The Ras Shamra Matrix

The Ras Shamra Matrix W. C. WATT

Lines, circles, scenes, letters and characters. Marlowe, Dr. Faustus Introduction: The categorial imperative1

Among those who study writing systems the letter sequence Ά, B, C, D...' has long been an enigma. On first consideration it looks altogether random; but one has only to imagine the letters in a different order — say 'D, Β, C, A...' — to wonder why they are ordered the way they are, instead of some other way. A number of scholars who have asked this question have argued that the sequence obeys one or another principle; but most have concluded that the letter order is due to 'chance' (Ullman 1932: 20), 'has no particular significance' (Diringer 1968: 169), or is 'arbitrary' (Goody 1983: 87). This is a reasonable consensus, given that the 'principles' that have from time to time been proposed to account for the letter sequence, ranging from ingenious theories based on astral and lunar parallels to the notion that it was divinely ordained (advanced for example in 1531 by the cabalist Cornelius Agrippa — Shumaker 1972: 135, Scholem 1978: 198), have in Sir Godfrey Driver's dismissive term been no better than 'fantastic' in nature (1976: 181). (Yet Sir Godfrey himself could not refrain from putting forward still another theory, which he freely admitted was in part 'fanciful' [1976: 185].) In 1987 I proposed a new explanation: that the alphabetic letter order originated in exclusive obedience to the simplest and most rational principle one could imagine — namely, that of imposing an organization on the letters' corresponding sounds (Watt 1987). This organization, I argued, took the form of a matrix whose columns grouped its sounds by place of articulation. The matrix is seen in fullest and least time-savaged form at its earliest reconstructed stage, dating from about 1400 B.C.; but its outlines have persisted to the present day, and can still be discerned in the modern English alphabet learned every September by millions of firstSemiotica 74-1/2 (1989), 61-108

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The Ras Shamra Matrix

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graders. The earliest matrix, which I have called the 'Ras Shamra Matrix', is given here as Figure 1. We will look at it again below, at this point lingering over it only long enough to note the intuitive 'naturalness' of its phonological categories and the relative 'tightness' with which the Matrix and its 27-letter alphabet are fitted together. The proposal that the letter order was founded on a matrix was based not on any new archaeological recovery, but on a study of the letter order itself and of the way in which the sounds represented by the letters fit into a densely packed phonological matrix. Plainly, then, the proposal was an hypothesis (and, even though much additional supporting evidence is adduced in what follows, it cannot be regarded as proven until an archaeological matrix is unearthed). In the 1987 paper I advanced the notion that the original alphabetic letter order was derived quite simply by reading the Ras Shamra Matrix from beginning to end; I defended the Matrix's claim to historical authenticity by appeal to its aforesaid 'naturalness' and above all by appeal to the overwhelming improbability that its letter order could so closely fit the Matrix (or any similar matrix) unless designed to do so. I calculated the chances of anyone's hitting by accident on an order conforming so tightly to a matrix like the Ras Shamra Matrix as about one in 500,000.2 (To gain a more direct sense of the improbability in question, hence to assuage any doubts he may have that the Matrix is a purely post hoc reconstruction of no historicity whatever, the reader may wish at this point to perform the following brief experiment: reverse the order of any two adjacent letters in the Ugaritic alphabet, and observe the effect on the Matrix. In almost every case the effect will be to 'loosen' the Matrix by forcing the addition of an entire new Row. What this shows is that given the Matrix as presently constituted and the abecedarial order as it existed in Ugaritic and as it has come down to us, the Matrix fits that order very tightly indeed. It is this 'fit' that is so unlikely to be possible had not it been present as the raison d'etre for the abecedarial order from the beginning.) Probability estimates are of course the very backbone of historical reconstruction, even though they are seldom manifested; for instance, the universal opinion that the Semites borrowed the basic alphabetic idea and even some letter shapes from the Egyptians is based not on any record of such a borrowing, but on the manifest improbability, if the world is sane, that so many coincidences in pattern, people, place, and time could all be due to chance. Still, even a figure like one in 500,000 is perhaps more persuasive than it ought to be, for one should take with a grain of salt any claim of historicity for what is after all only a phonologically plausible reconstruction founded on statistics alone. An event that is improbable is not impossible. A coincidence so unlikely as to

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be liable to occur by chance only after 500,000 prior trials might nevertheless have happened on the first trial, for some lucky scribe. And of course there is always the possibility, however remote, that the improbability in question is partly or wholly a statistical artifact after all.3 Given the perils of any statistical argument, it behooves someone claiming historical authenticity for the Ras Shamra Matrix to set down, at some early juncture, such corroborative details as he may think worthy of inspection. This is that juncture. It is also the point at which the Ras Shamra Matrix, its historicity established as well as it can be on the present evidence, may be used to cast what light it can on the phonological perceptions of its putative creators and users; further, it is the point at which the Matrix can be set next to other ancient devices of comparable nature. Since the goal of confirming the Matrix's historicity sorts well with that of showing how the Matrix reveals the inferred phonological knowledge of its time, in what follows the two will be intermixed. Background

The modern English alphabet is in most respects the Roman alphabet, which was in great measure the Etruscan alphabet, which in turn was largely a version of the Greek alphabet, borrowed via a Euboean colony on the Bay of Naples between 800 and 700 B.C. The Greeks had a few years earlier borrowed the alphabet from the 'Phoenicians', a Semitic nation living on the Mediterranean shore in what is now Lebanon and Southern Syria.4 The Phoenicians had inherited the alphabet from their Canaanite ancestors. (As was mentioned earlier, the ultimate inventors of the essential alphabet idea were the Egyptians; but that is another story.) Ignoring a more or less constant evolution of letter shapes over the 3,500 years of their use, then, and a few other vicissitudes, we may speak with impunity of the alphabet held in common by us and the Canaanites and the roughly 140 generations between as a single writing system — one we might call the 'Semitic/Euboean/Etruscan/Roman' alphabet, or 'SEER' alphabet for short. It is a remarkable fact that during most and perhaps all of its history the letters of the SEER alphabet have been passed on in the form of a canonical list, an ABC or abecedarium, in which those letters were ordered almost exactly as they are today: Ά, B, C, D...' and so on. (Of the letters that have persisted continuously in the SEER abecedarium since its known beginning at around 1400 B.C., not one has changed its place in the list.) It would of course be quite possible for one people to

The Ras Shamra Matrix 65 adopt another's alphabet without also adopting their traditional letter list, their ABC.5 In what follows we will mainly be discussing cases where both alphabet and abecedarium were inherited or adopted together; but even so it will be important to bear the distinction in mind. This said, we now note that the original SEER letter-list ended at T', though in most descendant alphabets more letters were added later. Properly speaking, then, the SEER abecedarium is coextensive with what we could and will call the common alphabetic 'core' ('A' through 'T'), even though almost all abecedaria also sport a kind of tail or 'coda' (in the English alphabet, 'U' through 'Z'). The SEER core and some of its varied codas appear as Figure 2. In the last row of the Figure is exhibited the modern English (general modern European) version of the SEER alphabet. The first row represents the Canaanite alphabet in the earliest version for which the corresponding abecedarium is known, the Ugaritic script of about 1400 B.C., including five 'extra' letters that were soon to be dropped.6 Three letters following 'T', however — the short-lived Ugaritic coda — have been omitted, for reasons to be taken up below. In Row 2 we find the later Canaanite or Old Phoenician letter order, with the alphabet shrunken by the five 'extra' letters that were rendered otiose by phonological changes: those of Columns 4, 16, 18, 25, and 26. Row 2 can also be taken as the Phoenician alphabet inherited by the Greeks a little after 800 B.C., according to some (though not all) authorities.7 From this point on alterations are relatively minor, and occur mostly in the coda. Row 3 represents the Western Greek alphabet transported by some Euboean (Chalkidic and Eretrian) colonists to Italy, where it was adopted by the Etruscans with little change, through which agency it passed soon to the Romans and later the rest of the Western World. Though for reading convenience the letters in Figure 2 are given throughout in their modern forms, for much of their early life they were of rather different appearance. Since this did not affect the letter order itself, it is of no concern to us here; however, some idea of how much evolution the alphabet has undergone in the course of its history may be gained from a glance at Figure 3, which traces the early history of the letter 'B' It is important to note that though certainly descended from the earlier [Proto-JCanaanite script, the Ugaritic alphabet is not part of the 'main line' of descent that leads from Canaanite to modern English: Ugaritic, whose letter forms were written in cuneiform wedges, was a dead end, and is of interest here only because the Ugaritic abecedarium is the earliest yet recovered.8 We note in passing that the fact that no pre-Ugaritic Canaanite abecedarium has come to light is not very telling, given the

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paucity of materials from that place in that period. (Though a quite ancient Canaanite abecedarium has recently been found, among other old materials [Demsky 1977; Cross 1980], this dates only from the twelfth century and so cannot be pre-Ugaritic.) Of course it is quite possible that no Canaanite abecedarium will ever turn up, and possible (barely) that no such thing ever existed.9 Here however we will assume that it did; that both the Ugaritic and the modern SEER abecedaria descended from it (via separate paths10); and that therefore it is due to an accident of archaeology that, if the SEER letter order is to be explained by having a phonological matrix as its source, the earliest letter order shown to be well-fitted by such a matrix must be that of Ugarit. Whether the SEER abecedarium was invented by the Ugaritians or the Canaanites, the 'Ras Shamra Matrix' is well-named, since it is a reasonable guess that both Matrix and abecedarium may in either case have been created within the area briefly dominated by the polyglot city of Ugarit, now 'Ras Shamra' ( = 'Cape Fennel'). The idea of organizing the symbols of a writing system in a phonological matrix may of course have been imported from elsewhere, but no possible provenance is known. In particular, it does not seem that the idea could have been inspired, except distantly, by the scribal practices associated with Akkadian, another Semitic language prevalent in Ugarit at the time in question. (Akkadian — the term is perhaps less well known than the names of its two main dialects, Babylonian and Assyrian — was the lingua franca of the region, and of the Near East in general [Gelb 1963: 68]; some of the same scribes who wrote the Ugaritic texts have been conjectured to have been writing texts in Akkadian as well [Horwitz 1979: 389]. The symbols of the Akkadian syllabary were canonically ordered [Peiser 1886], probably for reasons similar to those motivating the creators of the SEER sequence; but this ordering was based primarily on criteria of graphic similarity, and only secondarily on phonological principles [Zimmern 1896, Lidzbarski 1902: 135-136; cf. Thureau-Dangin 1935: 100 for possible Sumerian influences], so that it cannot have derived from a unitary phonological matrix like the one from which the Ugaritic abecedarium was derived.)11. As with any reconstruction, validation of the Matrix's historicity or 'authenticity' must depend on showing that it is (a) neither a statistical artifact nor (within the bounds of reasoned judgment) a merely fortuitous coincidence; (b) consistent with other reconstructions, in the present case with early Semitic phonology; (c) consistent with related material that has survived from the period (i.e., the Ugaritic and related Canaanite alphabets, abecedaria, and the scribal abecedarial practices for which evidence is available); and finally (d) so richly endowed with internal structure as to defy any contention that it was not the product of

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conscious design. My earlier paper (Watt 1987) was directed almost exclusively at demonstrating (a) and (b). The present study will have the primary objective of deepening those demonstrations, supporting (c) and (d), and showing what the Matrix implies about ancient phonological perceptions. In the case of (a) I will narrow the probability that the Matrix could fit the abecedarium by chance; in the cases of (b) and (d) I will show how the fine detail of the Matrix implies that its inventors attained to an analysis of Ugaritic (or Proto-Canannite) phonology that was extraordinarily subtle for its time, placing the Matrix within a very small set of possible matrices that both capture these subtleties and conform to the attested abecedarium; and in the case of (c) I will show that the Matrix appears to be intricately structured so as to conform to attested Ugaritian abecedarial practices, putting what I take to be the final nail in the coffin of any argument to the effect that the Matrix conforms to related alphabetic material by chance or that it was not 'real' to the first users of the SEER abecedarium. Following this part of the argument I will turn to a brief comparison between the reconstructed Ras Shamra Matrix and the matrices that have been postulated for two Sanskrit abecedaria. Besides taking the usual reconstructive path sketched above, summed up as showing that the object of inquiry has a certain structure and how that structure fits in with what else is known about it, I will where it seems appropriate (as above) estimate the extent to which such structures could plausibly be the result of chance. On occasion I will also venture to propose a (plainly marked) conjecture bearing on the question of why these structures are present, and what uses they may have been designed to serve. The matrix in the context of its creation In the four subsections that follow I will bring forward aspects of the Ras Shamra Matrix which, besides being worthy of attention on their own account, reveal the Matrix as having been crafted in such a way as to incorporate the phonological knowledge and scribal practices of its time. The 'principle of maximal separation' In this subsection I will advance the notion that the Ras Shamra Matrix appears to have been internally organized in over-all obedience to a 'principle of maximal separation', whose force is to segregate similar

