The Byblos Matrix

THE BYBLOS MATRIX W.

C.

WATT. University of California, Irvine I. INTRODUCTION

1

To come straight to the point, I will argue here that the order of letters of the Phoenician alphabet, the earliest certain examples of which come from Byblos and date probably from around 1000 B.C.E., is determined by a phonological matrix of the letters' sounds, a matrix whose columns identify place-of-articulation and whose first two rows identify manner-of-articulation. That the order of some letters of the Phoenician alphabet conforms in part to phonological criteria has been asserted before; 2 what is new in the present treatment, which if valid reveals a degree of linguistic sophistication surprising at so early an era, is that the letter-order is thoroughly determined by phonological criteria, that it is determined by nothing else, and (above all) that this determination takes the form of a matrix. No epigraphic or palaeographic matrix has been recovered: the present argument rests on evidence that is largely statistical. To the extent that the evidence is also circumstantial it rests on a comparison between the letter-orders of the Phoenician and the Ugaritic alphabets. The latter will be taken with little further comment to be a special development of an earlier Prato-Canaanite alphabet from which both the Ugaritic and the later Phoenician alphabets descend, with the important qualification that the Ugaritic system may have originated and then transmitted the letter-order as we know it today. Be that as it may, the fact remains that at present the provenance of this letter-order, hence of the matrix I here argue underlies and motivates that order, is unknown; and so I call the matrix underlying the Phoenician letter-order the "Byblos Matrix," faute de lieu, so to speak. The matrix here claimed to underlie the much earlier Ugaritic letter-order-this is essentially a looser and larger version of the Byblos Matrix itself-1 have called the "Ras Shamra Matrix" for ease of reference, though it may possibly predate the creation of the Ugaritic (Ras Shamra) alphabet itself. The Byblos Matrix itself, containing the Phoenician twenty-two-letter alphabet in sequential order, is illustrated in figure 1. As is plain, each letter of the Phoenician alphabet, entered in the Byblos Matrix in alphabetical order (but with empty cells intervening wherever necessary), falls into a cell whose column identifies its correspond­ ing sound as most saliently Laryngeal, Bilabial, Alveolar, Velar, or Dental. 3 Further3 These phonological terms, especially "Laryngeal" and "Dental," categorize sounds whose categories were (on the present argument) formed according to naive phonological analysis, or understanding, as of about 1500 B.C.E. The term "Laryngeal" is simply the one most in use for the sounds of Column I by present-day Semitists. The term "Dental" might per­ haps better be "Dento-Alveolar."

I I should like to thank anonymous reviewers for their extremely helpful comments. 2 See below, §4. [JNES 46 no. 1 (1987)] © 1987 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0022-2968{87/ 460 1-000 I $ 1.00. 1

Journal of Near Eastern Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1. (Jan., 1987)

2

STOPS FRICATIVES

Row3

JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

I

II

III

IV

LARYNGEALS

BILABIALS

ALVEOLARS

VELARS

1-' �

"

h

Row6

b w � f1'l

7

Row4 RowS

' �

1

0

c

1

m p

+ r I.IJ

z� y

'+'

v DENTALS

4 g

l:t'* k 4

!

f 9

tY

n

' � s

d

q

+

1

r t

FIG. 1. -The Biblos Matrix

more, the first two rows of the Matrix identify those sounds as respectively Stops or (with reservations to be noted) Fricatives. 4 Rows 3 through 6 are less defined. II. THE MAIN ARGUMENT If the Phoenician letter-order or abecedarium5 could be placed in sequence into a matrix containing no empty cells at all-if the matrix could be filled with letters in exact sequential assignment-then surely it would be hard to dispute the present claim that the letter-order was devised so as to fit that matrix: or that the order, rather, springs from the matrix. 6 But the Byblos Matrix contains eight empty cells, which might be thought to invalidate the fit and the present hypothesis. However, this objection will be shown to have little standing. In fact, what will be shown is: (1) that the number of interposed empty cells is, given the phonological information necessarily conveyed by the matrix, minimal; and (2) that the chance that any arrangement of the twenty-two Phoenician letters and eight empty cells could be mapped directly into a thirty-cell matrix by sheer happenstance, is so vanishingly small as to be put out of mind. Another way of stating this is that we could not now place the Phoenician alphabet letter-by-letter into the Byblos Matrix, had not someone in 1000 B.C.E. or so sequenced that alphabet so as to make this possible. The reader can see this for himself by reversing the order of any two of the letters: in almost every case the Matrix must

