought to have been written by Canaanite workers,* adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs to serve as written symbols for distinct alphabetic sounds. The letters in the Lachish inscription represent a more evolved form of the same early alphabetic script. Initial readings of the two-line inscription have identified the letters ‘ayin, bet, dalet (‘abd = “servant”); most likely the first part of a Canaanite personal name expressing servitude to a god. The second line features the letters nun, pe, and tav, which could be the word for “honey” or “nectar” (Hebrew nophet).

The inscription was discovered amid charred remains found on the floor of this monumental Late Bronze Age building at Tel Lachish. Image credit: Austrian Archaeological Institute/Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Lachish inscription, first published in the journal Antiquity last week, was discovered in 2018 by a team of Austrian and Israeli archaeologists excavating at the famous biblical site. The inscribed sherd was found among burnt soil and debris from a large monumental building associated with the site’s Late Bronze Age fortifications. Material from the surrounding burnt layer was dated by radiocarbon to the mid-15th century B.C.E., providing a secure date for the inscription.

The inscription’s early date suggests that the alphabet likely spread from Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period (17th–16th centuries B.C.E.), when Egypt was ruled by the so-called “Hyksos” kings, who were of “Asiatic” or Canaanite descent. This period may have witnessed more frequent social and commercial interaction between Egypt and Canaan, which would have included the exchange of new ideas and concepts, including the adoption within Canaan of an alphabetic script derived from hieroglyphs.

*Orly Goldwasser, “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs,” BAR, March/April 2010.

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Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Who Really Invented the Alphabet—Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates?

Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem

The Phoenician Alphabet in Archaeology

Word Play

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts
Literacy in the Time of Jesus
What is the Oldest Hebrew Inscription?
An Alphabet from the Days of the Judges

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Who were the Minoans? The Minoan civilization is remembered for its ornate frescoes, including this Prince of the Lillies from the palace at Knossos.

Who were the Minoans? Their civilization in Crete has long been considered Europe’s first great Bronze Age society. The floruit of the Minoan civilization, which spread across Crete in the third millennium B.C.E., occurred in the 18th–16th centuries B.C.E., in the late Middle Bronze Age and the start of the Late Bronze Age. The island is dotted with magnificent palaces, including labyrinthine Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia, and Minoan art and traditions have captivated and influenced the Mediterranean world for thousands of years.

Despite their celebrated legacy, the Minoan civilization remains shrouded in mystery. We do not know what language was spoken on Crete, and the scripts of the early Minoan civilization—Cretan Hieroglyphs and Linear A—have eluded translation attempts for over a century. Despite extensive archaeological research exploring the history of Crete, the Minoan civilization has always kept close ties to the world of mythology. Sir Arthur Evans, the first person to carry out extensive excavations in Crete, named the society after the mythological king Minos. Crete’s  landscape serves as the setting for countless legends, including the birthplace of Zeus, the labyrinth where Theseus killed the Minotaur and the prison that Deadalus and Icarus fled with their ill-fated wings.

But who were the people that left us with such grand mysteries and ornate palaces?

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Sir Arthur Evans claimed that the ancestors of the Minoan civilization came from North Africa, but more recent scholars have suggested dozens of additional forefathers. On May 14, 2013, Nature Communications published the study “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete,” analyzing mitochondrial DNA from Minoan osseous tissue found in caves at the Cretan Lassithi plateau. It suggests that the Minoan civilization was comprised of local Europeans rather than outsiders. The Greek and American research team writes that “Our data are compatible with the hypothesis of an autochthonous development of the Minoan civilization by the descendants of the Neolithic settlers of the island” and that “shared haplotypes, principal component and pairwise distance analyses refute the Evans North African hypothesis.”

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Who were the Minoans? Knossos’s Ladies in Blue are genetically related to modern Europeans, according to a recent DNA study. Archaeological Museum of Iraklion.