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sounds, and classes of sounds, as much as possible. (Except where noted otherwise, 'sounds' and 'classes of sounds' will be represented in the discussion, as in the Matrix itself, by the corresponding letters.) Separating like sounds was accomplished, within each Column and sub-column, by interposing between those sounds as many intervening sounds as the Column had available. Separating like classes of sounds — recall that putative sound-classes are represented in the Matrix as Columns — was accomplished by interposing between pairs of similar Columns as many other Columns as were available, given the need to do the same for all such pairs. It must be stressed that this description applies to the Columns (separated in the Matrix of Figure 1 by heavy lines), and not (necessarily) to the sub-columns making up those Columns: the difference between the two levels of classification being that the Columns are differentiated by approximate place of articulation, while within each such place the subcolumns are differentiated by manner of articulation. The optimal consequences of applying such a principle would be these: (1) no two most-similar sounds would occur in sequence within any Column (reading the Columns from top to bottom, 'across the Rows'); and (2) no two highly-similar sounds (having similar places of articulation) would occur together within any Row (reading the Rows from left to right, 'across the Columns'). To anticipate, once it has been shown that the Matrix conforms rather strictly to the principle, hence by inference that this conformance must have been deliberate, I will propose that the Matrix was designed to obey that principle, scanning both vertically and horizontally, because it was designed to be recited both vertically and horizontally, and because it was expected that such recitations would be eased — and/or that monitoring them would be eased — if highly-similar (hence easily confused) sounds were as distant from each other as possible. In a rather obvious fashion, I think, the five main classes of sounds the Ras Shamra Matrix acknowledges — Columns I, II, III, IV, and V — are based on an intuitive phonological analysis of those sounds' articulatory properties, viewed proprioceptively (that is, without access to transverse X-rays or the like). Just as obviously, the primary criterion of classification must have been 'approximate location in the vocal tract', with manner of articulation a secondary criterion. Application of the primary criterion produces the five classes of the Matrix: I, 'Extreme Back of the Vocal Tract'; II, 'Extreme Front'; III, 'Middle'; IV, 'Back'; and V, 'Front'. With two or three reservations to be noted below, these soundclasses correlate rather well with the closest modern phonological terms, as follows: I, 'Laryngeals or Pharyngeals';12 II, 'Labials and Interdentals'; III, 'Alveolars and Palatals'; IV, 'Velars'; and V, 'Dento-Alveolars'. As examples of the sort of 'reservations' that hinder complete identification

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of the Matrix's main sound-classifications with the corresponding modern ones, we might cite these two: /n/'s falling in with the other sounds of III, the 'Middle' sounds, means that III must contain two alveolars (/z/ and /§/), a palatal (/y/), and an /n/ that was probably dental, thus being rather more diffuse than we are used to; and /h/'s falling in with the other velar continuants of IVb requires special explanation, because /h/ bore a close affinity to the three 'laryngeals' and/or 'pharyngeals' of Column I. These issues will be returned to below as appropriate, but especially in notes 12-16. (Obviously, the relative sharpness with which the appropriate vocal-tract locations were delimited, hence the extent of their ambiguity or overlap, was what primarily determined the degree of freedom involved in the assignment to those categories of particular letters. On balance there was rather little freedom, except as noted below.) All things considered, the Ras Shamra Matrix is surprisingly modern in appearance; in fact, it is not too much to say that with its rubrics freshened up a little nearly all of its phonological assignments could have appeared in the linguistic literature as recently as 1960 or so without raising an eyebrow. However, the modernity or accuracy of these classes, realized as the Matrix's columns, is not the matter of immediate concern; in fact I mention it here only to remind the reader that the Columns' 'naturalness' offers an external argument for their genuineness, with the consequence that any ancillary properties they might exhibit are of greater potential interest than would be the case were they patent artifices. The first property to be considered here will be the order of the Columns, which appears to be non-random. Of course, any sequence starting off with 'Extreme Back' and 'Extreme Front' and ending with 'Back' and 'Front', with 'Middle' in the middle, suggests a pattern almost irresistibly. As was hinted just above, however, this particular pattern seems to come with a ready-made rationale: that of separating similar classes (on the criterion of place of articulation) by interposing dissimilar ones. (I note in passing that one might instead have expected, at a stage of linguistic analysis so far in the past, that a far more primitive organizing principle would have been imposed, such as the one that produces the modern linear arrangement from Front to Back, as if reading off the sound-classes from the standard textbook illustration of WestwardFacing Phonemic Man — and that also produces, reading however from Eastward-Facing Phonemic Man, the Sanskrit varna-samamnaya abecedarium and matrix, for which see Figure 6a below.) For example, the Laryngeals and/or Pharyngeals are separated from their articulatorily nearest neighbors, the Velars, by the articulatorily distant Labio-Interdentals and the Column containing /n/ and the Palato-Alveolars; the

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Labio-Interdentals are separated from their near neighbors the DentoAlveolars by the more distant Palato-Alveolars and the even more distant Velars; and so on. (As the reader will already have noticed, though, the Laryngeals for example are not taken in isolation 'maximally separated' from their nearest articulatory neighbors the Velars, leaving the other three sound-classes in the Matrix's center; over-all 'separation' is optimized at a cost in suboptimal individual separations. For further remarks on this point see note 30 below.) On the whole the picture seems quite clear; indeed, it is clouded only in the cases where within a Column the two sounds of subcolumns 'a' and 'b', though distinct by the subcolumnar or secondary criterion of manner of articulation, are as to the Columnar or primary criterion of place of articulation uncomfortably close. These cases are, however, but two in number at most: one certain case (IVa/IVb in Row 1 — a velar stop and a velar continuant), and a rather uncertain one (Va and Vb in Row 3) occasioned by Steiner's 'lateralization hypothesis' (1977; see also the discussion below, note 16). Given the relatively few possible arrangements of five sound-classes (5!, or 120), there is little point in arguing this case on statistical grounds, and I will not do so. For the moment I simply take note of the impression that a pattern can be discerned in the sequence of Columns, of the relative lightness of the evidence running against the pattern, of the cited rationale, and of the fact that this rationale has a rationale of its own. That is to say, the notion that those who devised the order of the Matrix's Columns did so to separate similar sound-classes is lent a certain air of plausibility by considering what use the Matrix may have had. Though it may have been designed primarily to play a role in some long-lost game or divinatory rite, or just to record the state of phonological knowledge at the time and place of its creation, more probably it was created, as the abecedarium itself seems to have been, to serve as a pedagogical tool (for which see the subsection Ά new use for nothing' below). In that case it was probably devised tobe used in conjunction with the viva voce recitation of the abecedarium, which is known to have been part of the teaching process in those days (Driver 1976: 89-90) even as it can be heard, in our own time, in thousands of first-grade classrooms. If this is so, and if the abecedarium to be thus recited was to be taken from the Matrix by reading it off Row by Row from beginning to end, then the most immediate practical effect of ordering the Matrix's Columns would have been to impose that same order on the contents of each of the Rows, hence on the abecedarium (which is the list of the Rows from top to bottom). In short, separating similar Columns in the Matrix had the consequence that similar sounds were separated in the abecedarial recitation, perhaps making it a little easier to learn, and certainly making it easier to monitor.

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Of course we do not know (and presumably will never know) whether the rationale just presented has any truth to it; but since nothing in the present argument really depends on it we can view it as a simple fantasy with no harm done. What matters is the apparent ordering of the Columns and the principle (separation of similar sounds) that can be hypothesized to underlie that order. For my next point is that that same principle appears to be found elsewhere in the Matrix. It is found in the ordering of the Column's contents. That is, just as the Columns are (horizontally) sequenced so as to separate like classes of sounds, so in great measure are the letters within each Column (vertically) sequenced so as to separate like sounds. To take Column Ha as an illustrative example: it is the voiced bilabial stop /b/ that heads the Column and its unvoiced counterpart /p/ that terminates it, the two being separated by /w/ (spelled as 'F' in Ugaritic) and /m/. Clearly, Ha conforms to the 'principle'. The other two Columns headed by stops also conform — and also begin with a voiced stop and terminate with an unvoiced counterpart — but their manner of conformance is a little more complex because each includes, besides a voiced/unvoiced pair like {/b/, /p/}, a third sound of roughly the same place of articulation, an unvoiced counterpart with a secondary backed component. (For maximum breadth of access, and to avoid overly specific phonetic implications, I will use traditional Semitist transliteration here. Wherever necessary, the sounds will be described in the text or given in their usual modern symbolization. As was mentioned above, sounds whose reconstruction has not reached consensus and/or whose place in the Matrix might be controversial are individually addressed, mainly in notes 12-16.) Thus Column IVa contains besides /g/ (spelled as 'C') and /k/, also the 'emphatic' unvoiced pharyngealized or uvularized counterpart /q/; Column Vb, besides /d/ and /t/, also contains 'emphatic' unvoiced /t/, which was velarized (Segert 1984: 21, 31) or glottalized (Steiner 1977: 155-156; Dolgopolsky 1977). (Dolgopolsky maintains that all 'emphatics' in all ancient Semitic languages save Arabic were glottalized ejectives [1977: 6]). The presence of these two backed consonants creates two triads of close sounds and necessitates choosing which two of each such triad are closest to each other, hence in greater need of maximal separation. In Column IVa the choice is between the pair {/g/ and /k/} and the pair {/g/ and backed /q/}; while in Column Vb the choice is between the pair {/d/ and dentoalveolar or anterior /t/} and the pair {/d/ and backed /t/}. These decisions are not foreordained: bearing in mind that it is articulatory properties that are involved here, not acoustic ones, should we expect the presence of backedness to have been perceived as increasing an unvoiced counterpart's resemblance to the voiced sound, or leaving it unaffected? To

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sharpen the focus, should we not expect the answer to vary with the primary sounds concerned (mainly, with how far back they themselves are), and with the precise nature or degree of their secondary backedness? In the event, the answer is as follows: in IVa the Matrix maximally separates voiced from backed (that is, /g/ from /q/); while in Vb it maximally separates voiced from unbacked (that is, /d/ from /t/). By inference, backed (pharyngealized) /q/ was judged to be more like its voiced counterpart than backed (velarized or glottalized) /t/ was. In other words, pharyngealization must have been judged to have less distinctively affected the velar, /q/, than velarization or glottalization the dentoalveolar, /t/. Which of course makes independent phonological sense (see for example Lass 1984: 90-91 for some remarks seeming to favor the likelihood of such a perception).13 In any case, as we have noted, Columns IVa and Vb emulate Column Ha in each having its voiced consonant at the head and an unvoiced counterpart at the foot, so that all three, with the noted complication, obey the 'principle'.14 Column III also obeys it. This Column contains the sibilants /z/ and /s/ (another 'emphatic'), plus /y/ and /n/; and it is the two sibilants /z/ and /s/ — voiced sound at the head, unvoiced sound at the foot, as with the three Columns considered just above — that are separated by the two nonsibilants /y/ and /n/. Column IVb, containing the Velar continuants, also conforms to the principle, for its two most similar sounds, /h/ and /g/ (respectively an unvoiced spirant and its voiced counterpart, Velar [Fronzaroli 1955:17-18]) or 'post-Velar' [Segert 1984:31]), are at head and foot of the Column and are separated by the more distant Velars /h/ and /r/.15 Column I, the so-called Laryngeals, also conforms to the principle, albeit with reversal of the usual voiced/voiceless order, since Column I is headed by the voiceless member of the pair {/'/,/'/} and concludes with the voiced member. It must be confessed that, considered in isolation, Column Fs conformance could not be very significant, however, since (like Column IVa) it contains but three letters. (For the Ugaritic laryngeals, see again Fronzaroli 1955: 14^17, 37 and Segert 1984: 30.) We have now covered all but two of the Matrix's eight Columns; to these last two (lib and Va) the 'principle' is barred from applying (or can apply only vacuously) because they each contain but two letters, which therefore cannot be 'separated' at all (or are separated as much as they can be).16 In sum, then, we have this picture: of the Matrix's eight Columns, two are too meager to be subject to the principle of maximal separation; the other six must obey or disobey. All six obey.17 We can hardly avoid concluding that the principle of maximal separation organizes the contents of the Columns at least as rigorously as it organizes the Columns themselves.