4 Row 2 is identified as containing "Fricatives" with some reservations, as see §3, below. 5 The term "abecedarium" has come into use (see, for example, L. H. Jeffery, The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece [London, 196 1], p. 4) to mean the canonical "list of letters" (the sequence, the letter­ order), as contrasted with the term "alphabet," mean­ ing the canonical "set of letters" (in any order). I will use the more common term "alphabet" whenever I am sure no confusion will result. Since I propose to use the parallel term "syllabarium" to mean the

canonical list of syllabary-symbols, I will avoid the anglicization "abecedary." 6 That is, the order springs from the matrix by reading the matrix row-by-row, in sequence starting with Column I. One would expect, of course, that as originally written the Byblos Matrix would have been written to be read from right to left, i.e., with Column I as the rightmost column. The Ras Shamra Matrix would presumably have been written to be read from left to right.

THE

BYBLOS MATRIX

3

now be expanded to accommodate the alphabet and so can no longer be said to contain the"minimal" number of empty cells. To jump over the intervening steps for a moment, the reader may gauge for himself how persuasive he is prepared to find the ensuing statistical argument when the following figure is given: by easy and natural calculation it can be shown that someone sequencing the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet at random, in the hope that someone else will be able to take his random sequence and fit it into the Byblos Matrix or any variant of the Byblos Matrix, would have only about one chance in a trillion of realizing his hope. In other words, he would have to make about a trillion random arrangements of those letters before hitting by accident on one that fit the Byblos Matrix or one of its variants, no matter how he distributed the eight empty cells. I now show why this is so. First of all I must define what is meant by the phrase "the Byblos Matrix or any variant," which requires that I also define the three distinctive characteristics of the Byblos Matrix itself. They are (I) its columns categorize the letters' sounds by place­ of-articulation; (2) two of its rows further categorize those sounds by manner-of­ articulation; and (3) the matrix is minimal. I will return below to the letters' phonological assignments, wherever they might generate controversy; for the moment, let us pass immediately to point (3). It is readily granted, I believe, that unless some sort of bound is placed on the size of the containing matrix, any order of letters can be "placed in a matrix," proving nothing. For instance, the randomly-rearranged letter­ order of figure 2A is easily fitted into the matrix of figure 2B, which preserves all of the phonological categories of the Byblos Matrix but which accomplishes this by dint of vastly inflating the number of empty cells. Contrariwise, the "tightness-of-fit" of the Byblos Matrix to the Phoenician alphabet can be well gauged just by noticing that the fit is obtained with only eight empty cells, the minimum. Essentially, the same point can be made without recourse to the "minimality" argument (which is just as well, since the Ras Shamra Matrix, for Ugaritic, is not quite minimal). Note that another striking feature of the Byblos Matrix is that no letter f sound pair is ever followed directly, in the Phoenician abecedarium, by another of the same place-of-articulation category. This means of course that the same column never has to be used for two letters in succession (which would destroy minimality); of perhaps equal importance, it means that the most obvious naive method of sequencing the Phoenician letters-i.e., placing like sounds next to each other-was systematically avoided in favor of so ordering them that they would fit the Matrix. Still, the Byblos Matrix is not the only minimal matrix having the column- and row-contents of the Byblos Matrix, since the order of the columns and the order of the rows can of course be varied without affecting characteristics (I) and (2). This is seen instantly when the matrix of figure 3 is inspected. This matrix accommodates its letter­ order precisely as economically (or minimally) as the Byblos Matrix accommodates the Phoenician order, and its columns and significant rows are identical to those of the Byblos Matrix and therefore make precisely the same phonological categorizations. It follows that the letter-order of figure 3 is as logical, as phonologically rational, as that of the Byblos Matrix (i.e., of the Phoenician abecedarium). This realization further refines our task: it must be to ascertain the relative improbability of the accidental construction of any letter-order that would fit any of the set of Byblos-like matrices of which the matrix of figure 3 and the Byblos Matrix itself are but two examples.

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JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

�" ��t 9� 11 "I YJ �� �� �" '1., 9� '1, 17'11 �; �� 'V, 0, rw (() '11 4-J I -1I

,

FIG. 2A. -A haphazard rearrangement of the Phoenician letters

LARYNGEALS STOPS

Row2

IlL

�

'tJ

Row6

h

Row7

7 7

7

b

�

w

�

FRICATIVES

a

DENTALS

�

Row3 Row5

VELARS

ALVEOLARS

BILABIALS

m p

7

nl

g

n

=F

y 'V

0

,4-J

Row II

t

z

STOPS

Row10

d

1;1

Row8 c

� e

�

tp

s

tY

L.

