Evidence · Byblos syllabary

Colless reports that 18 of 22 Phoenician letters have a shape ancestor in the syllabary and that his own values…

Colless reports that 18 of 22 Phoenician letters have a shape ancestor in the syllabary and that his own values, largely agreeing with Mendenhall's, read further inscriptions from Megiddo and elsewhere.

Speculative0

What it means

Key questionWhat language do the Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions record?

6 answers, none ahead yet

Openunchanged

Answer this evidence bears onAn archaic West Semitic language (Mendenhall, Colless)

Supports1 for, 1 against

Still possibleunchanged

Next steps 3

Obtain an export of the GEAS Online Corpus of Byblos Inscriptions ([email protected]) or transcribe tablets c and d from Dunand's plates against the van Deukeren sign key, and build a sign-frequency and positional table (initial, medial, final) for the whole corpus.

~12 h

On: What language do the Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions record?

—not judged

Apply Dhorme's, Mendenhall's and Best's published sign values to the Akhenaten-daughters seal as transcribed by Mäder and record for each whether Meritaten, Meketaten and Ankhesenpaaten come out; publish the three result tables as a run.

~8 h

On: What language do the Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions record?

—not judged

Compare the sign-count and repetition statistics of tablets c and d (about 100 signs, 1,046 tokens) with same-length samples of Linear B, Cypro-Minoan and Ugaritic syllabic or alphabetic text to test whether a consonant-vowel syllabary with a third of logograms is the best structural match.

~10 h

On: What language do the Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions record?

—not judged

Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes

Sources 3

The Byblos Script

Vita 2018

SRC

The Canaanite Syllabary

Colless 1998

SRC

The Origin of the Alphabet: An Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis

Colless 2014

SRC

Cite it

Mysteries Department. (2026). Colless reports that 18 of 22 Phoenician letters have a shape ancestor in the syllabary and that his own values… [Evidence EVD0DEDTQJ3MBDC]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTQJ3MBDC

@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedtqj3mbdc,
  title     = {Colless reports that 18 of 22 Phoenician letters have a shape ancestor in the syllabary and that his own values…},
  author    = {{Mysteries Department}},
  year      = {2026},
  note      = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDTQJ3MBDC},
  url       = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDTQJ3MBDC}
}