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This conclusion has an interesting corollary, for it would seem to imply that the orthodox abecedarium derived by reading the Matrix horizontally (i.e., reading the Rows one by one) has a fraternal twin, derived by reading the Matrix vertically (the Columns one by one). We might call this the 'columnar abecedarium' for want of a better term. If, as is generally acknowledged, the normal abecedarium was meant for use in school (the 'tablet house' — Sjöberg [1976: 159-161] gives the Akkadian as 'bit tuppi', translating Sumerian 'edubbaa'; Driver [1976: 647] gives the 'Assyrian' form as 'bit tuppäte'), then perhaps the columnar abecedarium was intended for the same purpose. If it was, the Ras Shamra Matrix could plausibly be viewed as having been designed to aid both 'readings' by minimizing interference from the juxtaposition of similar sounds. (This hypothetical custom of reciting a matrix both horizontally and vertically might have sprung from early Canaanite scribes' experience with variable reading direction in general,18 or it might have originated in practices associated with the abacus or with some other matrix-like device.)19 If this set of interrelated hypotheses is granted some standing, the reader might nevertheless wonder how the orthodox abecedarium came to achieve preeminence over the columnar one, since the latter seems superior: it makes a handy acknowledgment of the relevant sound classes, yet still manages to separate the most similar sounds. Note also that while it is true that the Matrix halves horizontally at what I will call the 'Coogan Division' of Figure 1 (as discussed in the subsection below on new use for nothing'), it halves about as well at the corresponding vertical axis. The obvious answer would be the simplest one: namely, that the horizontal abecedarium won out because the horizontal reading direction won out in general. This is possible, because even though the horizontal scan did not triumph definitively until around 1100 (as see note 18 above), it was predominant throughout the period. Even so, the absolute victory of the Orthodox' or stichic abecedarium remains something of a mystery. (Had it been the columnar one that was passed down to us, the modern English abecedarium would presumably be as follows: Core , E, O, B, F, M, P, G, I, J,20 N, S,21 C, K, Q, H, R, D, L, T;' and then the usual Coda, 'U, V, W, X, Y, Z'.)22 I noted above that though the chances of hitting by accident on an abecedarium tightly conformable to the Ras Shamra Matrix or any matrix closely similar to the Ras Shamra Matrix were about one in 500,000 (accepting the Columnar assignments shown in Figure 1 as fixed), the probability of such an event is still not zero, so that there was left a little room to argue that the fit between abecedarium and Matrix was indeed due to chance. In this subsection I have shown that a 'principle of maximal separation' appears to have determined the order of the Matrix's

76

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columns; this argument, too, rests on the improbability that the observed order is due to chance. But I hope also to have shown that, altogether independently, the same principle shaped the order of the individual letters within each of the six Columns to which it could apply, where yet again the argument rests fundamentally on the unlikelihood that the observed order could be due to chance. The improbability that both orders could have been due to chance is the product of the improbabilities that either could have, and that product is vanishingly small. Still further buttressing the arguments from probability, the 'principle of maximal separation' has a plausible rationale tied to the hypothesis that the Matrix was used, as the abecedarium appears to have been, in the 'tablet-house', where the alphabet was taught by rhythmic recitation. In all, these considerations militate more strongly than ever against any argument from chance, thus leading afresh to the inference that the reconstruction of the Matrix is valid and that the Matrix was 'real' to the first users of the SEER abecedarium. 'Judicious insertions'

In this subsection we will consider a kind of corroboration, not available at present, that might become available on discovery of new archaeological evidence — or conceivably on reexamination of evidence already in hand. New letters may be added to an abecedarium and its associated matrix in either of two ways: they can be inserted into appropriate places in the core (hence in the matrix), or else they can be added at the end, where they may conform to the matrix or else form a coda Outside' the matrix. Obviously, the abecedarial position of a letter introduced into a nonconforming coda has little or nothing to contribute to a discussion like the present one, since such a letter simply sidesteps the issue of whether or not at the time of its placement a matrix played a vital role in the local scribal traditions. To drive this point home, Figure 4 exhibits the result of an attempt to fit the modern English alphabet into a matrix as much like the Ras Shamra Matrix as possible. The fit is poor, due in large part to the coda following T': to accommodate its six letters in the matrix of Figure 4, fully sixteen new cells must be added (two new Rows). Nothing about the structure of the Matrix repels these six new letters from taking places in the core, for they could easily have been inserted into the six original Rows of the old Matrix, in appropriate Columns, as the reader can quickly verify. Even the 'principle of maximal separation' would have been little affected by this set of insertions, if in Column Ila the letter 'V had been placed in Row 3, for example, and in Column Vb Ύ' had been

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put in Row 4. But little follows from this, since (logically speaking) all of these possibilities are equally likely: (1) those who added these letters did not have access to the Matrix, which therefore could not guide the letters' placement, necessarily relegating them to the coda; (2) the Matrix was available but for some reason was kept free from intrusion; or (3) the Matrix had in fact expired, but even so its abecedarium was kept inviolate. (Cases 2 and 3 might seem more alluring if it were noted that both Matrix and abecedarium are of independent value as mnemonic aids; see below and the next subsection.) Nor is it only the six letters of the 'English' coda (actually added over a two-thousand-year period) that fail to resolve the issue of the Matrix's lifespan. The same judgment applies to the Roman coda, source of two of these six letters (Ύ' and 'Z'); it also applies with equal force to five letters the Greeks introduced ('Υ', 'Φ', 'X', 'Ψ', and Ώ'), all of which were placed in the coda instead of being inserted more featly.23 The judgment holds even for the Ugaritians themselves, who added three new letters at some point after the inception of their script, placing them at the end of their abecedarium (Gordon 1950), despite there being ample room inside the original Matrix. (If we now expand the Ras Shamra Matrix to accommodate these letters as a coda, we see at once how poorly they fit, since two whole new Rows must be added [i.e., sixteen new cells] just to accept them. Compare this egregious laxity with the relative tightness characteristic of the original Matrix.) Again, however, the strongest inference one can draw is that by the time the Ugaritians added these three letters they had either abandoned the Ras Shamra Matrix — surely the crown, to our present knowledge, of ancient Western linguistic scholarship — or else, for reasons at which we can only guess, they had decided to ignore it or preserve it inviolate.24 It would be pleasant to turn from this ambiguous expansion to one in which the Ugaritians unequivocally acknowledged their Matrix by inserting a new letter deep in its interior, placing it precisely where the right empty cell awaited it in the proper Column. But no such case is to hand. As an example of what such an insertion could contribute to the argument, however, we could briefly consider the sixteenth Ugaritic letter, /d/ (Column lib, Row 4), which has sometimes been supposed to have been a late addition, though nowadays the consensus seems to be running the other way.25 It will be noted from Figure 1 that had this letter indeed been inserted, it could scarcely have been put in a better spot, and so would have constituted a most persuasive instance in which the introduction of a new symbol could reasonably be taken as lending support to the contention that the Matrix was 'real' to at least one Ugaritian scribe. Ironically, a reason occasionally given for rejecting the notion that /d/ was added late is precisely its placement deep in the abecedarium's interior, a

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position taken to be 'strana' by Fronzaroli, for example (1955: 24), or even 'haphazard' (Gordon 1950: 375), obviously on the (tacit) assumption that since the letter sequence itself doesn't make sense, only additions made to its tail-end are rational. (A better reason for rejecting the insertion thesis is based on the judgment that /d/ was part of the original 27-consonant phonological system of Ugaritic, and also of ProtoCanaanite; as such, it had as good a reason to be represented in the Ugaritic alphabet, from its origin, as did any of the other original 26 consonants — Gordon 1950: 375; Naveh 1982: 30-31). In sum, then, the case of/d/ is worth raising here only because it nicely illustrates the sort of 'insertion' argument that future scholarship or excavation could conceivably make available; and, perhaps, because it also indicates an area where greater caution will be called for in arguing against late insertions. A letter placement that seems 'haphazard' in the abecedarium considered in isolation may look quite otherwise in light of the Matrix. In fact, future evidence for late insertions in any of the ancient SEER abecedaria — the weirder the better — should attract interest if for this reason alone. Before leaving this topic of possible Ugaritic insertions we ought to put it into chronological perspective. The life of the Ugaritic alphabet was short even for the tumultuous times in which it flourished: it originated a little before the reign of Niqmad II around the middle of the fourteenth century, and survived for only about 150 years at most (Millard 1979: 613-614). (Niqmad or Niqmaddu II, a contemporary of Amenophis IV or 'Akhnaton', is sometimes, as by Millard, assigned the regnal number ΊΙΓ. For the period, see Gordon 1966: 144-149; for a list of Ugaritic Kings, see Del Olmo Lete 1986: 86. Driver states that the Ugaritic script 'scarcely lasted a generation' [1976: 152], in which case the scribes of those days must have been enviably long-lived.) It can never have been the case that more than a small percentage of the populace knew the alphabet (Horwitz 1979) or its associated abecedarium, much less its reconstructed Matrix. It is even possible that the Matrix was considered hermetic doctrine in some sense, or at least a trade secret, and so was not lightly conveyed to those outside the scribal guild (for a sense of scribal society see Horwitz 1979). The point here is that if the Matrix was not part of what was borrowed when a people borrowed the SEER script, then we will look in vain for 'judicious insertions', for none can exist save by accident. Turning now from the coda to the core, there have occurred over the years a few 'injudicious insertions' into Canaanite-descended abecedaria which (unlike the coda-additions discussed earlier) persuasively indicate that by the time of their introduction the Matrix was no longer at the center of scribal practice, at least in the line of descent concerned. Since it conforms to the Matrix only by straining it — as a glance at Figure 4 will

80 W. C. Watt verify, it really belongs in Column V — the SEER abecedarium's late medieval T illustrates well this sort of insertion.26 In fact, however, the Matrix must have begun dying out within the SEER line of descent from about 1200 B.C. on, for it was about then that the letter order'... L, M, N, P, O...' began to crop up in scattered Proto-Canaanite and other Semitic abecedarial texts (Demsky 1977: 18; Cross 1980: 13). Whether it started as a conscious alteration or as a mere lapse (perhaps after writing had escaped from the scribal guild into the hands of others less well-schooled), this calamitous reversal (it requires the addition of a seventh Row) could scarcely have happened had the Matrix still been counted as among the hallmarks of literacy. Inevitably, some errors appear momentarily to fall on the other .side, seeming for a moment to confirm the Matrix's presence. For instance, the substitution of'M' for 'F' on the clzbet Sartah ostracon (Cross 1980: 8-13) looks like the sort of error a careless or inexperienced person might make if inscribing the abecedarium while glancing at the Matrix, since in Column Ha of the Matrix (but not in any other sense) T' and 'M' are neighbors.27 But no such conclusion is warranted: rather, the shard in question also contains an interchanged Ό' and T' of the sort that was used just above to argue that from the time such errors started to appear the Matrix must already have been moribund. Other examples of wholesale reorderings (see note 5) only make the same point all over again. Summing up, we have considered a kind of evidence — 'judicious' and 'injudicious' insertions and reorderings — which might, respectively, show that at the time of their occurrence the Matrix did or did not exist as a respected scribal tradition. We have done this partly in order to discuss a spurious 'judicious insertion', the case of Ugaritic /d/, and to provide a frame for possible future inquiry. Secondarily, however, we have taken the occasion to observe that the preponderance of evidence seems to indicate that the likelihood of finding a 'judicious insertion' in any but an extremely early text is small, owing to the Matrix's having been so shortlived. (The same comment holds for 'judicious reorderings'.) It may not even have lasted till the end of the Ugaritic script. But in any case the sporadic occurrence of the 'injudicious' reversal of Ό' and 'P' after about 1200 B.C. presumably provides an approximate terminus post quern to the Matrix's survival as an essential part of scribal tradition. Of course, the fact that the Matrix appears not to have influenced abecedarial developments subsequent to the creation of the original abecedarial order could also be taken as indicating that the Matrix never existed at all. The evidence presented by Watt (1987), in the subsection just above, and in the following subsection, speaks strongly to the contrary; but the reader will have to make his own judgment.

The Ras Shamra Matrix

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A new use for nothing2* Even the reader who accepts the foregoing case may entertain a residual doubt about the true nature of the Ras Shamra Matrix, for such an array, with its empty cells so essential to the right abecedarial reading, may strike him as quite beyond the needs or capacities of a secondary Levantine nation of about 1400 B.C. (a century or so before Moses, to give some perspective). After all, any attempt to rationalize the Matrix must confront the fact that, aside from the putative necessity of serving as the determiner of the Ugaritic abecedarium (and the desirability of separating similar sounds), only the Columns have so far been argued to have a plausible reason for being, and they would have precisely the same reason for being (and would be far more compact) if they had no empty cells. For the reader's convenience I give a Ras Shamra Matrix shorn of its empty cells as Figure 5. At first glance nothing has been lost. Even the 'principle of maximal separation' operates as well in abecedaria drawn from this 'packed' matrix as in one drawn from the normal version of the Matrix given as Figure 1, because the sounds needing to be separated are as separate in the one as in the other: the empty cells of the 'normal' Matrix, since they were presumably not pronounced in any way, contributed nothing to the distance by which sounds were separated during viva voce recitation. Which brings us to the obvious question: is there any justification at all for the empty cells other than the retrospective one of determining the Ugaritic abecedarial order? The answer is 'Yes', but to see why the reader must be willing to take into consideration a new aspect of the ancient uses of alphabets. To set the stage, it is to be noted that it was apparently an occasional practice in writing at least two of the old Semitic abecedaria (Canaanite and Ugaritic) to divide them at their midpoint into two sub-lists (Demsky 1977: 19-20). Canaanite, with its 22 letters, was divided in such cases after its eleventh letter, 'K\ Similarly, Ugaritic, with its 27 letters (ignoring the coda), was divided after its fourteenth letter, 'L' (Coogan 1974: 61), thus breaking into a fourteen-letter 'half followed by a 'half of thirteen letters. (Hereafter for expository ease we will take it as axiomatic that a 27-letter abecedarium is self-evidently halved after the fourteenth letter.) Whatever this occasional halving of the alphabet may have reflected — we will look presently at a plausible explanation — it probably antedated the Ugandans, since the post-Ugaritian Canaanites, who followed the practice, presumably inherited all of their abecedarial practices from preUgaritic speakers and writers of Proto-Canaanite.29 On our earlier reasoning the abecedarium was secondary to (in fact a mere byproduct of) the Ras Shamra Matrix, which we have conjectured was very