1

9

r

k q

.,..

t

FIG. 2B. - Matrix for a haphazard rearrangement

We have already seen, in figures I, 2, and 3, three different orderings of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet (i.e., three different abecedaria). The question we have now arrived at is; how many different orderings (abecedaria) are possible? The anwer is twenty-two! or a little more than l,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO (one sextillion). 7 It is an easy calculation to show that the number of Byblos-like matrices (i.e., the set of matrices accommodating the Phoenician alphabet in accordance with characteristics I through 3) is, in comparison, very small: a little fewer than I,000,000,000 (one billion); this is the same number, of course, as the number of letter-orderings that can 7 22! ("22 factorial") is 22x21x20 xl9 x. . . .xi, in round numbers J021 or as stated in plain English, one sextillion.

5

THE BYBLOS MATRIX

FRICATIVES

�

STOPS

1

Row3

rv

Row4 RowS Row6

tp

•

LARYNGEALS

BILABIALS

DENTALS

ALVEOLARS

VELARS

t

'Y

w

a

h

4

d

b �

0

,..,

l. y

'

1

; qf

n ;

tY

� �

r

s+

t

1).

�

g k

..,...

z

'1 ')

m p 0

c

FIG. 3.-Minimal matrix for another abecedarium

be fitted into a Byblos-like matrix, since there is exactly one letter-ordering or abecedarium per (filled) matrix. 8 Now we can determine the proportion of Byblos-like orderings to the total number of total orderings: it is roughly

I,000,000,000 I,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO,OOO or about one to a trillion. The set of Byblos-like matrices, then, forms an extremely small subset of the set of all matrices of the kind at issue-about a trillionth of the whole-and one's chances of hitting by accident on one of the relatively few letter­ orders conforming to one of these matrices is correspondingly small. In fact, it is so small that, practically speaking, it can be dismissed out-of-hand: an event with p<.OOOOOOOOO I, in conventional terms, is nonrandom. 9 The letter-order of the Phoenician alphabet is explained not by its being the only order that fits a Byblos-like matrix but by its being one of a set of such orders, which

8 We begin by holding the order of the Columns constant, subtracting Rows I and 2 as being constant in their contents, and calculating just the number of different (minimal) matrices constructible from the submatrix consisting of 5 columns and (the last) 4 rows. The number of possible different arrangements of the contents of a single column is given by the formula�, n;::>:l , where m is the number of items (cells) and n is the number of identical items (in our case, the number of empty cells). For the submatrix in question the number of possible different arrange­ ments of the items in Column I, for example, is f.. or M 4. For the other Columns, in order, the number 6 of possible different arrangements is respectively 12, 24, 12, and 24. Since each Column is free to vary with respect to each of the others, the number of different possible submatrices is obtained by multiplying 4 times 12 times 24 times 12 times 24, deriving the =

figure of 331,776. Now Rows I and 2, whose contents are fixed, are added for consideration: this means that for every one of the 331,776 submatrices just derived for Rows 3 and 6 there will be in all 30 matrices when Rows I and 2 have been inserted, in any order relative to the other four Rows; in all then (331,776)x(30) or 9,953,280 full matrices are ob­ tained, without varying the order of the Columns at all. Finally, then, we allow the order of the Columns to vary, thus multiplying 9,953,280 by 5! or 120, to obtain the final figure of 1,194,393,600 or roughly one billion different possible minimal matrices, with the Columns and Rows I and 2 phonologically constrained. 9 If Rows I and 2 were freed of their phonological constraints the number of different Byblos-like matrices would rise to about 80 trillion, making P<.OOOOOOl .