The researchers examined over 100 bone samples from the third and second millennia B.C.E. and found a combination of distinctly European and uniquely Minoan characteristics—with no trace of African descent. The DNA samples are consistent with that of Neolithic, Bronze Age and modern European populations, especially Crete’s modern population. The Minoan people may be related to groups that migrated from Anatolia millennia earlier; if true, this would allow researchers to use cues from known Indo-European languages to help decipher the still-unknown language of the Minoan civilization.

While mysteries about the seafaring Minoan civilization remain, we are one step closer to answering the question: Who were the Minoans? As University of Washington geneticist George Stamatoyannopoulos says, “We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European.”

Read “A European population in Minoan Bronze Age Crete” in Nature Communications.

Related reading in Bible History Daily:

Minoan Frescoes at Tel Kabri

Phaistos Disk Deciphered? Not Likely, Say Scholars

Bronze Age Collapse: Pollen Study Highlights Late Bronze Age Drought

Early Bronze Age: Megiddo’s Great Temple and the Birth of Urban Culture in the Levant

What Does the Aegean World Have to Do with the Biblical World?

Read more about Minoan civilization in the BAS Library:

The Minoans of Crete: Europe’s Oldest Civilization: Excavating Minoan Sites

Past Perfect: In Pursuit of Minoan Crete

Ancient Life: Bull Jumping

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Perforated stone containing a Linear Elamite text. Jean-Vincent Scheil (1858-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Despite the progress made deciphering ancient scripts over the past two centuries, a few remain tantalizingly out of reach, including the ancient Iranian script, Linear Elamite. Or is it? According to an article in the journal Zeitschrift für Assyriologie, this 4,000-year-old script, which recorded the language of Elam, has finally been almost completely deciphered. While a few questions remain, this is a massive step in understanding the language of the powerful Elamite kingdom that would eventually become the Persian Empire.

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The Journey to Deciphering an Ancient Script

Like the Indus Valley script, the Minoan Linear-A script, and a few others, Linear Elamite has puzzled scholars since it was first discovered in excavations at the city of Susa (biblical Shushan) in 1903. A likely descendent of Proto-Elamite, another still undeciphered script, Linear Elamite was the main script of the Elamite language in southern Iran from 2300 until 1880 B.C.E., when it was replaced by Mesopotamian cuneiform.

Map of Elam and Mesopotamia. Elamite cities marked with stars. Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Rosetta stone, containing an inscription in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. © Hans Hillewaert, Wikimedia commons.

Many ancient scripts have been deciphered using artifacts that feature both the unknown script and at least one known script which records the same message as the unknown. This was the case for Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were unlocked by the famous Rosetta Stone that contained the same text written in hieroglyphs, Demotic, and Greek. The decipherment of Linear Elamite, however, was a far more complex process. Although some artifacts contain both Linear Elamite and cuneiform, the two scripts never seem to translate each other. Such occurrences did allow a handful of signs to be deciphered, but it was a far cry from the smoking gun of the Rosetta Stone.

Recognizing these limitations, a team of scholars decided to take a different path. The team recognized that a group of silver beakers with Elamite inscriptions could be related to a second group of beakers that contained inscriptions written in Mesopotamian cuneiform. Although the texts are not in themselves identical, the extremely standardized nature of these inscriptions allowed the team to consider these objects much like the Rosetta Stone. With these texts, the team was able to identify numerous personal, geographic, and divine names in the Linear Elamite inscriptions, as well as Elamite phrases, clauses, and even sentences known from cuneiform texts. Working out from there, they succeeded in slowly unlocking the script sign by sign.

Bilingual inscription of King Kutik-Inshushinak in Linear Elamite and Akkadian. Jean-Vincent Scheil (1858-1940), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Through their breakthrough, the team identified and deciphered 72 different signs. While this does not account for all signs present in the Linear Elamite inscriptions, the remaining undeciphered signs are fairly rare. According to the team, it is possible that several of the undeciphered signs may be no more than graphic variants of already deciphered signs.

