The Byblos syllabary
The Byblos syllabary is an ancient and undeciphered script with a peculiar status. It was discovered in 1928 at the Phoenician city-state of Byblos, in present-day Lebanon. It is assumed to have been used to write Phoenician, but nobody really knows whether this is true or not. It is often assumed to have mostly predated the use of the Phoenician alphabet. The entire Byblos syllabary corpus is about 1,100 characters long in total and is spread across about 14 inscriptions. Most of the contents of the Byblos syllabary corpus are made up of just two tablets, named "c." and "d." On this page, we will discuss a new attempt at decipherment of the Byblos syllabary by focusing on tablets c. and d. only.
History
Since the author isn't a professional epigraphist, it is probably best to leave the longest descriptions of the history of the Byblos syllabary and other scripts of the 2nd millennium B.C. to others.
One could also describe here the entire history of previous attempts to decipher the Byblos syllabary since its discovery. That would also prove lengthy given the "little progress made" in the past. It's safe to say, however, that each and every attempt brought more conclusions and information to the wider public about how the script worked.
It's helpful to know that the author has read descriptions of and gone through the most famous decipherment attempts and acknowledges the hard work and contributions of all of them. The main points of contention with previous attempts are that:
- the readings remain, well, unreadable.
- the inherent difficulty of the challenge means that any further attempts are now considered by many to be intractable.
- the current models for understanding ancient alphabets and their history are helpful overall, but might be getting in the way of decipherment or new discoveries. These models are often based on a different undeciphered corpus of inscriptions.
Here, we hope to challenge the decipherment status quo by adding many more constraints compared to previous decipherment attempts. ONe constraint is making the resulting reading as interpretable as possible to readers of Phoenician/Ugaritic. We will also try to identify the principles of the script so that you, the reader, can then work independently, using Phoenician and Ugaritic dictionaries as backup.
Given this context, I argue that it doesn't matter how flawed a decipherment attempt may now be. No Byblos syllabary decipherments attempted so far have given us anything that is remotely interpretable as Phoenician or other related languages. Having a consistent reading of multiple words or phrases across both tablets c. and d. would therefore be a game changer, even if incorrect. In other words, if it really were that easy to overfit a Phoenician reading onto tablets c. or d., then someone would have done so by now and shared their decipherment attempt with the world.
Starting hypotheses for tablets c. and d.
Here I must mention and thank Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet for her 2022 Louvre Museum presentation. In it, she explained how to emulate Abbé Barthélémy's decipherment of the Palmyrene and Phoenician alphabets for any other script.
It is this decipherment method that we apply on this web page. The following information is therefore entirely hypothetical and should not be taken at face value. It is only designed to allow others to reproduce and test the decipherment attempt.
We also make an effort to keep the hypotheses as short and naive as possible. If we were to summarize the whole set of starting hypotheses listed below, we would use the words: Occam's razor. In other words, the starting hypotheses are not meant to be fringe theories, but rather a naive description of the default expectation for the script overall.
Language
Let's start with assuming the language of the Byblos syllabary, assuming only one is used:
- If people in Byblos wanted to write Egyptian, they would have used hieratic.
- Cuneiform was used for Sumerian or Akkadian, which the Byblos syllabary was not.
We therefore assume tablets c. and d. were used to write the most plausible languages in use at the time: Phoenician, Ugaritic, or perhaps Amorite, which was a popular language of the time and region. Fortunately, all three of these languages are considered closely related by scholars, so we will just assume Phoenician here. This assumption can be further reinforced by the knowledge that Byblian king names predating alphabetical inscriptions are all Phoenician names.
Linguistic context
No bilingual inscriptions exist for the Byblos syllabary and this is the main obstacle to decipherment today. No Rosetta stone of sorts. For this reason alone, we could choose to stop the decipherment attempt right now... Scholars do, however:
- have a good grasp of Phoenician.
- have lots of inscriptions from Byblos and elsewhere to help us.
- have palimpsests that prove contact between the Phoenician language and alphabet, on the one hand, and the Byblos syllabary, on the other. Arguably, the royal palimpsests are also evidence that the syllabary had a certain status in the eyes of Byblos before the use Phoenician alphabet.