6

JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

set, even though it contains one billion members, is still so small next to the sextillion or so possible letter-orders that it is possible to say of the Phoenician order-as it would be also of any of the other billion matrix-conformable orders-that the improbability of arriving at that order by accident is so small that it must have been arrived at by design: i.e., by conformity to the matrix. Ill. RESERVATIONS In assigning Phoenician letterIsound pairs to the Byblos or any other matrix one is dependent, of course, on specific views of what the sound-values of the Byblos letters were. There is good agreement on enough of these sound values to warrant the judgment that the integration of the Phoenician alphabet and the Byblos Matrix is on a sound footing; nevertheless, whatever residual doubts there are should now be taken note of. 10 The doubt that looms largest, I think, has already been obliquely referred to: the label "Fricative" for Row 2 of the Byblos Matrix is not altogether justified by the evidence, in that it is not certain that all five sounds represented in Row 2 were articulated by the Phoenicians with friction of one sort or another. Certainly Izl was; certainly "�" or lXI was; and if "�" was more-or-less the "laryngeal" 11 or "glottal" 12 lhl sound that it is said to be, it probably was articulated with some friction as well. Furthermore, " e," or HI, was "probably pharyngealized" 13 and so was also pronounced with some friction. This leaves only" Y," usually taken to have represented an ordinary IwI, in doubt; but of course any closure of the oral aperture, in pronouncing lwl, begins to produce friction-a large degree of closure will change IwI to I�I, the voiced bilabial fricative-and so it is possible that " Y " was articulated with some (slight) friction also. 14 On the other hand, admittedly, the label "Fricative" seems to hang heavily over this set of letterIsound pairs; and indeed I have allowed it to remain, in figure 1 and elsewhere, only as a suggestive possibility, one motivated by the faint coloring of fricativity that the row possesses, and also by the place of that row in the Byblos Matrix as a whole: for it does follow immediately upon Row 1, which unalterably consists wholly of Stops. In short, the slighter homogeneity of Row 2, once colored by the thoroughgoing homogeneity of Row 1, has been allowed to assume greater gravity than it could have independently. Apart from the label itself, and the fact that the set of"Byblos-like matrices" was thus defined to have two rows of fixed contents (among other characteristics) instead of just one, no issue of note is involved here. 1 0 Of the many reconstructions of the Phoenician or other early Semitic phonological systems there must be few indeed that do not contain a caveat along the lines of A. van den Branden's (Grammaire phenicienne[Beirut, 1969], p. 3) ". . . on ignore encore I 'exacte pronunciation des consonnes." Thus the "good agreement" on the values of most of the Phoenician letters, is only that. II Ibid., pp. 3-6. 1 2 G. R. Driver, Semitic Writing, rev. ed. (London,

1976), pp. 178-79. 13 P. K. McCarter, Jr., The Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet and Early Phoenician Scripts, Harvard Semitic Monographs, no. 9 (Missoula, Montana, 1975), p. 95, n. 1 4 Of course the "'r"' letter, transformed over the years to " IC " and finally to modern "F," has now come to stand for /f/, a bona fide fricative; but this is a relatively late development and has no bearing on the present argument.

7

THE BYBLOS MATRIX

Aside from the label on Column I, which is only a minor terminological issue since there appears to be no question about the homogeneity or rough identity of the sounds in question, 15 the Byblos Matrix as presented in figure 1 has, as far as I am aware, only two other assignment-problems worth noting. The first is "'¥" (Phoenician *samk, Hebrew samek), 16 which has been entered in Column V, "Dentals," because this controversial letter, whatever sound or combination of sounds it may have represented, seems to have had its closest affinities with two other Dental sounds, jtj and I d/. Thus, "'¥" was represented in Egyptian transcriptions by a symbol which on the evidence stood for". . . a palatal (or prepalatal) stop (like kY or tY) or affricate (like c) . . . "; 17 and once the Greeks had borrowed the Phoenician alphabet they for a time, at least on Thera, used " :f" for I*zd/. 18 Thus "while the real value of [the Egyptian sound] cannot be determined," 19 "'¥" does seem to have been heard by both Egyptians and Greeks as having a Dental component, granting that both /t/ and /d/ were Dental in Phoenician, or if that be not granted, then as having a It/-like or Id /-like component; in any case, in our present terms having a "Column V"-like component. Admittedly, this argument is complicated somewhat by the fact that another Phoeni­ cian letter, "/"'" (*� ade) 20 was also transliterated on occasion as Istj or even just It/ / 1 as well as "s" or I dz/ (cf. Theran I zd/, just above). And the Greek evidence is further complicated by the possibility that they confused the sound and acrophone of ":f" with those of " w." 22 But, though complicated, the argument does not seem to be compromised and has been adopted here. Note that if additional evidence indicated that ":f" were in fact to be counted as standing for IkYI, then" :f" would and could be moved one cell to the left, to fall in with the other Velars. The case is rather different with IrI, the second assignment-problem worthy of note. Phoenician" 9" was the symbol for some variety of IrI, whether a dental flap, a dental trill, a retroflex, or a uvular. I have placed "9" in Column V, the Dentals, quite as if "9" stood for a dental flap or trill as was once claimed for Proto-Semitic2 3 or as perhaps in Punic. (In Punic final consonant-clusters ending in IrI often yielded to anaptyxis, the interposition of a vowel between the IrI and the preceding consonant, just as if the final cluster were difficult to pronounce/4 suggesting that the final 1 r 1 may well have been flapped or trilled. ) However, in Ugaritic, /r/ seems to have been a Velar, as indicted in figure 5, the Ras Shamra Matrix. If it be granted that Phoenician /r/ was also a Velar, then the Phoenicians seem to have inherited an order in which IS For instance, all three letterjsound pairs of Column I, which are called "laryngeals" by van den Branden ( Grammaire, pp. 3-6) and by most other writers, are analyzed as closely similar by G. R. Driver, even though he labels the first two of these "glottals" and the last a "pharyngeal" (Semitic Writ­ ing. rev. ed. [London, 1976], pp. 178-79). It should be noted that van den Branden also calls " � ." jl).j, a laryngeal (Grammaire, pp. 3-6), as does Z. S. Harris, A Grammar of the Phoenician Language [New Haven, Conn., 1936], p. 20, while Driver, for his part, labels j l).j a "pharyngeal" (Semitic Writing, pp. 178-79). How close these sounds are to each other, however labeled, is nicely illustrated by P. Fronzaroli's diagram of Ugaritic consonants (La