As further excavations in Iran are carried out, the team hopes that additional Linear Elamite inscriptions will be discovered that can unlock the remaining signs. For now, however, over 95 percent of sign occurrences are represented in the team’s list of deciphered signs. Several scholars not associated with the research told the Smithsonian Magazine that they were quite convinced by the decipherment, even if some details are still being ironed out.

The Nature and History of Linear Elamite

Before this breakthrough, very little was known about Elamite scripts, and the language itself is still poorly understood. Now, however, it can be determined that Linear Elamite was quite distinct from the scripts of other cultures at the time, such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs. While other scripts utilized logographic or logo-syllabic scripts, Linear Elamite was an alpha-syllabary. As such, each sign represented a specific phonetic value. Unlike alphabetic scripts, however, these values typically included both a consonant and vowel sound (such as “ka,” “bi,” or “mu”), although some signs could represent a consonant or vowel alone. This system allowed for a significantly smaller number of signs than logographic or logo-syllabic systems. According to the team, Linear Elamite likely only had a little over 100 signs, while cuneiform had over 600. Meanwhile, most alphabetic systems, which first appeared in the Levant in the second millennium B.C.E., have between 20 and 30 signs.

General map of the origins of various Ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean scripts. Biblical Archaeology Society.

The Elamite language was the lingua franca of the Elamite kingdom, eventually falling out of use towards the end of the first millennium B.C.E. when it was replaced by Persian. A language isolate, there are no known languages related to Elamite, although several hypotheses have attempted to connect it to either the Dravidian, Afro-Asiatic, or Caucasian language groups.

Proto-Elamite clay tablet. Louvre Museum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The earliest attestation of writing in Iran is the still undeciphered Proto-Elamite script, which was first written at the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E., making it one of the oldest scripts in the world, alongside Sumerian cuneiform and the undeciphered Indus Valley script. The Proto-Elamite script went out of use around 2900 B.C.E., and it was not until around 2300, with Linear-Elamite, that an indigenous script is once again documented in ancient Iran. Although it is not certain that Linear-Elamite was a descendant of Proto-Elamite, the team that deciphered Linear Elamite is quite confident that it is. They hope that their recent work will eventually lead to the key that will unlock Proto-Elamite as well.

The team of scholars included François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Matthieu Kervran, Gian Pietro Basello, and Gianni Marchesi

Editor’s note: This article was lightly modified after discussions with the original scholars.

Read more in the Bible History Daily:

Site-Seeing: Surprising Susa

A New Light for the World’s Oldest Unknown Script

All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library:

Scrolls, Scripts and Stelae

Deciphering Cretan Scripts

The Evolution of Two Hebrew Scripts

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This article was first published in Bible History Daily on August 12, 2022.

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In June 2017, Dr. Martin Worthington of Cambridge University and students from his Assyriology class dramatized this ancient Babylonian story and captured it on film. Lasting about 20 minutes, their film was officially launched and made accessible to the public in November 2018. The tale is set in Nippur, a city in southern Iraq, during the second millennium B.C.E. The script itself follows a 160-line poem found on a tablet at Sultantepe, Turkey, and dated to 701 B.C.E.

Photo: Courtesy of Martin Worthington

The plot is fairly straightforward: The main character, Gimil-Ninurta, who is very poor and called a “truly wretched man,” brings a goat (his last possession) to the mayor of Nippur with the hope that the mayor will prepare a feast with the goat. The mayor does—but he gives the poor man only the gristle and bone before unceremoniously throwing him from his house. Gimil-Ninurta vows revenge as he leaves. The rest of the film follows Gimil-Ninurta’s revenge plan, where he pays back the mayor’s wrong threefold.

With a cast of 18 (plus the goat), the Cambridge team performed this ancient story entirely in Babylonian. Subtitles are available in 16 languages for those of us not fluent in the ancient language. It was filmed in various locations, including Cambridge’s campus, the British Museum, and Flag Fen Archaeology Park.

