G. Herbert Livingston
[G. Herbert Livingston is Professor of Old Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Asbury, Kentucky. He is the author of The Pentateuch in its Cultural Enviroment, from which this article was taken.]
More than one ancient community probably possessed a rich fund of oral literature that was passed from generation to generation through recitation from memory. Because these communities had no effective way to record their thoughts, their literature has been lost forever.
The major breakthrough in learning to write happened about 3000 B.C. Whether this occurred first in the Mesopotamian valley or the Nile valley has not yet been fixed. Three great systems of writing, however, did develop in the ancient Near East. They are the cuneiform style in the Mesopotamian valley, the hieroglyphic form in the Nile valley, and the alphabetic form in the Levant.
The inhabitants of the Mesopotamian valley learned early that clay was cheap and, when baked, provided durable material for writing purposes. Stone was scarce in the valley, but it was increasingly imported for inscribed monuments. The Nile valley had stone near at hand, in the desert bordering the river, and they employed it plentifully as a surface upon which to write. They soon found that papyrus and leather were also cheap
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The Sumerian King List, which records the rulers of ancient Sumer prior to and following the great flood. The edition shown here, the “Weld-Blundell Prism,” was written in about 1817 B.C., although the original version was probably compiled between 2250 and 2000 B.C. (See Bible and Spade, Summer 1972, pp. 84-86.)
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and effective, but these proved to be extremely perishable. Fortunately, the dry sands of Egypt have preserved some inscribed papyrus from the third millennium B.C. In the Levant, papyrus and leather seemingly were popular as writing materials, but its damper soils have destroyed all specimens of such inscriptions from before the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There have been a few inscribed stones (stelae) found in Palestine and also some inscribed pottery fragments (ostraca), but not nearly so many as in other areas of the ancient Near East.
The science of studying ancient inscriptions is called epigraphy. The science of analyzing the forms of scripts is called paleography.
Scripts have been classified according to several types. Pictographs are symbols that can be “read” in almost any language because they represented ideas and actions in a simple story sequence. Ideographs are signs that convey abstractions, subtle modifications of an idea, or a complex of ideas. A variety of ideographs, more advanced in function, may represent words in a given language. Such ideographs have a phonetic element in them. This kind is sometimes called “analytic transitional script.” Phonemes are graphic symbols for speech sounds, and thus cease to be self-interpreting pictures. Phonemes are intimately tied to the mechanics of speech in a particular language.
The aim of this article is to describe the nature of the several scripts utilized in the ancient Near East, to trace their development and influence, to list some of the most significant literature written in each script in the several areas of the ancient Near East, and to relate what is known about ancient scripts to the writing of the Old Testament, especially the Pentateuch.
The Mesopotamian Valley
The Sumerian Pictograph and Cuneiform
The oldest samples of Sumerian come from Erech, dating about 3000 B.C. and numbering about one thousand tablets. These tablets were poorly baked and came out of the ground in fragmentary condition. The signs were pictographs drawn on the clay tablets with a stylus, probably a reed. The making and inscribing of tablets were done at temples to record their resources and activities.
As the years passed, the pictograph forms were replaced by similar signs impressed on the clay surface by the tip of a stylus, which left wedge-shaped marks. More and more, this new procedure stylized the signs so that they looked little like the originals. Another change also crept into the system: instead of pictures representing ideas and acts, the signs became increasingly phonetic. The signs did not represent either a consonant or a vowel, but rather consonant and vowel: i.e., ba, bi, bu, ub, ib, ab. Since
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Selected Specimens of Sumerian Writing
a different sign was needed for each possible combination, hundreds of syllables were depicted by hundreds of signs, resulting in a complicated form of writing. About nine hundred different symbols were found at Erech (Uruk) alone.
By the time the Semitic Empire under Sargon I was formed, toward the end of the third millennium, the Sumerians had forged a system of writing that was an effective means of communication and preservation of records and literature. Scholars have given the name cuneiform (a Latin compound meaning “wedge-shaped”) to the symbols produced by this style of writing.
Originally the writing was arranged like Chinese or Japanese—in columns. Eventually, for reasons not entirely clear, the columns were turned on their sides, to run from left to right across the writing surface. Interestingly enough, this meant turning the original signs on their sides, as well.