fonetica ugaritica [Rome, 1955], p. 37). 16 McCarter, Greek Alphabet and Early Phoenician Scripts, p. 98. 17 Ibid., p. 98, n. 18

Ibid. Ibid. 20 Ibid., p. 99. 21 Harris, Grammar of the Phoenician Language, p. 23. 22 Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 32. 23 W. Leslau, "The Semitic Phonetic System," in L. Kaiser, ed., Manual of Phonetics (Amsterdam, 1957), p. 327 24 Harris, Grammar of the Phoenician Language, p. 34. 19

0

8

JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

"'I" held a place at variance with the then-current Phoenician phonological facts, not because "'I" had changed its value, but because Velar "'I" could no longer be conveniently represented in a matrix in which it immediately followed another Velar, "
9

THE BYBLOS MATRIX

GROUP

1

GROUP

2

GROUP

3

SUBGROUP

SUBGROUP

SuBGROUP

SuBGROUP

SUBGROUP

SUBGROUP

B

A

B

A

c

D

)b g d

h w zl).

y k l m n s= c

p

!

=f �

q

rs

t

FIG. 4.- The ordering rationale of G. R. Driver (subgroups "A" contain Stops; subgroups "B" contain Fricatives; subgroup "C" contains Alveolars; and subgroup "D" is miscellaneous).

which case the categories might well have responded to more than one criterion. The point to note, perhaps, is that however categorized, Columns III and V appear to contain phonologically-homogeneous materials. IV. PREVIOUS EXPLANATIONS FOR THE PHOENICIAN LETTER-ORDER The question of whether or not some sort of rationale underlay the letter-order of the Phoenician alphabet has long been debated. The order has by one eminent writer been said to be of "no particular significance" 25 and by another to be based on the Sumerian musical scale. 26 Other writers, whose notions have been collated by Driver, have suggested that the letters are sequenced in pairs in order to spell out words for organs of the body, said words however being Egyptian, not Phoenician; 27 that the letters in their Phoenician order represent a didactic poem, 28 or mnemonic words,29 or lunar or astral theories30 or-most ingeniously-in part the order of signs of the Akkadian quasi-syllabary. 3 1 Having justifiably labeled the better part of these notions "fantastic," 3 2 Driver proceeds to put forward an explanation of his own, one, however, which he himself is obliged to admit is "fanciful in parts." 33 This solution attributes the letter-order to a combination of no fewer than four criteria: (1) phonological, (2) semantic, (3) onomastic, and (4) graphological. First of all, he divides the Phoenician alphabet into three main Groups, segregated mostly on phono­ logical grounds, as shown in figure 4. Though the Driver solution is very far from constituting a matrix, or even suggesting one, nevertheless, it can be seen that, in part, it does organize the Phoenician alphabet according to rough phonological categories,

25 D. Diringer, The Alphabet, 3d ed. (New York, 1968), p. 169. 26 F. M. Heichelheim, cited by Driver, Semitic Writing, p. 269. 27 Driver, Semitic Writing, p. 269. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., p. 180. 32 Ibid., pp. 181 and 185. 33 As belonging in a separate category of its own,

we might mention here the theory that the letters are ordered in accordance with the principle that their names are, and follow the order of, the names of the days of the lunar month as expressed in the Meso­ american (e.g., Mayan) Calendar (see H. A. Moran and D. H. Kelley, The Alphabet and the Ancient Calendar Signs, 2d ed. [Palo Alto, California, 1969]; for summary and discussion, see C. H. Gordon, "The Accidental Invention of the Phonemic Alphabet," JNES 29 [1970]: 193-97).