In essence, the language of tablets c. and d. may already be relatively well understood. Multiple clues could help guide the project in triangulating a result. Here are some:
- Familiar inscriptions found nearby: We assume that the contents of the tablets are comparable with known Byblian and Phoenician inscriptions, some of the latter being carved on top of older Byblos syllabary inscriptions.
- Familiar languages from the time period: We have many similar inscriptions dated to only a handful of centuries after the Byblos syllabary dating, most notably from the city of Ugarit, just up the coast from Byblos. Ugarit, like the Byblos syllabary, was also discovered in 1928 and turned out to have the oldest confirmed use of the alphabet known today. One of the linguistic surprises of Ugaritic, though, was that its spelling was "less standard than first expected". Here, we assume that the Byblos syllabary spelling of Phoenician was also "non-standard". That did not stop scholars from considering it to be relatively conservative in nature. It turns out that we know of another sign of this "alternative spelling" from the Egyptian name for Byblos: "KPN" instead of the expected "GBL".
- Familiar cultural context: We assume that the contents of the tablets are also somewhat comparable to the Amarna letters: a cache of ancient international diplomatic correspondence found in Egypt and written in Akkadian. We assume here that some forms of official reverence or accompanying formulas, such as "(bowing seven) times" may have been used. A clue for this is the seven "gamma" signs at the end of tablet c. Most letters from Phoenicia found at Amarna were sent by Byblos officials.
- Character and syllable frequency of Phoenician: Although syllabic pronunciation of Phoenician inscriptions is reconstructed rather than known, this syllabic data is readily available for Phoenician after centuries of work by scholars. We will assume that making use of such data will be helpful.
- Script maturity: The script was used and written on multiple different things (monuments, spatulas, and tablets) and in multiple different styles. This allows us to assume a script that was quite mature and useful to its ancient users. It's not because we can't read the script today that people at the time couldn't read or use it. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered writing it in so many different contexts. The different shapes may also indicate that the script was used for a relatively long period of time, possibly centuries. In other words, let's keep ourselves from confusing the limitations of the models we use to understand writing, on the one hand, with the idea that the script was flawed or cultural immature, on the other. I argue that this is an easy mistake to make and that we can stop making.
- Validation through two different inscriptions: The fact that we are looking at two different tablets (c. and d.) means that the characters are only of one "tablet" type, making the problem easier. It also means that we want our decipherment to work on two separate inscriptions, not one. This dual-inscription approach is a first step towards avoiding overfitting.
- A strict C(V) syllabary: Phoenician and related languages are made up of syllables that are in turn made of consonants (C) and vowels (V). The syllables could therefore be of many different kinds: C, CV, VC, CVC, V, etc. In absolute terms, the number of glyphs makes us assume that we are dealing with a simplified syllabic system. We therefore assume a C(V) syllabary, where V is optional. This is because C(V) does allow for CVC syllables by writing CV + C. In Phoenician, C tokens can also be used to represent V syllables because it is a "consonantal" alphabet, hence the term "abjad". Long vowels are assumed to simply be represented as C glyphs. It is possible to imagine that signs other than C(V) syllables existed, but we assume that our abstraction will prove a sufficient starting point.
- An inventory of sounds equivalent to that of alphabetical Phoenician: There are 22 consonants in the Phoenician alphabet. We naively assume that this also applied to the Byblos syllabary, such that it had 22 base consonants.
- A full inventory of vowels: It is thought that there were 5 vowels in Phoenician (a, e, i, o, u). We therefore assume that the Byblos syllabary represented all 5 vowels as well as consonants with an empty vowel. Otherwise, why would people have bothered with a syllabary? This gives us a total of 6 signs per base consonant: Ca, Ce, Ci, Co, Cu, C.
- Many consonant categories only have one or two CV signs: We assume that it is normal for tablets c. and d. to not have 22 × 6 = 132 distinct glyphs (there are only 77). That is because most CV signs aren't needed to render Phoenician texts of this length. The 22 × 6 = 132 count is consistent with the more than 100 different glyphs found in the entire Byblos syllabary corpus.