The Akkadian Cuneiform
The Semitic Akkadians, led by Sargon I, borrowed heavily from the Sumerians and adapted the cuneiform to their own language. This could be done quite easily since already the signs represented syllables and had phonetic values.
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The Old Babylonian Empire of Hammurabi made extensive use of cuneiform in the late eighteenth and early seventeenth centuries B.C. By the fourteenth century, it was utilized widely as an international means of communication. The Hurrians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, and the Canaanites found that the system could be adapted to their own languages. This is most graphically illustrated by the collection of diplomatic correspondence from the fourteenth century B.C. found at Tell el-Amarna. Coming from every corner of the ancient Near East, all are written in cuneiform. During the Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, and Persian empires, the script was standard. It steadily declined in popularity during the Greek Empire and disappeared about A.D. 75 during the Roman Empire. The Persians had devised a mixture of alphabetic and syllabic signs; but centuries before, almost a millennium in fact, the scribes at Ugarit had invented a pure alphabetic script utilizing cuneiform signs. More about this will be presented later.
The Adapa Tablet from Ashurbanipal’s library at Nineveh dating to the seventh century B.C. or slightly earlier. It contains the story of the Mesopotamian Adam. (See Bible and Spade, Summer 1977, pp. 65-76.)
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The Nile Valley
The Egyptian Hieroglyphs
At least by 3000 B.C., the Egyptians were recording and communicating their thoughts by means of pictographs. Scholars have labeled this form of writing hieroglyphic (a compound of two Greek words meaning “sacred carvings”) and applied the term to all Egyptian forms that were pictorial. The pictures represented everything found in ancient Egyptian life, but they also stood for the actions and uses of each object pictured. The Egyptians soon learned to regard their hieroglyphs as more than ideograms; they gave signs phonetic values and made some into determinatives or modifiers of other ideas. The sign could be written from top to bottom, from right to left, or from left to right. From right to left was the normal direction of writing. There were 604 basic symbols in the system.
In hieroglyphic writing, there were no separate signs for vowels, as was true of cuneiform, but there were a few signs for groups of three consonants, about seventy-five for two consonants, and twenty-four signs (later as many as thirty) for single consonants. The latter actually could have provided the Egyptians with an alphabetic script, yet they mixed all these signs together as needed. They never did take the step of creating an alphabet, though some of their signs found their way into the one that was devised by other people.
Hieroglyphic writing was an artistic medium. It was used for virtually all the monumental inscriptions, beautifully carved on stone monuments or on stone or plastered walls of temples and graves. The carvings were then painted in brilliant colors that have survived the ages. Hieroglyphs became more and more confined to religious matters, continuing in use among the priests until a small group of priests of Isis on the island of Philae composed the last-known inscription in A.D. 394. Probably because of its complexity, hieroglyphs never became an international means of communication.
Developments of Hieroglyphic Script
Hieratic writing is an abbreviated kind of hieroglyphic script that scribes used for religious literature and somewhat for business documents. In this script, the signs were simplified to outlines or even to mere strokes. In time, many of the signs became linked to form ligatures. This script was mainly on papyrus, wooden boards, and pottery from the middle of the third millennium B.C. It received a great impetus through the reforms of Ikhnaton.
Demotic writing was a popular style that developed sometime before 700 B.C. and was widely employed in Egypt during the Greek and Roman
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domination of that land. It is an even more abbreviated form of hieroglyphic writing than is hieratic. Its use was limited almost totally to secular communication on papyrus, wood, and pottery. The latest-known inscription in this script dates to A.D. 476. It was written from right to left, as was hieratic.
The Rosetta stone is inscribed in Egyptian hieroglyphic and demotic characters and in Greek with a decree in honor of Ptolemy V, Epiphanes. This trilingual inscription became the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian writing.
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The Levant
The Proto-Sinaitic Alphabetic Script
Near some ancient turquoise mines in the Sinaitic peninsula, an Egyptian archaeologist, Sir Flinders Petrie, actually an Englishman, found twelve inscriptions of a peculiar script. Thirty-eight other inscriptions were located during expeditions in 1927, 1929, 1930, 1935, and later years, but they are in poor condition. Many are fragments. Two Semitic words have been identified: Ba’alat, a feminine form of Baal, designating Hathor, the Egyptian mother goddess; and a word meaning “gift offering.” There are at least twenty-five signs on the inscriptions, of which nineteen have been identified. Scholars regard the system as alphabetic. Some of the signs are like some Egyptian hieroglyphic signs, but they follow the acrophonic principle (i.e., the sign represents the first sound in the name of the sign, as c for “cat”).
