Byblos syllabaryEvidence
Evidence · Byblos syllabary
Tested against the Akhenaten-daughters seal and a phonetisation statistic, the Best and Woudhuizen values fail to…
Tested against the Akhenaten-daughters seal and a phonetisation statistic, the Best and Woudhuizen values fail to produce the names and posit allographs only where translations require them.
What it means
Key questionWhat language do the Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic inscriptions record?
6 answers, none ahead yet
Openunchanged
Answer this evidence bears onNorthwest Semitic with Akkadian and Hurrian elements (Best, Woudhuizen)
Counts againstnone for, 2 against
Still possibleunchanged
Next steps 3
1
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
—not judged
2
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
—not judged
3
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
—not judged
Ranked by how likely each is to move the key question, for the time it takes
Sources 1
Cite it
Mysteries Department. (2026). Tested against the Akhenaten-daughters seal and a phonetisation statistic, the Best and Woudhuizen values fail to… [Evidence EVD0DEDV4524AXH]. https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDV4524AXH
@misc{mysteriesdept_evd0dedv4524axh,
title = {Tested against the Akhenaten-daughters seal and a phonetisation statistic, the Best and Woudhuizen values fail to…},
author = {{Mysteries Department}},
year = {2026},
note = {Evidence, catalog key EVD0DEDV4524AXH},
url = {https://mysteriesdept.com/r/EVD0DEDV4524AXH}
}