Tool 0: Recognising known tokens, words, and proper nouns especially
Byblos is considered to have been a colony of Egypt. We therefore expect common Phoenician and Byblos words or roots to appear, as well as king or Pharaoh names. The words may include:
- Byblos (GBL or KPN)
- Baalat (B'LT) — the main divinity of the city.
- Other common words in Phoenician or Ugaritic such as RGM, BRK, BT, etc.
- Words associated with trade or cedar wood.
- King (MLK), although it is Pharaohs that were considered the kings of Byblos during the 2nd millenium B.C.
- Egyptian or Pharaoh names.
- Some borrowing of Egyptian words.
Our Ugaritic dictionary can come in handy for this particular step. Byblian inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabet could also help.
Tool 1: Scholarly syllabic reconstructions of Phoenician
The following table is suggested as a decipherment aid. It is built by counting the tokens inferred from reconstructed Consonant-Vowel (CV) Phoenician. We then compare it with Dunand sign descending frequencies from tablets c. and d. The Dunand notation should have similar phonological values in roughly the same order as the reconstructed syllabic Phoenician.
| Reconstructed CV Phoenician | Count | Tablets c. and d. Dunand | Count |
|---|---|---|---|
| w | 144 | E7 | 51 |
| y | 114 | E8 | 36 |
| a | 83 | G8 | 29 |
| m | 83 | D3 | 29 |
| l | 71 | G17 | 25 |
| t | 66 | D2 | 21 |
| š | 50 | E6 | 21 |
| mi | 42 | G3 | 21 |
| r | 41 | F5 | 20 |
| we | 37 | E5 | 19 |
| n | 36 | G6 | 19 |
| bi | 36 | D4 | 17 |
| ta | 33 | B8 | 16 |
| ya | 33 | E10 | 16 |
| ni | 31 | E14 | 15 |
| lo | 31 | B3 | 15 |
| oa | 29 | B5 | 15 |
| do | 25 | B11 | 14 |
| ai | 25 | A10 | 14 |
| ma | 22 | E1 | 13 |
| b | 21 | G13 | 13 |
| ae | 20 | E23 | 12 |
| ku | 20 | D9 | 12 |
| nu | 19 | G1 | 12 |
| ba | 18 | D1 | 11 |
| la | 18 | A21 | 11 |
| k | 17 | E11 | 11 |
| ti | 17 | G4 | 10 |
| ko | 16 | A3 | 9 |
| no | 14 | A16 | 9 |
| ṣi | 14 | E19 | 9 |
| ze | 14 | E22 | 8 |
| ḥ | 14 | E18 | 8 |
| za | 13 | A4 | 8 |
| yi | 13 | C2 | 8 |
| yo | 13 | A17 | 7 |
| mu | 11 | G7 | 7 |
| ha | 11 | A12 | 7 |
| p | 10 | F3 | 6 |
| d | 10 | B9 | 5 |
| o | 10 | A18 | 5 |
| ki | 9 | A6 | 5 |
| ḥa | 9 | F1 | 4 |
| ka | 8 | A14 | 4 |
| ṣ | 8 | A15 | 4 |
| na | 8 | E15 | 3 |
| šo | 7 | E20 | 3 |
| ru | 7 | G12 | 3 |
| qa | 7 | D5 | 3 |
| q | 6 | A13 | 3 |
| hu | 6 | B13 | 3 |
| pa | 6 | D6 | 3 |
| ša | 6 | A20 | 3 |
| ro | 5 | E13 | 2 |
| gi | 5 | E26 | 2 |
| da | 5 | E17 | 2 |
| ri | 5 | H6 | 2 |
| tu | 5 | F6 | 2 |
| ši | 5 | B10 | 2 |
| s | 4 | H1 | 2 |
| oi | 4 | E3 | 2 |
| ra | 4 | E2 | 1 |
| mo | 4 | H5 | 1 |
| di | 4 | A520 | 1 |
| oo | 4 | A8 | 1 |
| ke | 3 | A8' | 1 |
| bo | 3 | F2 | 1 |
| z | 3 | D8 | 1 |
| le | 3 | I3 | 1 |
| g | 3 | A9 | 1 |
| qe | 3 | A5555 | 1 |
| ye | 3 | B7 | 1 |
| se | 3 | E9 | 1 |
| ṣo | 3 | D7 | 1 |
| ne | 3 | B12 | 1 |
| he | 2 | F4 | 1 |
| to | 2 | G5 | 1 |
| go | 2 | ||
| bu | 2 | ||
| yu | 2 | ||
| so | 2 | ||
| zi | 2 | ||
| še | 2 | ||
| te | 2 | ||
| me | 2 | ||
| śa | 2 | ||
| ṣu | 2 |
For reference on how the previous table was designed, we share the Tabnit and Eshmunazar II inscriptions in CV format below. The texts are naive CV representations based on Jean-Claude Haelewyck's work.