There has been dispute about the date of the Sinaitic inscriptions. A. H. Gardiner gave them an approximate 1800 B.C. date, whereas W. F. Albright has proposed a date of about 1500 B.C. So far there has been no agreement.
Some scholars have held that Semitic workers in the mines operated in Sinai by the Egyptians borrowed directly from hieroglyphic symbols and invented an alphabet that was the ancestor of all other alphabets. Others hold that the invention was a product of Semites in Canaan, and that the Sinaitic script is a variety of the earlier form.
Canaanite and North Semitic Alphabetic Script
There is general agreement that the alphabetic script was invented by Semites in the Levant sometime between 2000-1700 B.C. Diringer regards the Hyksos as the likely candidates for this honor, but the claim cannot be proved. The actual origin of the alphabet is still shrouded in mystery. One thing is clear: the earliest inscriptions available utilize a fully developed system of writing. The two basic hallmarks of an alphabet, the one-sign, one-sound principle and the acrophonic principle, are present in these inscriptions.
The Canaanite Script
Our knowledge of a script is dependent on inscriptions that provide specimens of it. The specimens of early Canaanite script are limited but are extremely significant. They have all been found in the Levant since 1929 and are comprised of three chronological groups.
In the oldest group are three samples, dated in the eighteenth to seventeenth centuries B.C. They are (a) the Gezer Potsherd found in 1929, (b)
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the Shechem Stone Plaque found in 1934, and (c) the Lachish Dagger discovered in 1934.
The next group belongs to the late fifteenth to early fourteenth centuries B.C. They are (a) the Oblong Seal of Lachish, uncovered in 1935; (b) a similar seal found at Lachish; (c) Lachish Censer Lid found in 1936; (d) the Lachish Bowl No. 1; (e) the Tell el-Hesi Potsherd discovered in 1891; (f) the Tell el-’Ajjul Pot discovered in 1932; and (g) the Beth-Shemesh Ostracon brought to light in 1930.
The latest group is from the thirteenth century and includes (a) the Lachish Ewer found in 1934; (b) the Lachish Bowl No. 2 from the same year; (c) Lachish Sherd No. 6, also 1934; (d) a few bowl fragments; (e) Megiddo Golden Bracelet; (f) Jerusalem Temple Foundation Stone Inscription; and (g) the Raddana Jar Handle found near Ramallah in 1969.
Diringer notes the curious parallel of the first group with the Patriarchal period, the second group with the Conquest, and the last group with the period of the Judges. Although he refrains from claiming that these inscriptions were written by Hebrews, they certainly show that a full-fledged alphabet was being used as a means of recording items of interest during the time contemporary to the events recorded in the Pentateuch. G. E. Mendenhall has observed, “It is not widely enough known that in the time of Moses the Canaanites were familiar with at least eight languages recorded in five completely different systems of writing.”1
The North Semitic Script
Before 1923, there were a limited number of specimens of the North Semitic script available for study. Included in this small group were the Mesha Stele, or Moabite Stone, found in 1868 at Dhiban and dated about 850 B.C. An inscription written on bowl sherds was found on the island of Cyprus but dedicated to the Baal of Lebanon. Some specimens from Zinjirli in Syria also are dated to the ninth and eighth centuries B.C.
The breakthrough came with the unearthing at Byblos of the so-called Ahiram epitaph dated to about the twelfth century B.C.
More recently, these inscriptions have come to light: (a) the Abdo pottery fragment, fourteenth century B.C.; (b) the Shafatba’al inscription of the fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C.; (c) the Asdrubal spatula, about the twelfth century B.C.; (d) the Yehimilk of the eleventh century B.C.; (e) the Roueisseh spearhead of the same time; (f) the Abiba’al inscription; and (g) the Eliba’al inscription, both of the tenth century B.C.
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The North Semitic alphabet was the writing medium of the people who lived in Syria and was essentially the same as that used in Palestine. There were, twenty-two letters, all consonants, in the alphabet, and the script was written from right to left. It was this alphabet that the Greeks adopted about 1100-1000 B.C.
