EARLY HEBREW SYLLABARY

The Lost Link

The Alphabet in the Hands of the Early Israelites

Brian E. Colless

Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand

First published here:

http://www.asor.org/anetoday/2014/02/the-lost-link-the-alphabet-in-the-hands-of-the-early-israelites/

The version offered here is being modified:

If I am not interrupting,  I would like to tell you something that has got me thinking: I may have made a surprising discovery about the way the alphabet was used by the Israelites in their early period of settlement in the Promised Land, that is, the time of the Judges (including Samuel) or, archaeologically speaking, Iron Age I (c. 1200 to 1000 BCE).
   I feel like the woman in the parable (Luke 15:8-9) who lit a lamp, poured light on the scene, and searched diligently for a lost coin, one of her ten silver drachmas; when she found it she rejoiced and rushed to tell her friends and neighbours. So here is my ten drachmas’ worth to share with everybody, as I feel that I have alighted on something significant that has been overlooked for three millennia. This lost object, now ready for our inspection, is just one of a whole bunch of keys that can open doors to our understanding of the early alphabet, with regard to its features and functions. Indeed, it is a missing link in a ten-point theory of the origin and evolution of the alphabet.
   The main difficulty we encounter, as practitioners of ancient Hebrew epigraphy, is the dearth of documents available, from those early centuries of the Iron Age. The few inscriptions we do have are brief and frequently fragmentary.[1] However, things are now improving, and we possess two five-line texts, namely the Izbet Sartah Ostracon[2] and the Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon[3]. 
   The Qeiyafa Ostracon came to light in Khirbet Qeiyafa, a fort overlooking the Valley of Elah, where David confronted Goliath (1 Samuel 17); the site has been plausibly identified as Sha`arayim (mentioned in 1 Samuel 17:52). 

 

A tentative drawing of the Qeiyafa Ostracon (BEC January 2014)
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/qeiyafa-ostracon-2

   On this potsherd from three thousand years ago there are five faded lines of alphabetic letters, written in ink; and some of the signs have their upper part missing, because of damage to the top of the ostracon. The text runs from left to right (the opposite of later Hebrew writing). The first letter on the first line (top left corner) is ’Aleph, in a reclining attitude. The better-known upright stance (Greek Alpha and Roman A) appears at the start of lines 4 and 5. The original form, the head of an ox with horns, is found near the end of the top line. Closer examination reveals that other letters likewise have variations in their shape and stance. Notice that the letter Shin stands at the beginning of the second line in a figure-3 pose, but further along the line it looks like W. The numerous instances of Mem (all vertical, never like the horizontal Greco-Roman M) have different numbers of curves (or water waves).
   The question that begs to be asked (though nobody has dared to articulate it) is whether all the variations are arbitrary (just vagaries of the writer’s style of handwriting, like the three different renderings of P in my personal repertoire) or whether the differences are deliberate and meaningful.
   The common assumption is that the early Hebrew alphabet was like the Phoenician alphabet of the Iron Age: it had twenty-two letters and each of them stood for a particular consonant, and of course there was no indication of the vowels in writing. The dots and dashes found in Hebrew Bibles for indicating vowels were much later inventions of scribes who were concerned that the Sacred Scriptures should be recited correctly. Eventually, later in the Iron Age, vowel markers were inserted in a Hebrew text, using Waw for showing the presence of a long u or o, Yod for long i or e, and He for long a; these are known technically as matres lectionis (mothers of reading, offering sustenance to the reader, so to speak). This idea was not used in Phoenician inscriptions, but it is still employed in Modern Hebrew writing.
   Returning to our question regarding the possible significance of the variations in the letters on the Qeiyafa Ostracon, we may now ask whether the various forms and stances of each letter constituted a way of denoting particular vowels. Actually, there was already an analogy for this in the West Semitic cuneiform alphabet, which was particularly associated with the city of Ugarit (on the Syrian coast, east of Cyprus) but it is also attested throughout the Levant. The scribes of Ugarit, in the Late Bronze Age II, immediately preceding the Iron Age, had a cuneiform sign for each consonant, made up of wedge-shaped marks, and I think (having demonstrated this elsewhere) that almost all of them were constructed with the image of the corresponding letter of the Semitic alphabet in mind.[4]  The relevant detail is this: on the clay tablets of Ugarit there were three distinct ’Aleph characters, representing ’a, ’i, ’u.
   This phenomenon could have a connection with the trio of ’Aleph forms on the Qeiyafa Ostracon. But my idea goes further than that: in the early “Israelian” Hebrew alphabet each of its twenty-two letters had two additional forms, making a total of sixty-six signs. In fact, the system was not a simple consonantary (which the Phoenician alphabet certainly was, in the Iron Age) but a syllabary. Incidentally, there has long been a discussion about the nature of the Phoenician alphabet, and whether it should be understood as a syllabary, with each sign standing for a consonant with any vowel; but that is a different matter. What I am proposing here is a syllabic alphabet.
   How can this syllabary hypothesis be tested? A first step would be to compare the letters found on the Qeiyafa inscription with their counterparts in the Izbet Sartah text.