https://www.abjads.org/html/data/reconstructed-syllabic-phoenician.txt
Tool 2: The HLḤM order
As you now know, it turns out that there isn't one alphabetical order but many. The two main ones used today are "our familiar" ABGD and HLḤM.
We assume that there was a reason for these two orders. The most plausible or deducible reasons are assumed to be that, at some point in time, they had some sort of relationship with the frequency of languages contemporary with their appearance. In our study, we found that the HLḤM order in particular may represent the descending frequency of sounds of languages related to Phoenician. We can assume that, since the HLḤM order was also found in Ugarit alongside the ABG order, this HLḤM order may have arisen from a transition from syllabic to alphabetical writing during the 2nd millennium B.C. Since the HLḤM was canonical, it might have come from a different writing system such as the Byblos syllabary. Although the HLḤM might not in fact have applied, we do assume that it will still be a helpful constraint for decipherment due to its status, age, location and linguistic frequency ordering correspondence.
Tool 3: Managing phonological and spelling uncertainty
Non-standard spelling is expected for pre-alphabetical writing systems, as is already attested for Linear B renderings of Greek.
We use the Ordered Set Correspondence preprint results to explore possible phonological or spelling shifts or clues. This will mostly allow us to read Phoenician in non-standard spelling more confidently.
We assume that the following sounds could have been used, grouped, or represented in unexpected ways by the Byblos syllabary:
- T, TH, SH
- K, G, Q
- KH, GH, O, R, W, H., Y
- H and A
- D, DH, Z, S, S., T., Z.
- P and B
- L and N
This represents many degrees of freedom. It's therefore important to differentiate between the encoding we use for each letter and the way each specific letter might have been pronounced. We nonetheless assume that the Byblos syllabary was a mostly phonetic writing system (unlike our Latin-script rendering of English, for instance). We note that the most confusing group is the one containing fricatives and such:
- KH, GH, O, R, W, H., Y
We can also extract some useful Phoenician ordered sets from our study and that may apply to the frequency of Byblos syllabary signs:
(DFO = Descending Frequency Order of characters)
HLḤM:
h l ḥ m q w s² r b t s¹ k n ḫ ṣ *s³* f ʾ ʿ ḍ g d ġ ṭ ḏ z y ṯ ẓ
---
Phoenician syllabic frequency:
W,y,a,m,l,t,sh,r,n,b,o,d,k,s.,z,h.,h,p,q,g,s’,t.
Izbet Sartah_BOUS6
A,L,M,T,B,K,N,SH,G,Y,S,R,D,T.,P,Q,H,H.,O,W,Z,S.
Ugaritic alphabet_COL13:
a l t b m i g dh u kh n s2 d z. h s w o z p h. s. t. q y r k th sh gh
Ugaritic alphabet_COL13 (alt reading using MISSA. 2 hypothesis):
a l t b m i k d u kh n s2 dh d. h s w r z p h. s. t. q y gh g th sh o
Ahiram Sarchophagus DFO
l m b ʾ k t n p ḥ r s h w ʿ g z š y ṭ
Yehimilk DFO
L,M,B,T,K,Y,A,W,G,SH,H.,N,H,P,R,O,Q,D,Z,S.