82

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probably a pedagogical tool in its own right. But if Matrix and abecedarium were used in conjunction as teaching aids, and if for some teaching purposes the abecedarium was viewed as being broken into halves, the Matrix must have been meant to be similarly viewed. Clearly, though, any conjoined use of these two halved instructional aids would have been vexatious unless they broke in the same way — that is, unless the Matrix also broke neatly into equal parts, and in such a way that its halves corresponded to those of the abecedarium. This happy result could have been achieved only if the abecedarium was distributed into the Matrix in such a way that its first half ('A' through 'L') fell exactly into the Matrix's first half (Rows 1-3) and its second half ('M' through T') into the Matrix's second half (Rows 4-6). Matrix and abecedarium must have had the same midpoint. What's more, if the Matrix was to break neatly into two submatrices which like the Matrix itself were of rectangular form, then for best results the Matrix's third line should have ended exactly where the abecedarium's first half ended; or to put it the other way around, the abecedarium's fourteenth letter should have fallen into the Matrix's twenty-fourth cell, the last cell of the third line. But the abecedarium's fourteenth letter, 'L', does fall into the Matrix's twenty-fourth cell. Taken in isolation this is not terribly significant, since it is about what one should expect from a random distribution of empty cells in a space like the Matrix: roughly half of them should fall by sheer accident into the Matrix's first half, and the other half into the second half. But this misses the point: why distribute empty cells at all? We have already seen how the chief properties of the original Matrix are fully preserved in the 'packed' matrix of Figure 5; granting the reality of the Matrix, the sole reason for its having empty cells appears to be that only when so equipped can the Matrix divide evenly into equal and rectangular submatrices — i.e., to halve at what we could call the 'Coogan Division'.30 This, and a related reason: on closer examination, the distribution of empty cells does not seem quite so random as on first glance. As the reader can see for himself in Figure 1, the half-matrices into which the Matrix splits at the Coogan Division are not only on a par in number of letters contained; they are also alike in pattern, each having five letters in its first Row, five in its secondhand the remainder (four or three) in its third. This distribution is hardly inevitable. With the same sounds and with the same classifications (expressed as Columns), the six rows of the Matrix could just as easily, under a different distribution of empty cells, have for example contained in order eight, two, four, three, eight, and two letters. Such a matrix would still break nicely at the Coogan Division into two rectangular submatrices; but those submatrices would no longer have the near-identity of Row-patterning that characterizes the Matrix itself. In fact, almost any

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redistribution of the Matrix's empty cells, whatever other properties it preserved, would destroy this apparently rigorous patterning, which by inference is therefore not easily ascribed to chance. Since (whatever its significance) it requires the most careful disposition of elements, it would seem on the contrary to testify to the thought that went into the creation of the Matrix, therefore to the Matrix's 'reality' to the scribes of its time. Moreover, on closer examination a possible significance of this Rowpatterning leaps to the eye. Speaking the letters aloud, as their letternames [e.g., °alp, bet, gaml...', we notice that the Rows of the Matrix in their configuration '5,5,4; 5,5,3' have the form of a poem, whose two strophes start with identical distichs of five letter-names per line and conclude with a shorter refrain. Since the uses of rhythm must have been at least as well known to the ancients as they are today (Rubin 1977), it seems quite reasonable to suppose that this aspect of the Matrix's form was imposed by its designers to serve as a mnemonic aid, just as the crude tetrameter of the modern one does ('AECOE¥G;HIJKLMNO P...').31 Finally, it seems reasonable to think that the occasional 'halvings' of the alphabet found in ancient Semitic inscriptions — otherwise unexplained — are reflections of precisely this abecedarial mnemonic. Parenthetically, this view of the function of the empty cells forces restatement of the relationship between the Matrix and the abecedarium. In most cases to change the distribution of the empty cells is to change the abecedarium and vice versa. Thus, given how closely the Matrix was apparently designed to halve when the abecedarium halves, and to do so by dividing into two identically-patterned submatrices, it cannot be that the Matrix came first and the abecedarium was merely its derivate; rather, the two must have been developed pari passu. All of this is not equivalent to claiming that the observed distribution of empty cells in the Ras Shamra Matrix could not be the result of accident: no such demonstration, at least in the robust sense one could wish, is possible. However, it is equivalent to saying that this distribution does seem to have a rationale that sorts very well with what else is known about abecedarial teaching practices of the time, and that it is one of the comparatively few distributions that answers this purpose by being neatly divisible into two submatrices which echo the abecedarium's split at the midpoint while at the same time rather prettily echoing each other. The argument from letter shapes Like the argument in subsection 'Judicious insertions' above, any brief to be made from a study of the Ras Shamra Matrix's letter shapes is one

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whose potential lies in the future, if anywhere; in fact, it is worth raising here at all only because the reader alerted to the issue may see something that I have missed. The challenge is easily stated: to find some pattern in the shapes of the Ugaritic letters that would show that whoever created them had the Matrix in mind at the time. Certainly it would not be surprising could such a pattern be discerned. Recall (as from Figure 3) that the Ugaritic letters are basically cuneiformizations of their ProtoCanaanite forebears (here I follow various writers, including Stieglitz [1971], though he cannot be said to have proven his case conclusively). On the assumption that the Ugaritians inherited both abecedarium and Matrix from prior Proto-Canaanite tradition, but cuneiformized the inherited letter shapes to suit their custom of writing in clay, the Ugaritian scribe who first devised these letters should in fact have been familiar with the Matrix — in the form it came to him it would have contained not Ugaritic letters, of course, but Proto-Canaanite ones — and so might have been cuneiformizing those letters 'where they stood', so to speak: that is, where they stood in the Matrix. He might well be expected, when cuneiformizing letters adjacent to each other in Column Vb, for example, to be affected sometimes by that very adjacency, advertently or inadvertently making the letter forms more alike than they would otherwise have been.32 And if he had done so, could we not detect it? Yet no pattern emerges: or rather, any that does prove evanescent. The strongest sign of a pictorial pattern I have so far gleaned is one found in both Columns Ha and Vb, two major Columns with much in common otherwise. That is, the cuneiform shapes of 'B' and 'D' do seem to be related, in somewhat the same way as linear Έ' and 'D' are; to clinch the comparison, the cuneiformizations of the unvoiced counterparts T' and T' appear to be related in somewhat the same way — see the figures in Dietrich and Loretz's Table 1 (1986: 5). Furthermore, Column IVa, the third class of stops, displays a similar sort of connection to a degree, though the Winkelhaken (angle wedge) in the sign for /q/ introduces an element of doubt. To take another weak instance, Column III might also seem to betray a pattern of some sort, opening and closing as it does with a two-wedge letter and exhibiting two three-wedge letters in the middle (thus nicely mirroring its' 'maximally separated' phonological structure); but this pattern, even though it does to some degree imitate the one found in Ha and Vb, is less than compelling. Yet again, the letter forms of Column lib seem to have a little more in common than either chance or their putative Proto-Canaanite models would dictate. As against these faint positive indications, however, the forms of Column I — admittedly involving another Winkelhaken in the case of Ό' — seem to defeat the expection of Matrix-derived patterning altogether, at least to my eye.

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To make a long story short, while there are certain glimmerings of Matrix-derived patterning here and there among the Ugaritic letter forms, these are scarcely enough to offer much corroboration of the Matrix's historicity.33 With this negative comment the inquiry may be put aside for the time being. Summary thus far The preceding discussion has further supported the thesis, first advanced by Watt (1987), that the letter order of the SEER abecedarian derives from the Ras Shamra Matrix, and has shown how this Matrix appears to embody elements of an ancient phonological understanding and its associated scribal traditions. The earlier paper was devoted to showing that the chances of the Ugaritic abecedarium's having arrived by accident at a form that was so neatly accommodated by the Matrix were, in effect, nil. Here I have extended this sort of argument by showing how the Matrix discloses in much more subtle ways — in its detail of phonological understanding and in its correspondence with what else is known about Ugaritic abecedarial practices — that it was indeed the product of much thought in its own day. Its historicity having been established beyond serious doubt, the Matrix may henceforward make its own small contribution to historical reconstruction. Prospect

In keeping with the suggestion immediately preceding, I should like to close by briefly generalizing the question of what the Matrix might have to tell us about the state of phonological studies in the remote past. First of all, as we have already noticed, the phonological categories of the Matrix are conspicuously articulatory in character. Not only do the eight Columns consist of sounds whose articulatory classifications make sense, but they consist of sets for which categorization in terms of conventional distinctive features, so long as their basis is fundamentally acoustic, would be scattered and awkward. It should be an attribute of any attempt to interpret the Columns of the Matrix that those Columns' sound classes are classes indeed, each a 'natural' set exhibiting enough homogeneity for its defining phonological attributes to hold for all of its members. Interpreted articulatorily, the Columns do this quite well, as witness the appropriateness of the labels identifying their places of articulation within the vocal tract (a lingual feature such as 'Coronal',

The Ras Shamra Matrix

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which is highly correlated with location in the vocal tract, would also be serviceable). In contrast, the more purely acoustic a phonological feature is (or the subtler the articulatory distinction at issue), the less satisfactorily that feature labels the Matrix's columns. Taking the feature Obstruent', for example, Columns I, lib, IVa, and Va are all [ + OBSTR], and Column IV is [ — OBSTR]; but Columns Ila, III, and Vb mix the two and so are neither. The acoustic feature 'Strident' fares no better: while Columns lib and Va are both [ + STRID] and I, Ila. IVa, and IVb are [ —STRID], Columns III and Vb are mixtures and so belong to neither category. This is not to say that the Columns of the Matrix could not be described in terms of distinctive features (that would be absurd), but it is to say that any such features must apparently have the somewhat antique air of characterizing sounds by almost exclusive reference to approximate place of articulation, with subsidiary reference (in the subcolumns 'a' and 'b') to articulatory manner. Even the secondary feature 'Backjed]', used above to describe intra-Column similarities having to do with /q/ and /t/, is obviously articulatory in nature. That the Matrix was shaped by criteria of this sort is not surprising — after all, the linguistic study of phonology was itself largely shaped by such criteria before the Jakobsonian revolution, and for many linguists (e.g., Lass 1984) is so shaped again today, albeit in a 'featural' recension — but being able to confirm that such was indeed the case does serve to fill a gap in our knowledge of the earliest linguistic thought. Secondly, the Matrix, as was just suggested, offers insight into the state of linguistic thought at a time about a millennium before Pänini. Granting its historicity, the Matrix shows that long before Pänini or his predecessors among the Sanskrit grammarians, the sounds of a language had been subjected in the West to something approaching a phonological analysis. Accepted notions of the chronology of linguistic development must now be revised. Pänini's grammar-oriented abecedarium for Sanskrit, the so-called 'sivasutra1, can be set down in quasi-matricial or 'tabular' form (Staal 1962: 3), as can also the canonical Sanskrit abecedarium (Allen 1953: 20); but these two 'tables' are very different in character and purpose, and only one of them compares favorably as a matrix with the much earlier Ras Shamra Matrix. This is the ordinary Sanskrit abecedarium, the varnasamamnaya, a list of letters which plainly has the same goal as the Ugaritic abecedarium — namely, embodying a classification of the letters' sounds. It is therefore not astonishing from the present point of view that the varna-samamnaya can be organized quite naturally as a matrix, precisely as Allen has done.33 Pänini's sivasutra, on the other hand, though apparently founded on the same sound classification, was

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obviously created to serve the very different goal of chaining into a single list of maximum economy all of the subsets of sounds that play a role in the grammar of Sanskrit.35 This granted, it should come as no surprise that the sivasutra does not fall felicitously into matrix form (or that one sound, /h/, occurs twice). For comparison's sake, matrices for the varna-samamnaya and the sivasutra are given as Figures 6a and 6b. It may reasonably be asked whether there are enough similarities between the Ras Shamra Matrix and the varna-samamnaya matrix of Figure 6a, or between the Ras Shamra Matrix and the sivasutra matrix of Figure 6b, to warrant thinking in either case that despite the centuries that must have elapsed between the death of the first and the birth of the second, the elder influenced the younger. Briefly, the answer is 'No'. The similarities found in these matrices — or, setting the matrices to one side for the moment, in these letter lists — seem to be of the sort best attributed to coincidence or to the fact that similar goals were in view and similar human perceptions were at work. Thus, for example, the fact that all three letter lists seem to organize their corresponding sounds in accordance with articulatory (and not acoustic) criteria need betoken no historical connection among them, since as we have already noted this is just what we might expect of such an analysis at this state of linguistic understanding (and in the absence, we might recall again, of spectrograms or any other means of recording the physical dimensions of speech). That all three are basically 'normal' (stichic) and not 'columnar' abecedaria in relation to their putative matrices does not seem, by itself, very telling. (The sivasutra abecedarium however does have a 'columnar' relationship to the first nine rows of its matrix.) That all three analyses arrive at much the same articulatory classes means no more. That place of articulation was taken in all three as primary and manner as secondary was perhaps not a foregone conclusion; neither does it strike one as capricious.36 The only point of similarity that might seem to be more than coincidence is that both the sivasutra and the Ras Shamra abecedaria list most of their labials, velars, and dentals in that order. But the sivasutra sequences its sounds in strict obedience to morphophonemic considerations; since there are after all only six possible orderings for these three categories, the coincidence is probably only that.37 Much more striking than these few points of similarity are the points of difference. The Ras Shamra Matrix adroitly distributes its empty cells so as to serve the Semitic habit of dealing with the abecedarium in halves; neither of the two Sanskrit letter orders or constructed matrices shows the least sign of such a concern. Ancillary to the preceding point, in the Ras Shamra Matrix (whether divided horizontally or vertically) the two halves are identically patterned, taking into consideration the fact that