To see how Gimil-Ninurta executes his revenge, you can view their film at www.arch.cam.ac.uk/about-us/mesopotamia/mesopotamian-films.

Photo: Courtesy of Martin Worthington

I had a chance to interview Martin Worthington about the film’s inspiration and process of creation. See below for the interview in full in a Bible History Daily exclusive.

From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West examines the relationship between ancient Iraq and the origins of modern Western society. This free eBook details some of the ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations have impressed themselves on Western culture and chronicles the present-day fight to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage.

Megan Sauter (BAR): Who had the brilliant idea to dramatize this ancient story?

Martin Worthington: Cambridge Assyriology is lucky year in, year out, to have some wonderfully clever and creative students, and the initial spark came from them. We were reading The Poor Man of Nippur in class, as part of a course in Akkadian (i.e., Babylonian), and at the end of the session one of the students commented that it would be “fun to dramatize it.” Little did any of us suspect the consequences …

The idea sat at the back of my mind until a couple of months later, when I was involved in the dramatization of an ancient Greek work led by Patrick Boyde, Emeritus Professor of Italian in St John’s (my college). Watching all these people declaim a dead language, I felt a pang of what you might call “Assyriologist’s jealousy” and thought how nice it would be if we could do something similar!

From here, via the realization that a film would be easier than a play in the sense that we could have as many “takes” as we liked, grew a pipe dream … which might forever have remained such, except that I mentioned it to Assyriologist and Classicist Kathryn Stevens, now at Durham but then a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College in Cambridge. Kathryn was the first to see that a film could actually be made to happen and indeed secured the first dollop of funding. Once the ball (and later the camera) got rolling, we realized that the film united may different purposes, some for us and some for wider audiences.

On one level, I saw the project as something that could bring the Mesopotamian community in my university together and reward the students for all their hard work with a fun experience. But also, as a teacher of ancient Mesopotamian languages, I am very keen that people should learn them as languages. I don’t mean they should hold conversations in them (though I am toying with the idea of running Settlers of Catan in Babylonian), but at least they should speak the words aloud and allow them to exist in their minds as real sentences, with intonation and meaning—not just an algorithm of morphology and syntax. A film was, of course, perfect for this!

With regard to the wider world, I have often had the sense that most people’s perception of Mesopotamia tends to be that of a civilization aloof from normal humanity: those stately winged bulls, immobile as they stare into eternity; those wedge-packed inscriptions, so much harder on the eye, so much less human-looking than (say) hieroglyphs; those selfish little cylinder-seals, whose decorations can only be apprehended when you roll them out; and, in literature, most people don’t get beyond the Epic of Gilgamesh, which what with gods and kings hardly features normal people at all. It’s easy to forget that ancient Mesopotamia was occupied by people just like us, who used their languages to chat with neighbors, entertain friends, whisper confidences, teach cooking, and shop at the market. As a comic folktale, lowbrow in content (though highbrow in literary form), The Poor Man of Nippur was perfect for giving the general public a different, more lively, human, and lighthearted picture of what went on between the two rivers.

MS: What was the most challenging part of dramatizing it?

Worthington: With shooting in multiple locations, costumes, and everything else, there was a huge logistical dimension. Here we had huge support from Ph.D. students Peerapat Ouysook and Silvia Ferreri, without whose energy and attention to detail the project would simply not have happened.

Photo: Courtesy of Martin Worthington

From an artistic perspective, a major issue was the comic portrayal of violence. It’s all very well for the story to say “he beat him black and blue” (or words to that effect), but if we actually showed that visually, it would have been extremely hard to get right. You see this very clearly with the Asterix comics (which I adore): One of the characters, Obelix, is often drawn beating up Roman legionaries, but in a delightfully good-natured and nonviolent way. You never see Obelix’s fist make contact with them, only the aftereffect of the legionary sailing up into the air, minus his sandals, and looking more annoyed than hurt. When you see the same story as a cartoon, it’s just a large man hitting smaller men. To my mind the effect is completely different—and not at all funny. So we didn’t want to show Gimil-Ninurta to be hitting the mayor. We thought through several possible solutions (a shadow fight, an animation) and in the end decided on the cats.

