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The World's Oldest Alphabet from Carta

The World's Oldest Alphabet from Carta

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SKU: PB417

The World’s Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script.

For about 150 years, scholars have attempted to identify the language of the world's first alphabetic script and to translate some of the inscriptions that use it. Until now, their attempts have accomplished little more than identifying most of the pictographic letters and translating a few of the Semitic words. With the publication of The World's Oldest Alphabet, a new day has dawned. All of the disputed letters have been resolved, while the language has been identified conclusively as Hebrew, allowing for the translation of 16 inscriptions that date from 1842 to 1446 BC. It is the author's reading that these inscriptions expressly name three biblical figures (Asenath, Ahisamach, and Moses) and greatly illuminate the earliest Israelite history in a way that no other book has achieved, apart from the Bible.

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The World's Oldest Alphabet - Carta

 For about 150 years, scholars have attempted to identify the language of the world's first alphabetic script, and to translate some of the inscriptions that use it. Until now, their attempts have accomplished little more than identifying most of the pictographic letters and translating a few of the Semitic words. With the publication of The World's Oldest Alphabet, a new day has dawned. All of the disputed letters have been resolved, while the language has been identified conclusively as Hebrew, allowing for the translation of 16 inscriptions that date from 1842 to 1446 BC. It is the author's reading that these inscriptions expressly name three biblical figures (Asenath, Ahisamach, and Moses) and greatly illuminate the earliest Israelite history in a way that no other book has achieved, apart from the Bible.
 
Excerpt from Introduction:
"The origin of the alphabet has been a matter of intense interest from time immemorial.  The primitive pictographic and cumbersome syllabic forms of written communication that originated in the latter case at least as early as 3200 BC gave way at some point to the incredibly facile and flexible development of alphabets, an advancement dated and attributed to a variety of times and places.  The search for the beginnings of alphabetic scripts has borne fruit in the past century or so with a focus particularly, on the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world.  Biblical scholars have been at the forefront of these endeavors since the texts of sacred scriptures have never been evinced, except in alphabetic form, though the assumption is well-nigh universal that the existing exemplars likely sprang from both oral and written traditions, perhaps, in the latter case, non-alphabetically."
 
Contents:
  1. Background Matters to the Proto-Consonantal Inscriptions
  2. The Inscriptions of the Period of Egypt's Middle Kingdom
  3. The Inscriptions of the Period of Egypt's New Kingdom
  4. Concluding Thoughts

 

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 Douglas Petrovich (Ph.D., M.A., Th.M., M.Div.) teaches Ancient Egypt at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Canada). He formerly was the academic dean and a professor at Novosibirsk Biblical-Theological Seminary (Russia), as well as at Shepherds Theological Seminary (U.S.A.), where he taught all levels of biblical Hebrew. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, with a major in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, a first minor in ancient Egyptian language, and a second minor in ancient Near Eastern religions. His research interests include biblical history and exegesis, Egyptology, and ancient Near Eastern history (including archaeology, epigraphy, chronology, and iconography).

 

Size: 16.5 x 24 cm (6 1/2 x 9 1/2 in.)

Hardcover

No. of Pages: xvi + 262

Imported from Israel

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