The Ugaritic Alphabetic Script
After ancient Ugarit (Ras Shamrah) was rediscovered and excavation begun in 1929, a series of spectacular “finds” of clay tablets bearing cuneiform inscriptions opened a new frontier of study. But these were different from the Akkadian cuneiform tablets. It was soon recognized that instead of a syllabic system, these tablets had thirty-two signs of an alphabetic style of writing. There were twenty-seven consonantal signs, three vowel signs, and two others of minor value. The only similarity with cuneiform was that the signs were impressed on clay with the end of a stylus, making wedge-shaped marks. The direction of writing was the same, from left to right. The language of the inscriptions was Canaanite.
A remarkable discovery in 1949 was a tablet with the oldest A B C
Adze with an Ugaritic alphabetic inscription.
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list on it. It has thirty letters, twenty-two of which are equivalent to the twenty-two in the North Semitic alphabet and in the same order. Two other fragmentary A B C lists have been found in Ugarit since, and they confirm this order of the alphabet.
No specific evidence points to the precise origin of the cuneiform alphabet. Scholars are generally agreed that the North Semitic alphabet lay behind it and that some genius invented the system. A sizeable amount of literature was written in this script at Ugarit from about 1500 B.C. to about 1200 B.C., when Ugarit was totally destroyed. Two specimens have been found in Palestine: a clay tablet from Beth Shemesh dates from 1400-1300 B.C.; a copper knife found on Mount Tabor dates from 1300-1200 B.C. The writing on these samples are from right to left.
Whereas the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet ceased with the destruction of the city of Ugarit, the Canaanite and North Semitic alphabets continued in popularity among the Hebrew and Phoenician peoples.
The Palaeo-Hebrew Script
Actually the type of script on the inscriptions definitely known to have been authored by Hebrews was only slightly different from that employed by the older Canaanites. The older signs were more conventional, angular, and pronglike in palaeo-Hebrew; but the consonants were the same, the direction of writing was the same (right to left), and there were no vowels.
All the inscriptions so far discovered that date from the kingdom period were written on stone or on potsherds. In the Scripture, there is only one description of the writing process (Jer. 36), and it relates that the scribe Baruch wrote on a scroll, probably made of papyrus. It is known that papyrus and leather were cheap and popular during the kingdom period, so few of the everyday documents would likely survive the dampness of the wet seasons. Of all the things written on these materials, only the Old Testament has come through to us, by means of careful repeated copying of its content.
The number of Hebrew inscriptions from the kingdom period is limited. A recently published fragment found at Lachish in 1938 is now considered to be the oldest sample and is dated to the twelfth or eleventh century B.C. Other than this fragment there are the following inscriptions:
(a) The Gezer Calendar dates from 1000-950 B.C. and was found in 1908 at the ruins of ancient Gezer. It gives the agricultural operations in Palestine for eight months of the year, beginning with October. Some think the hand-sized limestone slab, on which the calendar was written, was a school boy’s exercise slate.
(b) The Samaritan Ostraca are a group of about eight pieces of broken pottery on which records were written with brush and ink. They are dated
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Gezer agricultural calendar as redrawn from an original fragment. The text describes the main periods of planting and harvest.
at about 750 B.C.
(c) The Siloam inscription was found on a wall of a water tunnel beneath ancient Jerusalem in 1880. It tells of the completion of the tunnel in the time of King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah. It dates from about 700 B.C.
(d) Near the Siloam tunnel the first-known Hebrew tomb inscription was uncovered. It is dated from about 700 B.C.
(e) The Metsad Hashavyahu inscription was found near Tel Aviv and dates about 650 B.C.
(f) The Lachish Ostraca unearthed in 1935 and 1938 are twenty-one in number and are dated between 600-589 B.C.
In addition to the foregoing, hundreds of inscribed jar handles have been found, along with one hundred and fifty stone seals and many inscribed stone weights and measures. None of this material is biblical; it is, rather, domestic, commercial, and military. But these inscriptions do illustrate the type of script in which the greater part of the Old Testament was originally written.
The palaeo-Hebrew script was largely discarded during the Exile, but the fact that some of the older Dead Sea Scrolls are written in this script
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and that Jewish coins of the Maccabean period were inscribed in this script suggests that some Jewish scribes retained a knowledge of it and revived the use of it, to a limited degree, just before the New Testament period.