The Ras Shamra Matrix

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one 'half contains one letter fewer; again, no such patterning is found in the Sanskrit counterparts. The Ugaritic abecedarium fits the Ras Shamra Matrix naturally, economically, inevitably, while the sivasutra fits its matrix in quite another fashion, so much so that to maintain a consistent density of empty cells the order of the velar and palatal subcolumns must be reversed in the latter part of the matrix (row 14 on). In fact, as is plain, the sivasutra's adherence to strictly grammatical criteria renders it but an awkward candidate for any sort of purely phonological matrix, though two of its included submatrices (rows 10-13 and rows 14-18) are compact enough, taken separately. Above all, the Ras Shamra Matrix is organized in conformance with the 'principle of maximal separation', which governs both the order of Columns and the order of the Columns' contents; in contrast the sivasutra was designed with the sole aim of serving Pänini's morphophonemic statements, while the varna-samamnaya matrix orders its columns in strict linear sequence from the back of the mouth to the front, and the contents of those columns on a 'principle of minimal separation' — i.e., with like sounds in juxtaposition. These comparisons urge the following inferences: (1) the sivasutra letter/sound order did not uniformly derive from a matrix, since as a whole it can be crammed into matrix form only by force; (2) the varna-samamnaya letter order probably did derive from a matrix; but (3) that matrix is very different from the Ras Shamra Matrix, as well as being less intricate and of narrower utility, so that (4) it was therefore in all probability an independent invention, except as it may have benefited, just possibly, from 'stimulus diffusion'.38 So much for the notion that the Ras Shamra Matrix might, however implausibly, have survived on the banks of the Indus long after it had expired in its homeland. Conclusion

On balance, the body of evidence presented in Watt (1987) and in the foregoing argument indicates that the Ras Shamra Matrix was invented prior to 1400 B.C.; that it was ingeniously designed to serve as an instructional tool in the 'tablet house'; that it registered in compact (and even poetic) form a body of phonological knowledge belonging to a long-lost ancient Semitic linguistic tradition (thus being in all probability the tip of an iceberg); that it forever determined the order of the SEER abecedarium; and that it shortly thereafter fell into disuse and oblivion.

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Notes 1. It is a pleasure to acknowledge the comments of earlier readers of this paper. I also thank UCLA's University Research Library, without whose Semitics collection this study could hardly have begun. 2. By the phrase 'the [Ras Shamra] Matrix or any similar matrix', or the like, I mean to capture the set of all matrices having the Ras Shamra Matrix's eight phonologically defined Columns, in any order, and its six Rows, with the same letters (representing the same sounds) in the same Columns, those letters however to be in any order. (For a discussion of the two or three letters whose Columnar assignments might be controversial, see notes 12-16.) As will be inferrable from what follows, this notion of 'similar matrix' is actually too lenient, since it appears that in fact the arrangement of the letters (i.e., sounds) within the Columns is much more severely constrained; and there is good evidence that the order of the Columns is more constrained also. The odds against the abecedarium's fitting by chance a matrix that is 'similar' to the Ras Shamra Matrix in this narrower and more apposite sense are correspondingly greater. 3. As one example of such an artifact, in the 1987 paper just referenced I held that the Byblos Matrix, a later and condensed version of the Ras Shamra Matrix, was even less likely to have come about by chance; on the usual reasoning, based on closeness of fit between letter order and matrix, this was so. But in this case the observed additional closeness of fit was owing to phonological changes ('mergers') which permitted the alphabet to shrink by five letters (Gordon 1950, and see below). I hasten to add that there is no reason to suppose that the 27-letter alphabet of the Ras Shamra Matrix had shrunk from some prior 32-letter script. This is perhaps the place to mention that for the author of the cabalistic work Sefer Yetfrah (the 'Book of Creation', from the sixth century or earlier), the 22-letter Hebrew abecedarium was taken in its entirety to constitute One mystical name' fissionable into the letter combinations by or through which the universe and everything in it was created (Scholem 1978: 25). The ideas of the Sefer Yezirah were of course ancestral to the notion, current in the Middle Ages, that the proper recitation of the proper letter combinations would result in bringing the Golem to life (Scholem 1978: 26, 351-355), a concept which alas works best in fiction, doubtless owing to the fact that in the Hebrew alphabet five of the original letters are missing. 4. This is the standard account, for which see for example Jeffery 1961: 2, 235-238. Like some other writers, Jeffery expresses doubt that the Etruscans owed their alphabet solely to the Euboean settlers at Pithekoussai (now Ischia) and Kyme (Rome Cumae); but these misgivings have to do with the sources of one or two letters only, it seems. The standard account (and Greek legend) has the Greeks getting their alphabet from a people called the Phoenicians, but the term was not precise for the Greeks, and its modern use may mislead. For example, it has sometimes been argued that the Greeks got all or part of their script not from the Phoenicians but from the Aramaeans, their Semitic neighbors to the east (e.g., Isserlin 1983; Driver [1976: 266] dates this notion from 1883), and in particular that the Greeks may have borrowed from the Aramaeans the notion that a writing system ought to represent vowels as well as consonants (Driver 1976: 266-267, urging however the broader claim that the Aramaeans were the Greeks' basic source). On this view in speaking of the Greeks' alphabetic donors the term 'Phoenicians' were at the very least best regarded as a shorthand expression for 'Northern' or 'Western' or 'Northwestern' Semites — these are among the several terms that have been put into use by one writer or another, as see note 32, below — or more simply, 'Levantine' Semites.

The Ras Shamra Matrix 93 5. The best known cases in which one people has adopted another's alphabet but at or after the point of adoption reordered the letter list are probably those of the Arabic and runic abecedaria (cf. respectively Naveh 1982: 162 and Diringer 1968: 404; Page 1987: 8-9, 20) and the Ethiopic syllabarium (Driver 1976: 138; Naveh 1982: 51), to which list the Irish ogham abecedarium may be added, with its fantastic reordering dependent on tree names and Old Irish wood-poaching fines (Pedersen 1931: 233). 6. A photograph (shortly after its excavation) of the clay tablet containing the first Ugaritic abecedarium to be so identified is to be found in Gordon 1950. Though it has no direct bearing on any part of the present argument, it should be noted that the 'Ugaritic' alphabet was not restricted to the Ugaritic nation, nor even to the Ugaritic language (Greenstein 1976). A notion of the location and extent of the ancient kingdom whose capital was Ugarit may be gained from consulting the map provided by Astour (1981: 12). Its area was at a maximum roughly 160 χ 140 km, rather smaller than Rhode Island. 7. The approximate date of Phoenician-Greek transmission had been widely accepted for many years when in 1973 Joseph Naveh published what is surely one of the most famous articles in the modern study of writing (Naveh 1973). There and in a subsequent book (1982) he asserted that the Greeks had borrowed the alphabet much earlier than was thought, at around 1100 B.C. (on which hypothesis the 'Dark Age' during which the mainland Greeks were illiterate was a 'Dark Century' at most. If indeed it ever happened, since if Naveh is correct the mainland Greek use of the Mycenaean syllabary ['Linear B'] — at least c.1425-1100 B.C. [Jefiery 1961: 12] — might have passed directly into their use of the adapted Phoenician alphabet). After some initial resistance, Naveh's theory has made considerable headway (as see for example Cross 1980, Isserlin 1983); more recently Bernal has made a still more radical proposal to the effect that the 'Phoenician or Levantine alphabet was transmitted westward [i.e., to the Greeks and others] around the middle of the second millennium B.C.' (1987: 16). His argument is based mainly on the wealth of early Semitic inscriptions found in the Mediterranean and on putative resemblances between certain of the earliest Greek letters and their Semitic counterparts from prior (but not subsequent) to about 1400 B.C. Since no record so far discovered attests to the Greeks' using a SEER alphabet at so early a time (while there are ample records of their having written in the Mycenean syllabary), Bernal is obliged to reject out of hand the traditional argument ex silentio (1987: 10), and to espouse the notion that for some 700 years the Greeks wrote in a SEER alphabet but left no sign of their having done so. Implication: they had one writing system for imperishable materials, another for perishable. Apart from their broader interest, the date and manner of transmission have no direct bearing on the present subject. For a general discussion of manner of transmission, see McCarthy 1985: 17-21, 69-79, 153-169. 8. The first Ugaritic abecedarium so identified was discovered in 1948. Discussion of the relations between Ugaritic and other Semitic alphabets, both earlier and later, is to be found for example in Gordon 1950; Cross 1954; Stieglitz 1971; Driver 1976: 148-152, 252; Naveh 1982: 23-31; Segert 1984: 24, 25, and Dietrich and Loretz 1986. 9. That the pre-Ugaritic Canaanites had no abecedarium at all seems improbable. Unlike the Egyptians' writing system, which consisted of a set of hieroglyphics augmented by a set of two- and three-consonant signs plus a 'true alphabet' of basically oneconsonant signs, the Canaanites' script consisted of an alphabet alone (indeed, this was their major contribution to the development of writing). Given their exclusive reliance

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on an alphabet, and the pattern of alphabetic transmission ever since, it seems probable that they would have perceived the advantage of ordering their alphabetic symbols into an abecedarium, for ease of transmission or whatever; thus, on the present argument, it is probable that it was they who first ordered the alphabet by organizing it via the Matrix. Incidentally, characterizing a 'true alphabet' as consisting exclusively of oneconsonant (and one-vowel) signs is a trifle misleading, since many 'alphabets' (including the ancient Egyptian) contain letters like English 'X', Ά', and/or 'U', which in many or most of their uses represent, respectively, a consonant cluster (/ks/ or /gz/), a diphthong (/ei/), and a syllable (/yu/ or /yuw/, depending on transcription). While we are on the subject of partial transmission, the history of writing systems offers, besides cases in which one people borrowed another's alphabet but not their abecedarium (note 5, above), at least one case (that of the Etruscans) where a people retained a borrowed abecedarium but instead of also retaining the inherited letter names ('alpha, beta, gamma...') substituted new ones. (Cross and Lambdin's apparent notion [1960: 22] that the letter order and the set of letter names necessarily go hand in hand cannot be supported.) This odd event gains added interest from the fact that it is these Etruscan names that have come down to the present; in large part they are the present-day English names, and they preserve even now hidden significata. For example, the names 'kay' and 'queue' (instead of 'kee' and 'qee' as would be expected from the general model ['bee', 'cee', 'dee'...]) encode the fact that in Etruscan 'K' and 'Q' were used only before Ά' and 'U/O' respectively (Ullman 1969 [1932]: 35, Driver 1976: 256), a restriction still largely maintained for 'Q'. And for a second example, all of the core consonant names beginning with a vowel — 'efF, 'el', 'em', 'en', 'ar', and 'ess' — represent continuants, sounds that can constitute syllables in their own right, which in Etruscan spelling, in certain environments, they did (Driver 1976: 256, Diringer 1968:420; Sampson gives a slightly different account [1985: 109].) An example is the Etruscan word 'cuclnial' (as in Banti 1973: 195). Modern Czech spelling follows a similar scheme, in part. But in English it is only the letters' names that preserve the memory of the mixed alphabet/syllabary innovated by the Etruscans, and not ('Q' aside) their use in spelling (with a few exceptions: 'bottle', which minus the decorative *e' is spelled Etruscan-style; but cf. 'hovel', Oven', Over', [not 'hovle', Ovne', Ovre']). 10. In fact, for reasons readily apparent to any reader who will glance again at the Ugaritic letters of Figure 1, it could be argued that the forms of the later linear alphabets could not have been derived from the cuneiform letter shapes, since too much design information had been lost in the process of cuneiformization. This thesis could perhaps be proven more rigorously, for instance by invoking formal design analysis of the kind sketched by Watt (1988). 11. For Akkadian as the local lingua franca, see also Schaeffer (1939) and Naveh (1982: 27-28). For a discussion of the Akkadian syllabary in relation to the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet, see Driver (1976: 103-104); for its possible relation to the SEER abecedarium, see again Driver (1976: 180-181). Driver observes (1976: 180-181, quoting Zimmern 1896) that the Akkadian syllabarium and the Ugaritic abecedarium share part of at least two sub-sequences (Ά, ... B,D' and 'Μ,Ν,Ο,Ρ, ... R'), but he concludes that the coincidence is only that. It may be noted that the idea of imposing a matrix on the sounds of one's language, or rather on the letters used to attempt to represent those sounds, might be expected to have originated with the users of a syllabary, since the symbols of a syllabary arrange themselves into a phonological matrix almost of their own accord. In this light it is all the more remarkable that the earliest phonological matrix appears to have been abecedarial.