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JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

in that Subgroup A of Group 1 consists of Stops; Subgroup B of Group 1 consists of Fricatives; and the subgroup {1, m, n} of Group 2 consists of spirants or continuants. But it is not on phonological criteria that t is assigned to Group I, or that Groups 2 and 3 are distinguished, or that the internal order of any of the groups or subgroups is determined: these details are either accidental, apparently, or are settled by recourse to one or more of the other three criteria. For instance, /!/ is assigned to Group I on onomastic grounds (its name is similar to that of the letter just preceding); "'f" is placed in Group 2 following "i" and"�" on semantic grounds (its name means"fish," as can the name of "�." while the name of "i" means "water"); and in Group 3 "o" and "1" are juxtaposed on graphological grounds (they supposedly resemble each other). Not only does this four-criterion rationale apply its criteria in each instance in whatever combination will fit the order, with no principled notion of which will fit where, but also the criteria themselves appear on occasion to fail altogether. Thus, for instance, criterion (2), semantic similarity, which is used to place "'I" and " Ul" in the same subgroup because the name of the former means "head" and the name of the latter means "tooth," fails to explain why then "1," whose name meant "mouth," is not placed next to the "tooth" letter. For another instance, criterion (3), onomastic similarity, fails to explain why"+" does not directly follow "
As is by now well known, the letter-order of the Phoenician alphabet, though 34 attested within Phoenician itself only from about 600 B.C.E., is far older, for essen34 Driver, Semitic Writing, p. 116.

THE BYBLOS MATRIX

11

tially the same letter-order of the twenty-two Phoenician letters turns up in Ugaritic abecedaria dating from around 1400 B.C.E. 35 or even from prior to 1800 B.C.E. 3 6 That is, the letter-order of the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet is essentially the same as the order of those letters in the Ugaritic alphabet, despite the fact that the latter alphabet contains eight additional letters. In fact, since the date of the Ugaritic alphabet is perhaps close to the date-of-inception of the alphabet itself, in the modern sense given that concept by the Northwestern Semites, it is quite natural to conclude that: ... the Ugaritic abecedaria show incontrovertibly that the order of the letters in the North­ western Semitic system of writing is almost as old as the invention of that system itself. It is only a short step from here to the hypothesis that the fixation of the order was part and parcel of that invention, that it was in fact a mnemonic device which helped the rapid spread of the Semitic

system of writing. 37

The order of the Ugaritic letters is given in figure 5, the Ras Shamra Matrix, with the exception of the last three letters of the Ugaritic alphabet, which by universal admission were late additions. 3 8 The Ras Shamra Matrix has of course been labeled in such a way as to make comparison with the later Byblos Matrix as perspicuous as possible: in particular, the two subcolumns "a" and "b" of Columns II, IV, and V of the Ras Shamra Matrix compare to the single column of the Byblos Matrix's II, IV, and V (this issue is discussed below). It is to be noted that the twenty-seven "core" letters of the Ugaritic alphabet map into the Ras Shamra Matrix in precisely the sequential fashion, with interpolation of empty cells, as the twenty-two letters of the Phoenician alphabet mapped into the Byblos Matrix itself. It is also to be noted that the same sort of probabilistic calculation as was performed for the Byblos Matrix can be performed for the larger Matrix of figure 5; the result of such a calculation shows that of the roughly ten octillion (1028) possible orderings of a twenty-seven-letter alphabet such as that of Ugarit, only about eighteen sextillion (18 x 1021) would fit into a matrix of the size and phonological complexion of the Ras Shamra Matrix, meaning that one's chance of hitting upon such an ordering by accident would be about one in 500,000, in other words p<. 000002. This allows one to discount with some confidence any claim that the Ugaritic letter-order can now be fitted into the Ras Shamra Matrix by sheer good fortune. As has been noted earlier, with but one exception (" �i-' " in Ugaritic, "Ut" in Phoenician, for j's/), the letter-order of Phoenician is, for the same letters, precisely that of Ugaritic; in other words, the Byblos Matrix is in an obvious sense a contraction of the Ras Shamra Matrix. Yet the Phoenician alphabet cannot in any of the usual senses be descended from the Ugaritic: the cuneiform figures of the latter system are derived from linear figures like those of the former, not vice versa. 39 What 35 W. F. Albright, "Some Important Recent Dis­ coveries: Alphabetic Origins and the Idrimi Statue," BASOR 118 (1950): 12. 36 M. F. Martin, "A Twelfth Century Bronze Pa­ limpsest," Rivista degli studi orientali 37 (1962): 179. 37 W. W. Hallo, "Isaiah 28 9- 13 and the Ugaritic Abecedaries," JBL 77 (1958): 335. 38 Gordon, "The Ugaritic 'ABC'," Or., n.s. 19 (1950): 375-76; Martin, "Twelfth Century Bronze Palimp-