There is inscriptional evidence that the neighboring Moabites, Ammonites, and Edomites employed the same script as the Hebrews. Other than the famous Mesha Stele of the mid-ninth century B.C., there are only two Moabite seals.
There are but a few Ammonite specimens. The oldest is the Balu’al Stele found in 1930, which is dated from the thirteenth century B.C. Another inscription was found in Kerak in 1958, and it is dated to the ninth century B.C. A so-called Amman Citadel inscription was published in 1969 and dated to the ninth century also. A very short inscription, on a statuette found at Amman, dates to the fifth century B.C. Three seals have also been identified as Ammonite.
Only a few samples of Edomite script have been found, and they differ little from the Hebrew script. A jug found at Ezion-geber in 1938 bears six letters of an inscription, and there are twelve other jar handles with seal impressions. These specimens have been dated to the seventh century B.C.
The Samaritan community, which formed in the hills of Ephraim after the fall of North Israel in 721 B.C. and which still continues with a few hundred members, developed a variation of the palaeo-Hebrew script. This style of writing has been preserved in the Samaritan Pentateuch, scrolls of which can still be viewed at their sanctuary at modern Nablus.
The Phoenician Script
The type of alphabetic writing common among the Phoenicians of Tyre and Sidon and their colonies scattered throughout the Mediterranean Sea islands and along its shores remained remarkably similar to the palaeo-Hebrew for many centuries.
Less than a dozen samples of this script have been found in Phoenicia; most are from the Persian period and are brief. The longest, found in 1869 at Byblos, is about Yehawmilk (Yehimilk) of Byblos and is dated in the fifth to fourth centuries B.C. Elsewhere, three were found in Zinjirli, Syria. Two of these were produced by Kilamuwa and are dated in the ninth century B.C. They were found in A.D. 1902, but were not published until 1943. The other was made by Barrakab and dated in 730 B.C.; it was found in 1891 A.D.
Three versions of a Phoenician inscription were found at Karatepe, Anatolia (Turkey), in 1946–47 and are dated in the ninth to eighth centuries B.C. Three inscriptions have been found on the island of Sardinia. One, the Nora Stone, is significant, for it is dated to the early ninth century B.C. It
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was found in A.D. 1838. The earliest inscription on Cyprus has been dated to the ninth or eighth century B.C. A five-line inscription from Spain dates to the eighth century B.C.
The Phoenician developed into a variety called the Punic script. Samples of this type were found at Marseilles, France, in 1845, dating to the third or second century B.C. Of the same time, there is an inscription found at Carthage. Others have been found in Malta, Sicily, and Greece.
The Phoenician script was the father of all the Western scripts, mainly through the Greeks, who started to borrow the alphabet as early as 1000 B.C. They retained nineteen of the Phoenician characters, made vowels out of several of them, and added new characters up to twenty-four. In the early period, their direction of writing varied. Some inscriptions proceed from left to right. In others, one line goes one way and the next goes to the opposite direction. In still others, the lines go from right to left. It was the left to right style that the Jewish translators of the Pentateuch employed in the third century B.C. to render the Hebrew text into the Greek Septuagint.
The Aramaic Alphabetic Script
While the Phoenician script was moving west, fathering the scripts of that part of the world, the Aramaic script was moving east, engendering the scripts of the Orient. It even persuaded the Hebrews to forsake the Phoenician style and rewrite, or better, transliterate, their Scripture into a derivative of the Aramaic form of writing.
Actually, the early Aramaic writing looked very much like palaeo-Hebrew or Phoenician, but it developed differently. The earliest inscription was found at Tell Halaf. It is dated to about 1000 B.C. and was published in A.D. 1940. The first royal inscription bears the name of Ben Hadad and is dated to the late ninth century B.C.; it was found in 1941. An ivory tablet uncovered in 1928 at Arslan Tash in Cappadocia is dated to the late ninth century B.C. The Zakir stele was discovered in 1904 near Aleppo and is dated about 775 B.C. Several hundred short inscriptions are scattered across the next centuries from as far away as northwest India. Many Aramaic papyrus scraps and inscribed pieces of broken pottery have been found in Egypt. The famous Elphantine papyri from the fifth century B.C. were written by Jews.
