▲ | thaumasiotes 9 hours ago | |
> The oldest actual alphabets that have been found (which show the alphabetic order of the letters) are for the Ugaritic alphabet, which is older than the Phoenician alphabet You're doing a lot of equivocating between identity and ancestry. (e.g. saying that "alphabet" is composed of the names of two Phoenician letters rather than two Greek ones.) In that framework, can we actually say that Ugaritic script is older than Phoenician script? My impression was that all of our knowledge of Ugaritic arises by coincidence, just that we happened to excavate a tell that turned out to keep records in what is as far as we know a script unique to it. Do we have reason to believe that someone wasn't using a proto-Phoenician script at the same time and we just haven't excavated them? |