sest," p. 175; P. Fronzaroli, La fonetica ugaritica, pp. 14-17; and S. Segert, "The Last Sign of the Ugari­ tic Alphabet," in Ugarit-Forschungen 15 (1983): 201-18. 39 See R. R. Stieglitz, "The Ugaritic Cuneiform and Canaanite Linear Alphabets," JNES 30 (1971): 135-39, for details concerning about half of the Ugaritic letters.

I

2

3

I

II

III

IV

v

LARYNGEALS

LABIO-DENTALS

ALVEOLARS

VELARS

DENTO-ALVEOLARS

I»-

lg::

ID-

6

b

a

b

a

INTERDENTALS

STOPS

CONTINUANTS

FRICATIVES

Ja �

h� 1>--r

4

5

a BILABIALS

v

c

1:::

T

b

'

w

m

').A

I'' g�

TT

p

- <> -

1

z

...--

y�

' .-:4

b 1;1** 4..

k

�

q

g

:::=t>-

a:UL

d

o-1"4

l**

s * fYT

T;:.

�

n

��

--

g

b NONFRICATIVES

�*

y

I

!J

r

-

--

--

1>--

t

FIG. 5.-The Ras Shamra Matrix; R. C. Steiner has argued that both of these sounds (Column Va/ Rows 3, 4) were lateralized in Proto-Semitic, being an unvoiced fricative lateral and its voiced counterpart, respectively, and that at least the first of them was still lateralized in Ugaritic (see The Case for Fricative-Laterals in Proto-Semitic, AOS 59 [New Haven, Conn., 1977], p. 157). Curiously, Steiner absolutely denies (ibid.) that the Ugaritic letter-order shows even a trace of a "phonetic principle." **Pharyngealized.

THE BYBLOS MATRIX

13

is more, Ugaritic was written, like the Akkadian cuneiform system that putatively served as its model, from left to right, while Phoenician like the other Semitic systems and the Egyptian quasi-alphabet on which they were modeled, was written from right to left: and given the greater facility with which most people write from left to right we would not expect any population anywhere to forgo a left-right (dextral) system for a sinistral one. Phoenician (Western Semitic in general) must, then, be descended from an earlier alphabet, Proto-Canaanite, from which also Ugaritic was descended. Yet there is one tantalizing indication that Ugaritic may not have been quite the dead­ ending sidetrack that this view would imply: for it seems possible that the Phoenician letter-order did originate in, and therefore was transmitted by, Ugaritic. This indica­ tion is the fact that the Ugaritic letter-order, thus the Ras Shamra Matrix that accommodates that order, seems to have been partly influenced by the order of the symbols of the Akkadian syllabarium.40 But this issue is at present best labeled for what it is, a puzzle. Two last remarks concerning the Ras Shamra Matrix. First, though in many respects it is closely similar to the Byblos Matrix itself, in one respect it is obviously rather different, namely, it is somewhat "less densely packed": it contains propor­ tionately more empty cells. However, this is partly owing to the more"open" Ugaritic phonological system, containing as it does more categories of sounds with fewer members. Secondly, though visual comparison of the two Matrices (figs. 1 and 5) will afford any reader a fairly clear view of how the system of the Ras Shamra Matrix was reduced to that of the Byblos Matrix, perhaps a more explicit sketch would be of ser­ vice. Overall, then, the Ras Shamra Matrix, understood as applying also to whatever system was ancestral to both Ugaritic and Phoenician, reduces to the Byblos Matrix of Phoenician in the following way: Column II, which in the Ras Shamra Matrix contains two subcolumns"a" and "b," in the Byblos Matrix contains but one column, Ras Shamra subcolumn lib, the "Interdentals," having vanished together with the Interdental consonants. Column III of Ras Shamra contains four letters, to which Byblos adds a fifth," w," representing a merger of old lateral fs/41 and old interdental /!/. The two subcolumns"a" and "b" of Ras Shamra's Column IV, the Velars, merge into the single column of Byblos after these three events: Ib/ merges with It).f; IrI is moved to the right either because it can properly be characterized as a (Dento-) Alveolar or because it comprises an anomalous one-member category (as almost any IrI does in any language) and so can be anomalously placed among the Dentals just to save the Matrix from having to place two letters in one cell when subcolumns IVa and IVb are merged; and subcolumns IVa and IVb are merged, comprising a single Velar column containing both Stops and Continuants. Lastly, Column V, which in the Ras Shamra Matrix also contains two subcolumns "a" and "b," simply loses subcolumn "a" altogether when the two sounds represented there are merged with other sounds represented elsewhere in the Matrix: Column VafRow 3 being merged with Column lib/Row 6 and then moved to III/6; Column Va/Row 4 being merged with III/5. As an overall characterization of the change from the Ras Shamra Matrix to the Byblos, Column I, "Laryngeals," remains constant; Column II, "Labio-Dentals," loses its 40 41