Another artistic thought point was what to do about the poetic structure: Most lines in the story fall naturally into two halves (not “meter” in the European sense, but something not a million miles away). Should we emphasize this or prioritize “natural delivery”? In the end, partly inspired by Patrick Boyde’s experiments with Greek, we plumped for natural delivery.

MS: What was your favorite part of dramatizing The Poor Man of Nippur?

Worthington: It was hugely fun—the whole experience constituted some of the most stressful but also most enjoyable weeks of my life!

One of the highlights was that, at every door we knocked on, we were met with the most amazing goodwill: People gave us permissions to film and all sorts of other help with a readiness that was constantly dizzying. For example, the translators of the subtitles worked for free! In the same vein, the crew and cast were extraordinarily good-humored, putting up with all sorts of hitches without complaint.

From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West examines the relationship between ancient Iraq and the origins of modern Western society. This free eBook details some of the ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations have impressed themselves on Western culture and chronicles the present-day fight to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage.

Photo: Courtesy of Martin Worthington

Worthington: From the start, it was policy that the three main speaking roles should go to the three students who had read the story in class. This made everything much quicker, as they were already so familiar with the story.

MS: Who was responsible for the great filmography, editing, and sound track?

Worthington: All of these were handled by competent professionals. The footage was shot by JH Film and Anna Kyriazidou, and sound-processed by David Erwood. The editing was undertaken by Rachel Tookey (in consultation with myself).

The soundtrack was specially composed by Stef Conner, who had already released an album in Babylonian, The Flood. It was recorded by musician colleagues and herself, and the post-recording sound work was done by Christopher McDonnell.

MS: What’s next? Do you have plans to dramatize any other Mesopotamian texts?

Worthington: We are very pleased with how The Poor Man has been received. We got lucky with media interest, and at the time of writing (January 2019) it’s been viewed almost 50,000 times (with 1,300 YouTube “likes” vs. eight “dislikes”). As regards a “repeat” of the venture, this is all extremely encouraging. Whether a repeat actually happens will partly depend on funding and partly on having the right critical mass of people.

Meanwhile, after the film, we released a video about Assyriology as a university subject, and we will be releasing documentaries—one about the making of The Poor Man—during 2019.

There seems to be something of a Zeitgeist for “Mesopotamia and film”! A few weeks ahead of the launch of The Poor Man, the University of Bern released a film in Sumerian!

MS: Who was responsible for the beautiful costumes and props? How closely did the costumes adhere to what we know about Mesopotamian clothing?

Worthington: The costumes were hired from the National Theatre, and the props came from a variety of sources (from the same National Theatre to friends of ours).

From the start, we made a decision not to try to imitate original Mesopotamian styles. This would have added hugely in terms of time and expense, and the locations were perforce going to be modern ones. The story’s being comical reassured us when we were compelled to take liberties, and we trusted the audience would forgive us.

MS: How large was your cast?

Worthington: The cast (all of whom were volunteers) comprised 18 people plus the goat. The crew comprised 22 people, many of whom were volunteers.

MS: You mentioned volunteers. What about the money side of things?

Worthington: The project was quirky, but it also had educational value, so thanks to the farsightedness of various educational bodies we were able to piece together monies in sums that went from £1000 to £200, with most being in the middle. Something I would not have anticipated, but which became clear in the final accounts, is that the most expensive part of production was transport!

MS: Thank you for taking time to share the details of your project with Bible History Daily. What an exciting venture! I am looking forward to seeing the documentary about the making of this film later this year, and I sincerely hope you and your students decide to dramatize another ancient text.

The post Acting Out Revenge—Babylonian Style appeared first on Biblical Archaeology Society.

This trilingual inscription is written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. Photo: M.A. Mosallanezhad.