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12. There is a good deal of variation in how the sounds here inscribed in Column I have been named, and even categorized. As to names, Driver for instance calls the first two of these sounds 'glottals' and the last a 'pharyngear(1976: 178-179); Fronzaroli also calls the last a 'pharyngeal', but terms the first a 'laryngeaF (1955: 14-17); Naveh agrees (1928: 27); Segert calls the first two 'glottals' and the third a 'pharyngeaF, but subsets all three under the cover term 'laryngeals' (1984: 30); and so on. Van den Branden, describing Phoenician, also calls all three 'laryngeals' (1969: 3-6). For simplicity's sake I have followed Segert's and Van den Branden's example. The terms 'laryngeaF, 'pharyngeal', 'glottal', and even 'velar', though far from synonymous, do after all refer to the far back of the vocal tract; given the early date of these phonological proprioceptions, not to mention the fact that the pronunciation of these Ugaritic sounds is not precisely known, some variation in classification is understandable. (Owing to the nature of the Ras Shamra Matrix's sound classifications and to its evident articulatory bias I have thought it best to couch the Matrix and related discussion in traditional articulatory terms, except where noted to the contrary.) But in any case the basic categorization of the Column I sounds as being articulated in the 'Extreme Back' of the vocal tract — the only issue bearing directly on the structure, coherence, or validity of the Matrix — is not in question. To this should be added that a fourth sound, /h/, has generally been classified with the three sounds of Column I, whether as a fellow 'laryngeaF (Harris 1936: 20, Speiser 1964: 43, Van den Branden 1969: 3-6, Segert 1984: 30) or as a fellow 'pharyngeaF (Driver 1976: 178-179). On the evidence, /h/ was 'laryngeaF and was distinct from velar /Jj/ in Ugaritic (Speiser 1964: 45-46), but was in the course of merging with /h/ in Canaanite and Aramaic (Speiser 1964: 44), and in fact was already written as velar /h/ in some texts written in a variant of the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet (Hillers 1964:45-46), perhaps reflecting the process just cited. In a Babylonian textbook listing Akkadian equivalents for the Semitic letter names, and in some other Akkadian texts (Speiser 1964: 44), /h/ was transcribed as (velar) /k/ (Cross and Lambdin 1960: 25-26), an event which Speiser has explained as probably springing from a scribal desire (in the linguistic situation just described) to make sure that /ft/ was distinguished from its rival /h/ and understood as a laryngeal by representing it as /k/, thus denoting a group of sounds containing (in /g/) a laryngealized sound (1964: 46). Certainly, whatever the reason for this curious pattern of transcriptions, /h/ and /h/ must by some speakers in polyglot Ugarit have been easily confused at the time in question. It seems possible that the placement of /h/ in a Matrix position co-classifying it with the velars — and next to /ft/ in any Columnar recital of the letters, where perhaps the differences between the two sounds could be contrasted — may have had the same motivation as underlay the transcriptions just noted. This possible explanation does admittedly go directly counter to the argument used elsewhere in this study, to the effect that the closer two letters are in sound the more likely they are to be separated; but the pair {/fr/,/k/} seems on robust evidence to have been considered a special case by the scribes of the period, so perhaps we are after all justified in treating /h/ as a very special case. In any event, taking into account the articulatory proximity of all such sounds to each other, the unavailability of the sort of phonetic detail that would clarify their differences, the resultant taxonomic ambiguities, and the other facts just mentioned, I have boldly put /h/ where the Matrix best accepts it, resulting in its therefore being classified together with unvoiced velar spirant /h/, voiced velar spirant /g/ (Fronzaroli 1955: 17-19), and velar /r/. (For more on /r/, see note 15 below.) As a last nomenclatural point it should be noted that the class composed of /g/, /k/, and /q/, here called velars, Fronzaroli calls 'dorsal palatals' (1955: 19).

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13. Perhaps we might hazard the guess that a linguistically inclined person trying in 1400 B.C. or so to judge the relative articulatory proximity of voicedness and pharyngealization might have palpated his throat while voicing and pharyngealizing. Or maybe not: for an experiment in which modern children made comparably naive articulatory judgments, apparently without recourse to palpation, see Zei 1982. 14. Column IVa contains but three sounds, so that the total number of possible arrangements of its letters is only 3! or six, meaning that taken in isolation not much could be made of its arrangement, no matter what it was. As will be seen, the same must be said for Column I. More generally, the statement that any one Column taken in isolation obeys the 'principle' could not be worth much: what is interesting is what is true of the Matrix as a whole. Parenthetically, if the inventors of the Ras Shamra Matrix did recognize the suggested relationship between voicing and pharyngealization in the manner I have conjectured, then they may also have correctly identified the nature of the voiced/voiceless distinction. In that case they would have been the first to do so and for a very long time, at least in Western (non-Indie) traditions, the last; for as W. S. Allen has pointed out (1953: 3, 36-39), later classical grammarians such as Quintilian and Marius Victorinus had no more than the 'vaguest impressions' regarding the nature of voicing, even attributing it to a difference in place of articulation (Allen 1953: 37). Allen goes on to observe that Only in the latter part of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Indian [i.e., Sanskrit] teaching, does the [West's] recognition of the voicing process make headway' (1953: 37), a course of events made possible, as we can now surmise, because the prior Western (i.e., Semitic) phonological tradition was so early throttled. 15. Assigning /r/ to the Velars, however, is no simple matter. The scholarly literature on the ancient Semitic languages, while it often avoids the issue of just where /r/ was articulated, describing it simply as a 'liquida vibrante* for example (Fronzaroli 1955: 36), as often as not when it does delve into greater articulatory detail describes the sound as a trilled dento-alveolar or a 'dental liquid' (Segert 1984: 31). By happy accident the Matrix taken in isolation will accept either velar or dental characterization of/r/, given the place of 'R' in the abecedarium, since both of the appropriate cells (in IVb and Va) are available. And obviously the phonological insights that I claim the Matrix represents are but little affected by placing /r/ in Va rather than in its present IVb. (It is hard to say whether moving /r/ into Va makes that Column more anomalous or less so. Less so in one way, since with /r/ present it would possess a voiced sound and could begin with an unvoiced sound and end with a voiced, thus resembling Columns I and IVb [though continuing to be anomalous with respect to five of the remaining six Columns, which begin with a voiced and end with an unvoiced sound]. More so in another way, since all the other Columns begin and end with sounds closely paired as Opposites' in the highly salient sense that one is voiced, the other unvoiced, in light of which a Va beginning with unvoiced /s/ and ending with voiced /r/ is arguably more anomalous than a Va beginning with unvoiced /§/ and ending with the unvoiced emphatic /?/.) However, there is one intriguing aspect of the Matrix that would be adversely affected by placing /r/ anywhere but in the Velar column IVb: namely, the interwoven poems put forward in note 31 below. The horizontal or stichic poem would be unaltered, but the vertical or columnar poem would be changed radically, its two four-line strophes now being quite unlike. And while Ugaritic poetry is generally of a somewhat 'irregular' character regarding the lengths of its verses or 'cola' (short verses or hemistichs of from two to six words — Segert 1979: 730; Korpel and de Moor 1986: 175), the extreme regularity of the horizontal poem makes it likely

The Ras Shamra Matrix 97 that a regular or singsong meter, with no suppressed or slurred feet (i.e., no suppressed or slurred letter names), would have seemed optimal in a poem designed to serve as an abecedarial mnemonic. (For Ugaritic poetic practices see Segert 1979, Watson 1983, Korpel and de Moor 1986; for a synoptic view of Northwest Semitic poetic practices in general, see Segert 1987.) This being so, it seems worthwhile — without pretending to solve the problem of /r/'s phonetic nature in the ancient Semitic languages — to ask whether or not /r/ could plausibly have been treated as a velar by scribes creating the Matrix. In doing so we might bear in mind that creating a pair of interlocking poems is a task requiring no little effort (the task is very like that of creating a crossword puzzle), and that those involved in such a task might have been willing, in furthering the regularizing of Columns and Rows, to move into a Velar Column a phoneme that was velar only in a secondary ('emphatic') characteristic, or only in certain environments, or perhaps only in certain social or geographic dialects. Though of only marginal relevance because of the presumably tighter control exercised over abecedarial mnemonics, we might note that Zandee has remarked of the earliest Egyptian crossword that its spellings are often 'very queer' because of "adaptation to the crossword'; he gives several cases in point (1966: 8-9). Nor, needless to say, would variability or instability of /r/ make Ugaritian an anomaly among languages. To take just two immediate examples: within the English-speaking world there are geographic regions folk-identified by particular articulations of /r/ (without going into phonetic detail, the 'burred' /r/ of Scotland and the 'slurred' /r/ of parts of England and of the American South); and in modern French Canada a couple of presumably transient 'prestige' dialects have in recent times exhibited uvular /r/ while their less prestigious counterparts exhibited the dento-alveolar trill (Haden 1955: 509). For a recent discussion of stylistic variation with /r/ in New York City, see Woodbury 1987: 735-736. Ugaritic, though not ancestral to Biblical Hebrew, was exceedingly close to it among the Canaanite languages (Segert 1984: 14), and was also close to Aramaic (Gordon 1965: 144-145). This lends due weight to Cantineau's contention that in Biblical Hebrew /r/ may have borne a strong resemblance to the laryngeals, hence have been uvular, since it patterned with the laryngeals in never geminating (1950: 91); and to the similar point made by Moscati et α/., with reservations, for the Syriac dialect of Aramaic (1964: 32). Further, /r/ patterns with the laryngeals in another respect in Ugaritic itself, apparently conditioning the co-occurrence within the same morpheme of /d/ rather than /d/ (Gordon 1965: 26-27). On the other hand, though, /r/ does appear to geminate in Ugaritic, as in '§rr', 'srr', and 'trr' (Gordon 1965: 476, 507, though see also Good 1981). Of possible pertinence to the general argument, /r/ is uvular in present-day Askenazic Hebrew (Cantineau 1950: 91), and also, though modern Israeli Hebrew is basically Sephardic (Chomsky 1969: 92), in that language as well (Berman 1978: notes 4, 5). (This uvularity, however, may have been acquired through the influence of one of the primary languages spoken by the Ashkenazim, for instance German.) Bolozky has argued that gemination is 'largely irrelevant' to any inference of velarity for Biblical Hebrew, since in that language /r/ failed to shadow the laryngeals in two other respects: in being unable to close a syllable or immediately precede a syllablefinal consonant (1978: 40). But Bolozky's argument may in turn be countered by noting that a velar /r/ would after all differ enough from the four pharyngeals/laryngeals in question, in being a sonorant, to predict some differences in patterning, perhaps of the kind just cited. (The four sounds at issue were /h/, /S/, /h/, and /?/: two pharyngeal fricatives, a glottal fricative, and the glottal stop.) A second sort of

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counter-argument regarding the nature of Biblical Hebrew doubling contends that such 'gemination' was largely a graphic phenomenon in any case, being merely, as in modern English, a means of spelling a change in the preceding vowel (Deist 1979); but this assertion, even if granted, cannot directly affect the argument as to the nature of /r/, whose failure to double could on Deist's argument have reflected an inability to mimic the 'geminable' consonants in influencing the preceding vowel, resembling the pharyngeals and laryngeals in this respect (as before), hence serving more to reformulate Cantineau's argument for /r/'s uvularity than to disconfirm it. In sum, while the case is certainly far from closed, there are indeed grounds for holding that /r/ was uvular in Ugaritic and even in Northwestern Semitic in general; hence for its being classed with the 'Velars' /h/, h/, and /g/). And we note again that it might have sufficed for /r/ to have had uvularization or velarization as a secondary characteristic, if this can be imagined (just barely, as see Sapir 1938: esp. 272-273), or as a positional or dialectal variant (as see above). Accordingly, I have placed the letter 4 R' in Column IVb, where it best fits. Readers vexed with this choice may move it to Va, irregularizing the columnar poem of note 31; or they may choose to keep the question open. 16. The two-sound Columns lib and Va are not 'defective', just short. There are only a certain number of fronted consonants that are articulatorily possibly (or acoustically distinguishable), whether those are Labio-Dental or Dento-Alveolar; and there must be a few languages indeed for which a matrix much like the Ras Shamra Matrix could be constructed none of whose Columns contained empty cells. (For instance, no phonological matrix for the consonants of Ugaritic could avoid empty cells unless it somewhere found exactly as many sounds in each category as in every other. No matter how the sounds are categorized this is a tall order, as the reader can easily see for himself. For a far more interesting slant on the empty cells and their distribution, see the subsection Ά new use for nothing' below.) Both sounds of Va, /s/ and /?/, the latter for an emphatic [hence unvoiced] interdental (better written/t/ or perhaps /$), were putatively lateralized in ProtoSemitic (Steiner 1977, passim). The first may still have been lateralized in Ugaritic (Steiner 1977: 157), though Segert thinks otherwise (1984: 34), and indeed Steiner's evidence, which consists of /s/'s being juxtaposed with /!/ in the Ugaritic abecedarium, is unconvincing on the present hypothesis, which holds (among other things) that in both the Ugaritic abecedarium and the Matrix it derives from, Row-wise juxtaposition of similar sounds appears to have been avoided. While of course there can be no definitive answer to the question of why the interdental /?/ was not so placed in the abecedarium as to be grouped with the other interdentals in Column lib, two possible answers lie not far afield. First, accepting Steiner's thesis that both sounds of Va were lateralized in Proto-Semitic, given that no other sounds (apart from /!/ itself) were also lateralized, the two that were might have been placed alone in Va to indicate their distinction — provided of course that the language for which the Matrix was formulated inherited from Proto-Semitic the named characteristic. Secondly, since /z/ was emphatic (i.e., velarized or glottalized), its secondary backed component might have led to its being scribally perceived as more naturally grouped with the (further back) Dento-Alveolars of Column V than with the Labio-Interdentals of Column II. A piece of evidence supporting this notion is the scribal error reported by Fronzaroli (1955: 32) in which a /?/ was substituted for alveolar /t/. Either tactic might have been all the more likely to be exploited so as to serve some ulterior goal, such as avoiding a unique one-letter column (assuming /r/ in IVb) or, more importantly, arranging the Matrix so as to permit construction of the