Punic DFO
L,M,B,A,T,SH,K,N,W,O,H,H.,R,S.,Y,Z,P,D,Q,S,T.,G
Phoenician DFO (Eshmunazar II + Tabnit Sarchophagi)
M, A, T, L, N, B, K, SH, Y, R, O, D, W, Z, H., S., H, P, Q, G, S, T.
Letter forms and interpretation
- Many letters in tablets c. and d. are comparable in shape to letters of the Phoenician alphabet, and we assume that this is for a reason.
- As mentioned previously, we assume non-standard spelling/pronunciation; otherwise, Dunand and other decipherers would have deciphered the script long ago!
- Letter forms can still be compared with their Phoenician values when recognisable, but this step should not be the biggest guiding principle.
- Mentions of Byblos (KPN) in Egyptian inscriptions found in the vicinity of the famous proto-alphabetic Wadi el-Hol texts suggest that Byblos glyph forms may already be somewhat comparable with our current model for ancient alphabetical systems.
A reliable representation of tablets c. and d.
A reliable representation of a corpus is paramount to reading and interpreting it correctly in the first place. Without this step, a decipherment is impossible since one isn't even identifying letters correctly. We provide a Dunand notation text file with tablets c. and d., which is available at the link below. The author has also done his best to represent uncertain or scratched-out characters reliably.
https://www.abjads.org/html/data/text-version-dunand.txt
Because no Dunand value exists for this sign, note that a G8 variant named G8' occurs once in tablet c.
Inventory of glyphs
Not much is currently known about how many glyphs there are for the Byblos syllabary. It is assumed to be a syllabary since it has too many to be alphabetical and too few to be logographic. Forms can vary depending on whether the inscription was written on a tablet, a monument, or a spatula. We focus on tablets only, so this makes our problem simpler. We count about 77 different symbols on the c. and d. tablets. The inventory of glyphs is larger but this is assumed to be mostly due to stylistic differences rather than differences in script inventory size. An inventory of Byblos syllabary glyphs can be found below:
Results
We can now talk about our decipherment attempt results. These are, of course, hypothetical and do not constitute any kind of full decipherment right now. We do think the results are worth sharing however since the decipherment attempt seems to have performed better, if not differently to all previous attempts.
To consult our latest suggested reading for tablets c. and d., and how to read the Byblos syllabary characters, the following pages are available.
Character mapping:
Resulting transliteration of tablets c. and d.:
- https://www.abjads.org/html/encoded.html
- https://www.abjads.org/html/encoded-simple.html
- https://www.abjads.org/html/data/byblos-syllabary-transliterated.txt
Words identified
We suggest that words for Pharaohs or other people appear in tablets c. and d., most notably "Amenemhat" and "Sankhkare". We also see "Baalat" and "Byblos" appear multiple times and on both tablets, as expected.
Arguably, many other frequent or expected roots and words from Phoenician and Ugaritic appear in our results. Some are indeed in slightly unexpected spellings but most are recognizable if not from glyph shapes alone. We will not get into too many details on the language itself or provide a full translation here, and will leave that to epigraphists instead. For the sake of sharing the results, however, and after consultation of dictionaries, here are some approximate translation ideas:
- Baalat: G13 (B11/G1) A10 G17
- Amenemhat: G8 E8 A3 E14 E7
- Sankhkare: G7 A9/A4/A3 D3 E11 F3
- House: G13 G17
- Lion? Brother?: E7 D3 B11
- Byblos: E23 B8 E10
- Guard: E10 E19 E13
- Reshef or Hotep: D3 G17 B9
- Before?: B10 H1 D4
- Blessing: C2 E6 B5
- Worship: D1 F5 A21
- Lord: E13 F1
- Offerings: A16 A16 E8
- Plural marker: E8
- Feminine noun marker but also verb affix: G17
- 3rd person possessive marker: E7
- 2nd person possessive marker: E22
- To...: D2 ...
- For...: D4 ...