Driver, Semitic Writing, passim. R. C. Steiner, The Case for Fricative-lAterals in

Proto-Semitic (New Haven, Conn., 1977), passim.

14

JOURNAL OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES

(Inter)Dentals and becomes simply "Labials"; Column III, "Alveolars," retains its character but gains an additional letter; Column IV, "Velars," retains its identity but merges its two subcolumns and changes its constituency somewhat; and, lastly, Column V, "Dento-Alveolars," loses its FricativejNonfricative contrast and becomes simply"Dento-Alveolars" or more simply"Dentals." These are, of course, not trivial changes, since in the aggregate they represent five sound-mergers;42 on the other hand, it may be considered remarkable that this particular pattern of sound-mergers can so easily and naturally be represented by comparing Matrices. That this is possible, of course, is due to the fact that the two alphabets share a basic letter-order. VI. THE BYBLOS MATRIX'S LATER HISTORY The Byblos Matrix's later history is easy to state: it left no trace, and in certain cases it was demonstratably no part of the living alphabetic tradition. Later people inherit­ ing the Phoenician (or West Semitic) alphabet-the Greeks, the Etruscans, then the Romans, and the Venetie tribes from whose usage the runes seem to have been inspired-added new letters in apparent disregard for the rigors of the Matrix (or of any matrix); and, indeed, the present-day English alphabet faithfully reflects this history, for the Byblos Matrix cannot easily be extendeed to accept the new sequence of letters-"U" through "Z"-added after the final Byblos letter "T." The letter-order may well have been a useful "mnemonic device" in Rallo's phrase;43 more probably, given how helpful a matrix is to memory, it was the matrix that was the useful mnemonic device. It is all the more remarkble, then, that the Matrix was not passed on. That it was not forms, perhaps, yet another historical mystery of the kind that so often puzzles the student of writing systems: another such, for example, is the fact that the Etruscans inherited the Greek letter-order, which presumably was conveyed by some aural mnemonic (a recitation of the letter-names: "alpha, beta, gamma.... ) but they did not inherit the Greek letter-names, or at least almost immediately replaced them with new ones of their own (i.e., the ones we use today). "

­

VII. CONCLUSION The letter-order or abecedarium of the Phoenician alphabet matches the Byblos Matrix in a way that cannot reasonably be ascribed to chance; the letter-order of the Ugaritic alphabet matches the Ras Shamra Matrix in a way that also cannot reasonably be ascribed to chance. The original Matrix may have been created to serve as a mnemonic device.Despite this, it was not transmitted to the Greeks nor indeed to any other modern people using some variant of the Phoenician (or West Semitic) alphabet.Nonetheless, the present-day order of letters"A" through"T," and the order of the symbols of the Phoenician and Ugaritic systems, appear to be best accounted for by postulating that they represent simple start-to-end readings of a phonological Matrix like those presented above. 42

Gordon, "Ugaritic ' ABC'," pp. 375-76.

43 Hallo, "Isaiah 28 9-13 and the Ugaritic Abece­ daries," p. 335.