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99

two interwoven poems reconstructed in note 31 below, a process perhaps exacting one or two compromises of the sort that Zandee has pointed out in an Egyptian crossword dating from the reign of Rameses VI (1966: 8). I mention as a possibly related fact Dahood's contention (1966: 6) that /d/ in 'an impressive number of roots' reflects etymological /s/. One last problem with Column V worth noting is the nature of the nineteenth letter, 'samek', conventionally given as /s/ (e.g., Segert 1984: 23). In particular: how is this letter fitted in with the others of Vb (all of which are nonfricatives), or separated from the two fricatives of Va? The answer may lie both with the nature of the two sounds of Va and with the nature of 'samek'. First, as noted just above, the two sounds of Va were possibly both lateralized at the time of conception of the Matrix, which by itself would suffice to explain their being segregated. But secondly, 'samek' may not have been /s/ at all, but rather some sort of affricate. Of particular importance ... is the representation of [samek] in Egyptian transcriptions as t. While the real value of Egyptian t cannot be determined, the phonological evidence ... points clearly to a palatal (or prepalatal) stop (like ky or ty) or affricate (like c), and not to a simple s'; moreover, like zayin, samek was often used by early Greeks to represent *zd, as on Thera (McCarter 1975: 98, in part quoting a personal communication from T. O. Lambdin). In sum, then, there are very good reasons indeed for thinking that samek could more reasonably have been classed with the sounds of Vb than with those of Va. 17. Just for the record, the probability that all six of these Columns could obey the 'principle' by sheer chance is about one in 300,000 (proof left to reader). In deriving this figure, within the set containing the Columns that adhere to it I have taken the most restrictive characterization as mandatory; thus I have assumed that five out of the six Columns must begin with a voiced sound and end with an unvoiced counterpart, thus exempting I and IVb, each of which may begin with either so long as it ends with the other. (To pass beyond this set of six Columns for a moment, note that Va must both begin and end with unvoiced sounds because it contains no voiced ones.) The reader objecting to so specific a prescription — admittedly, one which raises the apparent odds against the Matrix's being the result of chance — should feel free to broaden the range of permitted Obedient' Columns by allowing them all to begin with either voiced or unvoiced sounds, terminating with their opposites. NB that in deriving the probability just cited, the relative position of 'L' in Column Vb (and all related matters) has been left open; for a stricter and I believe more correct position on this issue, see the subsection Ά new use for nothing' below. 18. 'In a fashion similar to (and probably suggested by) Egyptian procedures, ProtoCanaanite was written vertically or horizontally, and left to right or right to left. To judge from the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, vertical writing dominated in the earliest period. By the eleventh century horizontal writing from right to left prevailed. With it came an end to the violent shifts of stance characteristic of Proto-Canaanite' (Cross 1954:18-19). If viva voce 'Columnar readings' were indeed a feature of Ugaritian scribal instruction, then the last sound of each Column could also have served to announce the end of that Column, thus playing a role similar to that of an anubandha, for which see note 33, below. 19. Driver also implies that the coincidences between the Ugaritian and Akkadian letter orders are probably accidental (1976: 150-151). It will be remembered that he depreciates the coincidences between the Ugaritian and Akkadian letter shapes as well (1976: 148-149), and Stieglitz agrees, though holding that even so the Akkadian letters 'determined for the Ugaritic signs their method of formation, mechanical execution,

100 W. C. Watt

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

medium of writing, and the direction of writing' (1971: 138-139; see also Dietrich and Loretz 1986: 5). This placement is based on the assumption that T, since it began as just a positional variant of T and was a late introduction as a separate letter, would have followed T in no matter what abecedarium. For the story of T, see Diringer 1968: 421). This is to assume that the dominance of the 'columnar abecedarium' would not have affected the sound changes and resultant decisions that in the case of the orthodox SEER abecedarium made the symbol 'S' available and led to its changing value so as to represent /s/ (for 'sin'). For further on 'S' and 'sin', see for example Stieglitz 1971: 136 and Cross 1980: 12. As with the placement of T, I have assumed that the coda, whatever was going on elsewhere in the alphabet, would have taken its present form. The Romans dropped 'Z' from their alphabet and abecedarium, since they did not need it, and put 'G', which they did, in its stead; then subsequently, needing 'Z' to write Greek, they borrowed it from the Greek alphabet (together with Ύ'), placing it at the end. For further details, including the naming of the individual responsible for the first-named innovation, see Diringer 1968:420-421 and Sampson 1985:109. The Greeks apparently added 'T, for /u/, right off the bat, but the story of the other four additions to the standard Greek coda is more complex (Jeffery 1961: 24-25, 35-38). In some epichoric variants still other letters were added, such as 'Τ', '^', and '|/|' (Jeffery 1961: 38-40). The late-added twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth letters of the Ugaritic 'alphabet' (at this stage actually an alphabet-cwm-syllabary slightly reminiscent of the Etruscan one mentioned in note 11) stood for two syllables beginning with /'/, the unvoiced laryngeal or glottal stop: namely, /'i/ and /'u/, respectively. Original /'/, the first symbol of Column I, now stood for another such syllable, /'a/. (The story of these three syllable-signs is told in Driver 1976: 151, Naveh 1982: 31, and in more detail in Segert 1983.) Given the place of/'a/ at the head of Column I of the Matrix, and given the fact that the same Column offered three empty cells, obviously no coda was necessary at all: the two new symbols could have been inserted into the abecedarial core, obviating the need to expand the Matrix. The same comment holds for the thirtieth Ugaritic letter, which stood for a sibilant (Naveh 1982: 31, Segert 1983) or for the syllable '/su/ and perhaps also /so/' (Segert 1983: 214-215) — in short, for a sound easily positioned in one of the Matrix's empty cells (for instance at the bottom of Column III), again obviating the coda and the expansion of the Matrix needed to accommodate it. In all, it would certainly seem that when the Ugaritian coda was added its effect on the Matrix was of little concern — either because (as undoubtedly with the Greeks and Romans) the Matrix was already dead or at least moribund, or conversely because it was very much alive but, like the abecedarium according to Demsky (1977: 15), was held inviolable, the coda being viewed as placed Outside' it, so to speak. (I note again that in the subsection Ά new use for nothing' it is shown that the Matrix appears to have been carefully crafted to serve as an intricate mnemonic device, one it might have seemed unwise and radical to tamper with.) The twenty-eighth, twenty-ninth, and thirtieth letters of the Ugaritic alphabet were apparently all added by the same man, a scribe named Eisirios (Segert 1983: 203). Fronzaroli assigns to the sixteenth letter of the Ugaritic abecedarium, here transliterated as 'd', the set of values '/d/, /z/, /z/' (1955: 13), and at the end of a lengthy passage devoted to this much-discussed symbol (1955: 21-25) he terms it polyphonic. The symbol 'd' itself represents for Fronzaroli a voiced apical alveolar 'pronunciatlo] con la punta delta lingua diretta verso il basso'' — in other words, a sort of [z] — having as its nearest counterpart 'd' itself, for Fronzaroli a voiced apical alveolar pronounced ''con

The Ras Shamra Matrix

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

101

lapunta della lingua diretta verso l'allo1 (1955: 21). The usual transcription, at one time T (e.g., Gordon 1950: 375, comparing Ugaritic /z/ and /d/), is now more generally 'd' (e.g., Gordon 1965: 11-16 et passim), meaning /δ/, though 'z' is still favored by some (e.g., Demsky 1977: 15). Segert uses 'd', meaning /o/, reserving 'z' to describe a 'late variant' of [δ] (1984: 31-32). I have followed Segert and most contemporary usage in calling both the sixteenth letter and its unvoiced counterpart the twenty-fifth letter 'interdentals' (Segert 1984: 32), assigning them therefore to Column II, the 'Extreme Front' or fcLabio-Interdental' group, as subcolumn lib. Their place in the abecedarium and the Matrix would of course be unaffected had they been assigned to the 'Middle* or 'Palato-Alveolar' group, which would thus be divided into two subcolumns of which Ilia would contain the 'interdental' sixteenth and twenty-fifth letters, with Illb containing the four letters already committed to Column III (i.e., 'z' through '§'). The Matrix's tacit statements about phonological similarity would be affected by this change, but not by very much. Both Fronzaroli and Segert also categorize 'z', the eighteenth letter, as an interdental, specifically an 'emphatic' (velarized or glottalized) unvoiced interdental (see, respectively, 1955: 21-36 and 1984: 32). Whether because of its backed 'emphatic' quality or because it was lateralized, this letter is sequenced abecedarially not to fall into lib with the other two interdentals, but rather to fall into Va, with /s/. For further discussion of this issue see note 16, above. Roman 'G', however, also added long after the Matrix had presumably expired, fits the Matrix quite well (see Figure 4), but it does so accidentally, as see note 23, above. See note 32, below. With this rubric I pay homage to a famous title (Hoenigswald 1959). I.e., writers of texts in Old Palestinian or Proto-Sinaitic, in Cross's current terminology (Cross 1967: 12*, and see Naveh 1982: 30). I note again that as of this writing no preUgaritian Proto-Canaanite abecedarium has yet been published. See Coogan 1974 and the discussion of abecedarium-splitting earlier in this subsection. For an example of an acrostic poem split at the midpoint, see note 31, below. The supposition that the Matrix was indeed visualized and for that matter actualized in rectangular form is not far-fetched. As John M. Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh has pointed out to me, contemporary board-games were mostly played on rectangular matrices; furthermore, the original of this and all matrices (including the abacus) is probably to be found in domestic textiles —for instance, the lowly floormat, woven of reeds or fibers — the columns having been modelled on the warp, the rows on the weft. It would be nice to discover that a sort of 'alphabet game' was played in the Semitic area at the time of the Matrix, perhaps like the one that children in India were playing a thousand years later, the 'akkharika' (Diringer 1968: 258). But none is known. The curious marked pebbles found near Sidon come closest to suggesting such a pastime, but as Driver observes (1976: 90-91), they almost certainly were not alphabetic in character (see Driver's Plate 34, #2). Still, see further note 31, below. In the 'divested' matrix of Figure 5, note that since there are no empty cells to bring about any other result, the abecedarium's fourteenth letter must fall into the Matrix's fourteenth cell. But if the Matrix is to be of rectangular form, is to have the eight subcolumns that appear to have been deemed appropriate, and is to break into two equal submatrices also of rectangular form (so that the number of cells in both the Matrix and its submatrices is always an integral multiple of eight), then of course the Matrix cannot possibly halve at the fourteenth cell. Such a division must produce the ragged break marked in Figure 5 by the heavy line.

102 W. C. Watt 3l.

If early Semitic practice was like that which Driver credits to the later Hebrews, the abecedarium was inculcated by means of a rhythmic recitation in a sort of 'sing-song' (1976: 89-90). Just subsequent to that period, the construction of acrostic poems is a well-known feature of Biblical writings. (In such a poem successive lines begin with the letters of the abecedarium in order.) Two of the Psalms (numbers 9 and 10) are of particular interest in this regard, since they form one poem between them, the break coming (predictably enough) between 'K' and 'L' (Demsky, 1977: 17, note 9). While 'no actual alphabetic acrostics have yet been found [in the Ugaritic texts] ... it is remarkable how often consecutive lines ... tend to begin with the same letter or group of letters', whether 'by repeating the same [initial] word' or 'by using an identical initial letter' (Watson 1980:445). Watson notes further that these proto-acrostics as we might call them were probably byproducts of the 'pervasive parallelism' that characterized Ugaritic poetry, 'made overt when the oral poetry of ancient times was committed to writing' (1980: 447). For a more general discussion of Ugaritic poetic practices see de Moor 1978, Segert 1979, Korpel and de Moor 1986; for Egyptian acrostics of about a hundred years later (i.e., from c.1290 B.C.), see Zandee 1966: 1-9 and Clere 1938: 38-43, 46); and just below. A columnar reading of the Ma'trix also produces a strophaic structure (the number of letters per Column being in order 3,4,2,4; 3,4,2,5), though I mention the matter with some diffidence. First of all, this structure depends on the placement of 'R' in Column IVa, which may be controversial (as see note 15, above). (With 'R' removed to Va the Columnar pattern would be '3,4,2,4; 3,3,3,5'.) Secondly, the structure in question has nothing to do with the distribution of empty cells (these can of course have no effect on the number of letters per Column, since that depends solely on the phonological character of the Columns and the letters' corresponding sounds), so that in this sense it is of a nature seemingly less deliberated than that of the strophaic structure detected in the sequence of the Rows. Thirdly, the Columns' strophaic structure differs from that of the Rows in having the longer of the two 'refrain' lines second. One wonders, if the columnar 'strophes' were indeed the products of design, why the Columns were not arranged so as to yield the more conforming strophaic form '3,4,2,5; 3,4,2,4', as is easily accomplished by reversing the order of the two halves of the Matrix (divided vertically), thus sequencing the Columns in the order (IV, V) / (I, II, III). Obviously, such a reordering has no effect on the number of letters to be found in each of the Matrix's Rows, thus leaving the Rows' strophaic structure unmarred; perhaps more to the point, neither (with one qualification) is any other essential attribute of the Matrix adversely affected. In fact, the Columns could be argued to be slightly more 'separated' in this reordered Matrix than in the original one, The one qualification is that there may have been a special reason for placing the 'Extreme Back' sounds first, in Column I. The same class of sounds (the 'Glottals') occurs first in the Sanskrit varna-samamnaya matrix (Figure 6a, below), and one explanation for this placement stresses the Sanskrit grammarians' emphasis on the nearness of these sounds to the origin of the vocal tract's motive power, the breath. The soul, apprehending things with the intellect, inspires the mind with a desire to speak; the mind then excites the bodily fire, which in its turn impels the breath' (quoted in Allen 1953: 21). And so, Allen observes, 'quite logically [the Sanskrit grammarians] begin with [the places of articulation] which are closest to the origin of the air-stream' (1953: 48). Of course the 'logic' the Sanskrit grammarians found so appealing might have eluded their ancient Semitic predecessors, or left them unmoved. Though Driver thought otherwise: The reason for beginning the alphabet with [aleph] is that it is the first letter of the phonetic alphabet, starting from the bottom of the throat instead of