- Pharaoh: B8 E6 G8 and possibly: B9 A16 A17
- Head/leader: E6 D9
- Hathor or gathering: E7 E18 E6
- Throne?: E22 E7 F5 and E23 E7 A21 and E22 F5 E7
- Demonstrative?: B3 A3 E1
- Blessings + on use/of the eye of...?: D1 B9 B3 D3 A3
- Has + made: A14 A18 + B8 D3 D4 G6
- To return: D3 H5 A520
- Year / tooth: G12 A3
- Shapanu?: E26 B8 E10
- Zizzu?: B3 B3
- Call: E10 D5 A16
- To elevate / times?: A13 D3 E14 E8 G17 also E6 D1 G3
- Palm of hand?: E23 B8
- To listen: F6 B12 A17
- Right (direction): A13 G3 A3
- Snake?: A10 E7 F6
- Message or speech: E6 B5 E8 G3
- Seven: G7 C2 A17 and also E19 E19 E19 E19 E19 E19 E19
- Six?: F5 A21 H6
- Ten?: A12 A21 E6
- Name: G12 G3
- A proper name? / Take? / Ending?: G17 B13 G1 A16
- Request?: G7 D6
- Houses?: A15 E7 G6 ?8 E8
- A personal name or expression involving gratitude: A17 E5 G6 E8 G3 F5 E5 E6
Some of these symbol sequences appear multiple times — sometimes in between two lines — so be sure to check for duplicates.
Abugida
The current Byblos syllabary decipherment result we have suggests that glyphs might have been used in a way that forms an abugida rather than a simple syllabary. This is assumed to be possible because:
- Since Byblos is considered to be the place from which the Phoenician alphabet spread, an abugida at Byblos may help explain a transition period that wentfrom using syllabic writing systems such as cuneiform to fully alphabetical systems such as the Phoenician alphabet.
- Even if the abugida assumption is incorrect for the Byblos syllabary, such a mapping may prove helpful as an intermediary abstraction when dealing with unfamiliar spelling.
- Moreover, a Phoenician, Frumentius of Tyre, is traditionally considered to have brought the concept of abugida to what is not Ethiopia and Eritrea. This abugida (whose script is known as "Ge'ez" or "Fidäl") is still in use today by millions of people and still uses the HLḤM order found at Ugarit, not the commonly known ABC order. Also remember that christian apostle Thomas traveled to India through the Red Sea where Ethiopia and Eritrea are today. Both India and Ethiopia use syllabaries today. Granted, we are referring to traditional narratives for later events, but these may still help us think about what was in the realm of possibility for the Byblos syllabary.
Ordering
In our results, the Byblos syllabary order of the first occurrence of consonants is the following:
H, Ḥ/Y, W, R, TH, L, M, SH, K/KH, P, N, DH, G, B, KH?, S.?, O/GH, S, D/T?, A?, Z.?
We can reorder this slightly such that we get something comparable to the HLḤM order:
H, L, Ḥ/Y, M, K/KH, W, TH, R, P, SH, DH, G, N, KH?, S.?, S, B, A?, O/GH, Z.?, (Q?), D/T? ...
We note the following:
- The differentiation between H. and Y is not clear.
- The use of K instead of Q.
- The inversion of TH and SH.
- The inversion of P and B.
- DH is a letter which might be used for D, Z, or S.
- Here, G is used to represent K.
- Z. may represent T.
As a comparison to the order we gave above, the HLḤM order in the Ugaritic script from the second millennium B.C., found at Beth Shemesh, is the following:
H, L, H., M, Q, W, SH, R, (B), T, TH, K, N, KH, S., S, P, A, O, Z., G, D, GH, T., Z, DH, Y,
Note that multiple HLḤM abecedary inscriptions have been found in the Ugaritic script.
In other words, the Byblos script may be an abugida whose overarching organising principle is similar to that of the Ethiopian "Fidäl", which is also in the HLḤM order. The different letter categories are represented in the first table of the link below. The left-hand column is the Latin transliteration of the order, and the right-hand column emulates the visual principle of the abugida.
Why we haven't exactly found the HLḤM order exactly is unknown but it could be because tablets c. and d. only constitute a small corpus to work with and that counting more characters may have produced the HLḤM order more distinctly. In other words, the HLḤM order might have been the syllabic order inherent to language and/or script of the Byblos syllabary rather than a designed order. It may then have naturally become a fixed convention and learning order.
