The Zayit Stone is a limestone boulder dating to the 10th century BCE, discovered on 15 July 2005 at Tel Zayit (Zeitah) in the Guvrin Valley, about southwest of Jerusalem. The boulder measures and was embedded in the stone wall of a building. It is the earliest known example of the complete Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew alphabet as it had developed after the Bronze Age collapse out of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet.
The flat side of the boulder is inscribed with a complete abecedary, although in a different order to the traditional version.Tappy p.344 The first line contains eighteen letters (aleph through tsadi), while the second contains the remaining four letters (qoph through tav) followed by two enigmatic zigzag symbols.
Description One side of the stone carries the Northwest Semitic (Phoenician) abecedary extending over two lines:
Rendered in the modern Hebrew alphabet, this corresponds to the sequence:
In other words, the Zayit abecedary has the order compared to the standard Semitic abjad order of , switching the positions of he and waw, of zayin and heth, and of kaph and lamedh.
The very top line of the inscription contain the letters:
In the modern Hebrew alphabet this translates to , transliterated ʿzr. This is the given name Ezer ().H5828, H5829 in Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance to the Bible, 1979
The side opposite this inscription has a bowl-shaped depression measuring , a volume of approximately . Other similar ground stone objects have been recovered at Tel Zayit. Their function is uncertain, but "they may have served as mortars, door sockets, or basins of some kind."
Discovery The stone was discovered on July 15, 2005, by volunteer excavator, Dan Rypma, during excavations under the direction of Ron E. Tappy of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary at Tel Zayit as part of the archeological excavations which took place during the 1999–2001, 2005, 2007, and 2009–2011 seasons.
The inscription was discovered in situ in what appears to be a tertiary usage as part of wall 2307/2389 in square O19.In the editio princeps, the authors write that "the utilization of the Tel Zayit stone as a writing surface seems likely to have been secondary to its original purpose, so that the subsequent appropriation of the inscribed boulder as a building block might be described as tertiary" . Like the Gezer calendar, the abecedary is an important witness to the letter forms in use in the Levant in the early Iron Age.
Significance
The Tel Zayit abecedary adds to the corpus of inland Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions from the early Iron Age and thus provides additional evidence for literacy in the region during this period. While claiming a certain "level" of literacy on the basis of this and similar inscriptions is notoriously difficult, Carr (2008) argued that because "Tel Zayit is... small enough and distant enough from Jerusalem... the presence of this inscription there might be taken as testimony of more widespread writing across more far-flung and minor administrative centers of Judah."
In addition to preserving writing as such, the inscription preserves an ordered sequence of letters, though this differs at points from those of other abecedaries from the Late Bronze and Iron Age Levant.For a useful chart, see . Particularly, waw is placed before he, het is placed before zayin, and lamed is placed before kaph. In this last instance, a large X appears to mark a mistake realized by the scribe himself.
There has been some disagreement as to whether the inscription should be associated with the coastal (Phoenician) or highland (Hebrew) cultural sphere.Tappy (2008), p. 37. Consequently, there has been debate on whether the letters should be described as "Phoenician", "Paleo-Hebrew", or more broadly as "South Canaanite.", Tappy et al. (2006) associated the inscription with the early Kingdom of Judah."[given] the well-established archaeo-palaeographic chronology of the Tel Zayit inscription... and the clear cultural affiliation of its archaeological context with the Judaean highlands, we may reasonably associate it with the nascent kingdom of Judah." Tappy et al., p. 42 This interpretation has been challenged on both palaeographic and archaeological grounds.
In addition to the above broad historical concerns, the inscription is significant primarily due to the light it sheds on the development of letter forms in the southern Canaanite interior of the early Iron Age. Because the stratigraphy of the site and the date of the inscription itself are still debated, it is difficult to come to any definite historical or chronologically absolute conclusions.See especially , to which is a response.
See also Paleo-Hebrew Gezer calendar Biblical archaeology
Notes
References Excavation website
The Zeitah Excavations
Academic books and articles