The Ras Shamra Matrix 103 the lips' (1976: 271). Of course both of these explanations may be post hoc, as a tenthcentury Bulgarian one for Glagolitic would seem to be: God gave the thithertoilliterate Slavs /a/ for their first letter to Open their mouths' (Matejka 1984: 333). The columnar or warpwise reading of the Matrix is on a more or less equal footing with the stichic or weftwise reading in another respect, too: as was noted above, just as the Matrix halves horizontally at the 'Coogan Division' shown in Figure 1, so also it halves about as authoritatively at the corresponding vertical axis. (In both cases, and for the same reason, this could be due to chance.) The assumed greater importance of the Coogan Division is founded on the greater weight the Ugaritians themselves apparently came to give the orthodox abecedarium, a minor consequence of which is that the only halved abecedaria so far discovered (Coogan 1974) have been stichic or orthodox ones. To which it should be added that the eleven indicative Ugaritic abecedaria reprinted by Gordon — his texts 320; 401; 1188 A[l], A2, A3, A4, B[l], B2, B3, B4-6; and 1189 (1965: 207, 214, 244) — are not decisive on any of these points, or even especially suggestive, though they do seem to contain line breaks that coincide with Row-ends with more than chance frequency. Using Cross and Lambdin's reconstructed early Semitic letter names or partial names (1960: 24; Cross 1967: 24*), supplemented by Driver's reconstructed names (1976: 169) for letters 'yod' through 'ayin', which were missing from the materials used by Cross and Lambdin, a conjectural partial reconstruction of the Ras Shamra orthodox or stichic poem is as follows: 'Alp, bet, garni, harm, dilt, Hü, wo, ze, hot, tet, Yod, kap, sin, lamed. Mem, d[ ], nahäs, z[ ], samek, e Ayin, pü, sade, qöp, ra's, Tann, g[ ], to. And the corresponding columnar poem goes like this: 'Alp, hü, eayin, Bet, wo, mem, pü, P[ ], tann, Ze, yod, nahäs, sade. Gaml, kap, qöp, Harm, hot, ra's, g[ ], Sin,z[ ], Dilt, |et, lamed, samek, to. The Cross and Lambdin reconstruction is based on the thesis that a bilingual letter name list (Ugaritic and Babylonian) found in 1955 in Ugarit (Gordon's text 1189 [1965: 244]) represents a scribe's attempt to capture with the nearest Akkadian syllabary sign the first syllable of the Ugaritic letter names (Cross 1967: 23*-24*). Driver reconstructed 'yod' through 'ayin' (1976: 161, 168-169) from various sources, mostly without early attestation. The names containing square brackets, not recovered by either Cross and Lambdin or Driver, are those of three of the five Ugaritian letters that were early casualties of the phonological changes mentioned above.

104 W. C. Watt

32.

33.

34.

35.

Just as the Matrix itself constitutes the earliest known 'diagram' in the Peircean sense (Sebeok 1979: 110-127), these two interwoven poems constitute the earliest known crossword, or at least crossverse (each cell contains not a letter constituting part of a word, but — since each letter is read as its name — a word constituting part of a verse). The earliest attested Egyptian crossword (again, more properly a crossverse) dates from the reign of Rameses VI in the eleventh century B.C. (Clere 1938: 43-58). As was noted just above, proto-crosswords (texts with one or more noncontiguous acrostics woven through them) have been dated from the opening of the reign of Rameses II in 1290 (Zandee 1966: 1-4). Recall that Egyptian, like ProtoSemitic (see note 18 above), was written both horizontally and vertically, which may have promoted the development of acrostics and (then?) full crosswords. Clere gives the Egyptian for 'cross-word' as' 5 ^^n '»^cr^ se lisant de deuxfaςons> (1938: 57). On the same reasoning it would not be astonishing to find 'Matrix-adjacency' occasionally affecting letter shape even at the hands of scribes familiar with the Matrix. (For a case where a letter's shape may have been affected by its place in the abecedarium, see Jeffery on 'F': echoing Ullman [1969 (1932): 42], she theorizes that this letter became gradually more ctenic under the influence of Έ' [1961: 25].) Since some writers of pre-Ugaritian Proto-Canaanite presumably had knowledge of the Matrix, for example, the letters used to write Proto-Canaanite might be expected to reveal some effects of Matricial influence on the ancestral Proto-Sinaitic or Egyptian forms (for which see e.g., Cross 1954: 16, 1976: 15*; Driver 1976: 136-171). But the Matrix's impact should be a little more salient in the Ugaritic alphabet, because the letters of this writing system seem to have been refashioned deliberately. Note that since graphic similarities among letters adjacent tc each other in either a list or a matrix may increase over time, their presence does not preclude the possibility that, at its origin, a given list or matrix was ordered in exclusive obedience to purely phonological criteria. The same comment applies to the letter names, as far as they can be recovered. Admittedly, since the Ugaritic letter forms are mostly or entirely rather free cuneiformizations of pre-existing letter shapes, the effects of the Matrix should be expected to be small in any case — so much so that perhaps only formal iconic analysis, perhaps along the lines of Watt (1988), could reveal them. The 'varna-samamnaya' letter order fits so neatly into a compact matrix (Allen 1953: 20) that it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that, just as with Ugaritic, the matrix was primary and the letter order its derivate. The Ras Shamra and the varna-samamnaya matrices do not appear to me to be historically connected, except conceivably via the indirect 'diffusion of ideas' route, even though the two alphabets (Ugaritic and Brahmi) were connected rather closely, as first cousins once removed. Like the Ugaritic script, Brahmi descended from 'ProtoCanaanite' in its broadest sense, though from its Aramaic rather than its Canaanite branch (Diringer 1968: 262-272). (The 'Proto-Canaanite' script, here synonymous or nearly synonymous with the terms 'North Semitic' or equivalently 'West Semitic' script [respectively, Diringer 1968: 185 and Naveh 1982: 9], in this sense was the source of both Aramaic and Canaanite, the latter being the branch from which sprang the Hebrew and Ugaritic scripts, as well as that of the Phoenicians, whence descended — with the qualification of note 4 — the SEER alphabet. A better term might be 'ProtoCanaanite-Aramaic'.) The Sivasutra is composed of fourteen sub-lists, each taking part in a 'sutra' or rule of morphophonemics, each consisting of one or more sounds forming a phonologically defined set (e.g., the Nasals), and each ending in an 'indicatory sound', in every

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instance but one a sound from some other sub-list. These are the 'anubandha'. Each sound in each sub-list, excepting the anubandha, occurs in the form of a syllable ending in /a/: thus, for instance, the complete aspirated voiced stop sub-list has the form Vgfca <Jha dha s/'. (The inconcinnous /s/ is the anubandha.) These sub-lists are drawn up in such a way that each of the sound-sets to which the grammar of Sanskrit needs to refer can be denoted by an abbreviation consisting of the first sound of the set plus the anubandha ending the set: thus, 'gha + s' denotes the set composed exclusively of aspirated voiced stops (though not necessarily of all of them — Staal 1962: 6); while, say, 4<Jha + s' denotes the narrower set with /gha/ specifically omitted. That is, the order of letters in the sivasutra is logical, not phonological, except as the two (as in any morphophonemics) coincide. (The foregoing sketch is based on Staal 1962 and Cardona 1976: 208-210.) The alert reader will already have noted that the sivasutra is more a (specialpurpose) syllabarium than an abecedarium, because each of its consonant symbols represents an open syllable ending with /a/, even though this vowel disappears in many contexts of its usage (Staal 1962: 1). For comparison with other mixed systems, see notes 9 and 24 above. 36. For some distinctively articulatory aspects of the sivasutra, see Cardona 1976: 206-208. 37. It should be noted that for the labial/velar/dental ordering coincidence to be due to more than chance, and yet not due to historical influence, the sivasutra and the Matrix would have to have been shaped by some shared design consideration, hence (presumably) by some shared purpose. But they seem to have had no shared purpose (cf. note 35) — though this is admittedly an audacious claim in view of the fact that nothing now extant bears witness to the Matrix except for its putative impact on the letter order. 38. This is probably the place to recall that the great Victorian anthropologist Max Müller once averred that Pänini and all of his predecessors among the Sanskrit grammarians were illiterate (Goldstücker 1965: 16-72, in warm and windy dissent), a claim which if anybody still believed it would mean that the Ras Shamra matrix would have to have reached the great grammarian via oral transmission; which in turn, given how fiendishly difficult the empty cells are to pronounce, might well lead one to suppose on this ground alone that it could not have reached him at all. (Muller's claim aside, however, there may have been a strong oral component in Sanskrit teaching tradition; for example the primary function of the anubandhas must have been to serve as a pedagogical aid in oral recitation — Staal 1962: 1.) For a sketch of the pre-Paninian grammarians, see Cardona 1976: 146-153 or Misra 1966: 15-17. References Allen, W. S. (1953). Phonetics in Ancient India ( = London Oriental Series 1). London: Oxford University Press. Astour, Michael C. (1981). Les frontieres et les districts du royaume d'Ugarit. UgariiForschungen 13, 1-12. Banti, Luisa (1973). Etruscan Cities and their Culture, trans, by Erika Bizzarri. Berkeley: University of California Press. Berman, Ruth Aronson (1978). Modern Hebrew Structure. Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects, Ltd.

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108 W. C. Watt —(1983). The last sign of the Ugaritic alphabet. Ugarit-Forschungen 15, 201-218. —(1984). A Basic Grammar of the Ugaritic Language. Berkeley: University of California Press. —(1987). Phonological and syntactic structuring principles in Northwest Semitic verse systems. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Hamito-Semitic Congress (= Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 44), H. Jungraithmayr and W. W. Muller (eds.). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Shumaker, Wayne (1972). The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sjöberg, A. W. (1976). The Old Babylonian Eduba. In Sumerological Studies in Honor of Thorkild Jacobsen on his Seventieth Birthday (=The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Assyriological Studies, 20), Stephen J. Lieberman (ed.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Speiser, E. A. (1964). The syllabic transcription of Ugaritic [h] and [h]. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 175, 42-47. Staal, J. F. (1962). A method of linguistic description: The order of consonants according to Pänini. Language 38, 1-10. Steiner, Richard C. (1977). The Case for Fricative-Laterals in Proto-Semitic ( = American Oriental Series 59). New Haven, CT: American Oriental Society. Stieglitz, Robert R. (1971). The Ugaritic cuneiform and Canaanite linear alphabets. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 30, 135-139. Thureau-Dangin, F. (1935). Formes grammaticales sumeriennes, d'apres une tablette inedite du Louvre. Revue d'Assyriologie et d'Archeologie Orientale 32, 89-114. Ullman, Berthold L. (1969 [J932]). Ancient Writing and its influence. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Van den Branden, Alb. (1969). Grammaire Phenicienne. Beirut: Librairie du Liban. Watson, Wilfred G. E. (1980). Quasi-acrostics in Ugaritic poetry. Ugarit-Forschungen 12, 445-447. —(1983). The character of Ugaritic poetry. Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 11, 157-169. Watt, W. C. (1987). The Byblos Matrix. Journal of Near Eastern Studies 46, 1-14. —(1988). What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? Part IV: Union. Semiotica 70 (3/4), 199-241. Woodbury, Anthony C. (1987). Meaningful phonological processes. Language 63, 685-740. Zandee, Jan (1966). An Ancient Egyptian Crossword Puzzle (= Mededelingen en Verhandelingen van het Vooraziatisch-Egyptisch Genootschap Oriente Lux' XV). Leiden: Ex Oriente Lux (J. J. Brill). Zei, Branka (1982). Children's awareness of their own phono-articulatory activity. In Proceedings of the Second International Congress for the Study of Child Language; vol. 1, Carolyn E. Johnson and Carol L. Thew (eds.). Washington, DO University Press of America. Zimmern, H. (1896). Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Alphabets. Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 50, 667-670. W. C. Watt (b. 1932) is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of California in Irvine. His principal research interests include general semiotic theory, zoosemiotics, semiotic evolution, and alephatics (the study of the significance of alphabetic letter orders). Among his publications are 'What is the proper characterization of the alphabet? II: Composition1 (1980), 'Grade der Systemhaftigkeit' (1983), 'Signs of the times' (1984), and The Byblos Matrix' (1987).