Confusing fricatives
A limitation of our decipherment results is that spelling of sounds such as KH, O, GH, H., R and Y remain somewhat confusing. This, amongst other things, is a sign this decipherment is at best still a partial one.
Decipherment validation using the rest of the Byblos syllabary corpus
It turns out that we can partly validate our decipherment attempt by trying to apply its glyph mapping to the rest of the inscriptions in the corpus (everything other than tablets c. and d.). The author beleives he has found more common Phoenician and Ugaritic words such as that for "rememberance", "assembly", "measure" (GŠT), etc. We also argue that the KAI 3 spatulas have some resemblance with Byblos syllabary spatulas:
Phoenician alphabet spatula KAI 3 / 1125:
- "Y L'ZRB'L [...] MGŠTK 'LK WMGŠT 'LY"
Byblos syllabary spatula e.:
- "'Z W DGN 'LH 'ḎŠ 11111"
We don't want to give too many details and let epigraphists come to their own conclusions however.
Sign concordance with previous decipherment attempts
Signs that share a similar base consonant in previous decipherment attempts are listed below:
| Dunand notation | Cartwright | Medenhall/Colless | Dhorme |
|---|---|---|---|
| B8 | P | B | B |
| H1 | B | K | B |
| G13 | B | K | P |
| E19 | G | G | R |
| H5 | G | G | W |
| B5 | G | K | B |
| E18 | Ḏ | D | P |
| B3 | Ḏ | S | Z |
| D5 | D | D | Ṣ |
| D1 | Ḥ | H | Y |
| E7 | H | M | H |
| G1 | K/KH | W | T |
| E20 | W | W | L |
| G5 | W | W | L |
| F6 | S | Z | P |
| A10 | N | N | N |
| A6 | N | N | B |
| A2 | ʿ/Ġ | ʿ | Š |
| A16 | R | R | R |
| E6 | R | L | R |
| G17 | Ṯ | T | T |
| G6 | Ṯ | T | T |
| H6 | Ṯ | T | T |
Conclusion
All in all, we have shown that very interesting patterns arise from a set of very specific -yet arguably expected- constraints for decipherment of the Byblos syllabary. Indeed, many starting constraints are not directly related to the syllabic frequency of Phoenician only, making triangulation of glyph values possible. Achieving a decipherment using one constraint, although impressive in its own right, isn't enough to claim a decipherment. We argue that respecting many different constraints during any future attempt would make the claim for decipherment much more tangible. This ticking of constraints seems to have been achieved here. We also find that an abugida reading of signs may be possible which in it's own post-analysis way, constrains the reading further.
We hope you find the overall decipherment attempt interesting and that you are now able to read the Byblos syllabary corpus. We hope also more will come of our decipherment attempt in the future! :)
Again, for more exploratory results on the alphabetical order, see the preprint and repository.
The preprint can be found at the following address:
https://zenodo.org/records/21959747
The project repository is on GitLab:
https://gitlab.com/hugo.deploys/abjads
Next page on reviewing or contributing to the project →
References
- Dhorme, E. (1946). Déchiffrement des inscriptions pseudo-hiéroglyphiques de Byblos. Syria, 25(1): 1–35.
- Sass, B. The pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions from Byblos, their elusive dating, and their affinities with the early Phoenician inscriptions. In Par la bêche et le stylet! Cultures et sociétés syro-mésopotamiennes: Mélanges offerts à Olivier Rouault, pages 157–180.
- Vita, J. P. and Zamora, J. Á. (2018). The Byblos script. In Paths into Script Formation in the Ancient Mediterranean, volume 1 of Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, Nuova Serie, Supplemento, chapter 3, pages 75–. Edizioni Quasar.
- Woudhuizen, F. C. (2007). On the Byblos script. Ugarit-Forschungen, 39: 689–756.
- Darnell, J. C., Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W., Lundberg, M. J., McCarter, P. K., & Zuckerman, B. (2005). Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of Egypt. The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 59, 63–124.