Not only does this inscription shed light on the elite families who associated with the Persian kings, some of them even serving as advisors, but it also adds a new verb to all three languages—the act used to describe the gesture of the figure below the inscription. Iranian scholars Mojtaba Doorodi and Soheil Delshad recently discovered the inscription at Naqsh-e Rustam. Hidden by dirt and lichens, it had escaped earlier notice by archaeologists.

The inscription is located next to carved reliefs in the Naqsh-e Rustam necropolis in Iran. Photo: M.A. Mosallanezhad.

Another trilingual inscription from Iran—the Behistun Inscription—helped us crack the cuneiform script in the early 1800s. Also written in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian, the Behistun Inscription by King Darius did for cuneiform what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphs. Scholars were able to first decipher the cuneiform of the Old Persian part of the inscription and use that to make sense of the Elamite and Babylonian portions.
 

 
From Babylon to Baghdad: Ancient Iraq and the Modern West examines the relationship between ancient Iraq and the origins of modern Western society. This free eBook details some of the ways in which ancient Near Eastern civilizations have impressed themselves on Western culture and chronicles the present-day fight to preserve Iraq’s cultural heritage.
 

Related Reading in Bible History Daily:

10 Great Biblical Artifacts at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem
Check out the quadrilingual Darius I jar

Babylonian Trigonometry Table: The World’s Oldest?

I Am Ashurbanipal at the British Museum

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Papyrus Amherst 63. Photo: The Morgan Library Museum/Art Resource, NY.

Dating to the fourth century B.C.E., the enigmatic Papyrus Amherst 63 was likely created by the descendants of the Aramean and Judean soldiers, who in the fifth century B.C.E. had been stationed at the southern Egyptian border. Recorded in a cursive script derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Aramaic texts of the Amherst papyrus keep challenging what we know about the Aramean religion and the history of the Hebrew Bible. In the article “Egyptian Papyrus Sheds New Light on Jewish History” in the July/August 2018 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, author Karel van der Toorn contends that three Israelite psalms appear in Papyrus Amherst 63—although only one is attested in the Bible. Below, read Van der Toorn’s translations of the psalms from Papyrus Amherst 63.—Ed.

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Papyrus Amherst 63,
Our Banquet is For You (xiii, 1–10),
“Psalm 2”
Hear me, our God!
Fine lambs (and) sh[ee]p
We will sacrifice for you among the Gods.
Our banquet is for you
Among the Mighty Ones of the people,
Adonay, for you,
Among the Mighty Ones of the people.
Adonay, the people will bless you.
Your annual offerings we will perform.
From the pitcher, saturate yourself my God!
Let it be announced forever:
The Merciful One exalts the great,
Yaho humiliates the lowly one.
They have mixed the wine in our jar,
In our jar, at our New Moon festival!
Drink, Yaho,
From the bounty of a thousand bowls!
Be satiated, Adonay,
From the bounty of the people!
Singers wait upon the Lord,
The player of the harp, the player of the lyre:
“We will play for you
The song of the Sidonian lyre,
And our flutes resoundingly,
At the banquets of humankind.”
End.

Papyrus Amherst 63,
The Host of Heaven Proclaims
Your Rule (xiii, 11–17),
“Psalm 3”
Who among the Gods,
Among humankind, Yaho—
Who among the Gods,
Among king and non-king,
Who is like you, Yaho, among the Gods?
From the very beginning, Adonay, avenge
Your worshippers, the longstanding people.
Take note of our pursuer,
And restore my strength.
Beneath you, Yaho,
Beneath you, Adonay,
The host of heaven is (as plentiful) as sand.
Yaho, the host of heaven
Proclaims to us your rule.
Take note of our pursuer,
And restore my strength.
Let Baal from Zaphon
Bless Yaho.
Arise, Yaho, to our rescue.
Let his ears turn
To the prayer, Lord.
Arise Yaho!
Do protect,
As you have been protecting
Your people since olden times.
End.

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