Up to the seventh century B.C., the Aramaic script was mostly limited to the Aramaeans themselves. But increasingly in the eighth and predominantly in the seventh centuries, the script was adopted by the Assyrian government, along with the Aramaic language, as the international means of communication. Assyrian sculptures show two scribes sitting side by side, one
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using the cuneiform method of writing, and the other, brush and ink on a scroll. The latter is presumably writing with the Aramaic script. Tablets in Ashurbanipal’s seventh-century library show that they were catalogued by means of the symbols of the Aramaic script. The Aramaic script remained important during the Neo-Babylonian and the Persian empires and was adopted widely by the common people. This is a remarkable achievement for the Aramaic nation. Syria was destroyed in 732 B.C.
The Square Hebrew Script
Sometime during the Exile of the Jews (sixth-fifth centuries B.C.), the Hebrew people decided to transliterate their Scripture into the Aramaic script, which by that time had developed to the extent that it looked somewhat different from the palaeo-Hebrew. Parts of Daniel (2:4b–7:28) and Ezra (4:8–6:18; and 7:12–26) were originally written in Aramaic.
The Aramaic script was taken by the returning Jews to Palestine, where the earliest-known inscription written by them dates from the third century B.C. There are inscriptions on Jewish ossuaries (burial boxes containing bones) from the second and first century B.C. Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nash Papyrus (dated about 100 B.C.) was the oldest biblical text known.
The Jews developed the Aramaic script into a more nearly square form. The alphabet still remained at twenty-two letters, all consonants; but two ceased to have a sound value, and four increasingly were used as signs for long vowels as spoken Hebrew died out, except in the synagogue and the school.
During the Middle Ages, vowel-systems did develop in Jewish circles. They are known as the Babylonian, the Palestinian, and the Tiberian systems. In the Babylonian system, small consonantal letters were written above the line of the text to represent basic long and short vowels. The Palestinian system utilized dots, also placed above the line of the text, to represent various vowels. Both of these schemes are represented in but a few manuscripts.
The Tiberian manner of symbolizing vowels was to arrange dots and dashs in varying combinations and to place them both above the line of text and below it. Some dots were placed within or beside the consonants. It is a highly efficient and logical method and has been the kind which has been preserved in most texts of the Hebrew Old Testament. The Tiberian mode also had a group of markings to indicate the accent patterns of each word. Synagogue scrolls never have any of these symbols.
During the years, cursive styles have developed among the various Jewish communities scattered throughout the world. Only one of these has
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Selected Specimens of Alphabetic Script
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become popular in modern Israel. It comes from the Polish-German communities and is used mostly in handwriting.
To the present time, Hebrew has managed to remain fairly close to the ideal of an alphabet, namely, one sign equals one sound. It has failed in two instances where two signs have lost their sounds, and in two cases where two signs stand for one sound. Only Turkish, Norwegian, Finnish, Spanish, and Korean scripts have successfully retained a one-sign, one-sound relationship. This is much better than English, which has twenty-six letters, forty-four sounds, and two hundred fifty-one spellings. Try this sentence: “The rough-headed, dough-faced ploughman went coughing and hiccoughing through the village after houghing the thoroughbred horse which he had bought for his brougham” (Diringer). Or, read this sentence: “Oh, no, you sought the toy cow thoroughly below the bureau, on the oboe, the boat, behind the door to sew the poor toe for Otto too.” To top it off, our letter “c” has no sound of its own but is pronounced as either “s” or “k.” By comparison, Hebrew is relatively easy.
Other Varieties of Script
A group of ten inscriptions was found at Byblos in 1929, only three of which are of any length. The total of signs on the inscriptions is 1038, but there are only 114 different symbols, which are heavily influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs. The Frenchman, Edouard Dhorme, claimed in 1946 that he had deciphered the script and found it to be made up of syllables. He said the language was Phoenician and that the script should be dated about 1500 B.C. Other scholars, however, disputed his conclusions.
The Hittites had a sort of hieroglyphic script, which was employed by them from about 1500-600 B.C. The earliest inscription was found in A.D. 1812, but the script was not deciphered until the 1930’s. This script had no impact on the productions of the Scripture.
(From The Pentateuch in its Cultural Environment by G. Herbert Livingston. Copyright 1974 by Baker Book House and used by permission.)
Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant: even as the Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life, a ransom for many.
Matthew 20:26–28