The Reading of Hebrew

Abstract

Since Syria-Palestine formed the bridgeway between the Nile and the Mesopotamian world, it is natural that this strip of territory should form the meeting place for the cultural influences of these two centers. Here the alphabetic system of writing which probably developed ultimately from Egyptian hieroglyphs clashed with the syllabic system developed in Mesopotamia. Each type had its advantages. Impressed with the value of the alphabetic system, on the one hand, and the clay tablet as a medium for writing, on the other, the scribes of Ugarit created an alphabet in imitation of the cuneiform manner of writing which could be impressed on clay with the help of a stylus. The so-called Phoenician alphabet, the father of modern scripts, flourished further south and was better adapted for papyrus and stone. Since the Nile and the Euphrates valleys were sources from which the system of writing used in Syria-Palestine sprang, it seems more than possible that the aids developed for reading in Egypt and Mesopotamia came into use in this region. In both Mesopotamia and Egypt writing was originally pictographic. In time these pictographs became stylized pictures of objects, and, since the objects for which they stood could be recognized easily, the reading of the script was comparatively a simple matter. While Mesopotamian pictographs retained ideographic values, they also took on a multiple of syllabic values. When this happened, certain aids became necessary for the reader to give the correct value to the sign or signs. These aids took the form of determinatives which were added at the beginning or end of a group of signs to denote the class to which the objects belonged. Since the cuneiform writing of Mesopotamia remained chiefly syllabic, the reader had a certain advantage in that the vowel sounds were included in the syllabic values. At what period these determinatives came into general use in Mesopotamia is uncertain, but it was well after the language had been reduced to writing. The Ugaritic scribes retained the syllabic system 139