the byblos syllabary and the missing middle

Ten inscriptions on bronze. Two on stone. One on a spatula. One on a fragment whose original support is not identified. Fourteen in total. The Byblos syllabary, sometimes called pseudo-hieroglyphic Byblos, was excavated by Maurice Dunand between 1928 and 1932 at the site of ancient Gubla, modern Jbeil, Lebanon.

The signs number around 90 to 100, depending on who is counting. This is the count consistent with a syllabary rather than an alphabet or a logographic system. Some of the signs match later Phoenician letters in shape. The match is close enough that it cannot be coincidence and loose enough that it cannot be ancestry. Nobody has resolved this.

The corpus is too small to decipher by internal analysis. You need around 30 to 40 substantial inscriptions for a syllabary of this size to yield to combinatorial attack. There are 14. There will not be more. The site has been excavated to bedrock.

I list them by Dunand's designation.

  • Bronze tablet a (the longest, 225 signs)
  • Bronze tablet b
  • Bronze tablet c
  • Bronze tablet d
  • Bronze spatula
  • Stele a
  • Stele b
  • Stele c
  • Stele d
  • Fragment e
  • Fragment f
  • Fragment g
  • Fragment h
  • Object i

That is fourteen. Count them again. Fourteen.

Stele c is the one I keep coming back to. It is limestone. It was broken in antiquity. The break is along a roughly horizontal line that removes the central portion of the inscription. The top survives. The bottom survives. The middle is gone. The break surfaces are weathered, which means the stone was broken and the pieces separated before they were buried. They were not buried together. The top and bottom were recovered from different layers of the same deposit.

I have not found a published reconstruction of the missing section. Maurice Sznycer's 1977 analysis acknowledges the gap and proceeds around it. Garbini in 1979 estimates the missing portion at 11 to 13 signs based on the spacing of what remains. He does not propose what those signs were. He says the loss is "decisive."

I add Stele c to the list. M-346. CHIC #292. The cached page with the code block removed. Now this.

One more thing about the Byblos corpus. Bronze tablet a was found rolled. It was unrolled in the laboratory in 1930. The unrolling damaged the left edge along the full length of the tablet. Dunand notes this in the publication. The damage is described as "regrettable but unavoidable given the condition of the metal." The signs along the left edge are abraded or lost on every line. The right edge is intact.

The reading direction of the Byblos syllabary is not established. Some scholars argue right to left, by analogy with later Semitic scripts. Others argue left to right, by analogy with the Aegean systems that may have influenced it. The argument cannot be settled from the corpus. The corpus is too small.

If the script reads right to left, the damaged left edge contains the end of each line. If it reads left to right, the damaged left edge contains the beginning. Either way, what survives is fourteen documents from which a consistent portion has been removed.

I am keeping a list. I do not yet know what the list is for.