Tentative drawing of the Izbet Sartah Ostracon (BEC January 2014)

   The bonus on this document is the copy of the scribe’s own set of signs in the fifth line, running from the left (sinistrodextrally) with the familiar Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, which would become Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta when the Hellenic alphabet was constructed from the West Semitic consonantary, and when Aleph (the glottal stop) became the sign for the vowel a, with no consonantal reference. The copy of the alphabet presented to us on the Izbet Sartah Ostracon has the expected twenty-two letters, though some of them are hiding from us, and several of them are not in the order we know from the later Hebrew and Greek alphabets.
   Habitually in this field of endeavour, the assumption is made that when the letters in this abecedary (or “abagadary”) are used in a text, the reader will have to supply the appropriate vowel in every case. However, in the four lines of writing above the Izbet Sartah alphabet (which are an interesting personal message from the writer himself, in my interpretation of them) we are offered Aleph in more than one stance (though the inverted A-form, the ox-head, is absent here). And when we have established the shape of the Lamed in the bottom line (more like a 6 than a 9), we look higher and see 9s as well as 6s (with the added complication that this scribe makes it difficult to distinguish B and L).
   Consider also Kaph: we can see the origins of Greek Kappa in the model provided in line 5, but at the beginning of line 2 it is quite different, being a bisected right angle on a stem; I suggest (after experimenting with possible words and meanings in both texts) that the K-form says ka, and the trident is ki. My detailed observation of the letters in this line, in comparison with examples on the Qeiyafa inscription and other related documents, leads me to suspect that this inventory is indeed an abagadary, in which every sign has the vowel a built into it: ’A, BA, GA, DA, and so on to TA. The Taw here is not a simple + cross (like a plus sign) since the cross-beam points north-east; and if we focus on a trio of them, one above another, in lines 1, 2, and 4, we see the middle one has its cross-bar pointing north-west, and I have reasons for believing it is TI.
   Now, if we take the Izbet Sartah TA to the Qeiyafa text, this matches the third letter in the top line, and the presumed TI is the penultimate sign in the bottom line. The TU is lurking in line 3 (a small character) as a cross that is shaped almost like a multiplication sign. If we apply this information to Phoenician inscriptions from the same period we might expect to see the TA syllabogram functioning as Taw, or even a perfectly even cross (+); but the TI is predominant.
   Looking at Shin, we know two forms, “W” (SHI) and “3” (SHA in the Izbet Sartah abagadary); and the Qubur Walayda Bowl (pictured below) provides the third, a reversed “3”; the SHI sign (W) is what we see in the Phoenician realm, as well as in later Hebrew inscriptions, notably the Gezer Calendar [5], which show that the Phoenician style was adopted at some time in the 10^th century BCE, the era of the reigns of David and Solomon, when commercial and diplomatic relations were flourishing between Jerusalem and Tyre.
   A supposition is rising up before our eyes: the Izbet Sartah abagadary (with its a-vowel syllabograms) is not the place to look for the originals of the letters in the later consonantal alphabet, because this simpler system was made up of i-syllable signs (but with the vowels ignored). Fortunately we have at our disposal a list of the consonantal letters from Iron Age II, on the Tel Zayit Stone, and it seems that this document confirms the supposition.[6]
   Thus, the Zayit K is not the KA of the Izbet Sartah abagadary, but the KI at the start of line 2 (as mentioned earlier), which is a trident. The Qeiyafa KI (at the end of line 4 in the word MLK “king”) apparently has no stem, but this is likewise the case with all the Phoenician examples.
   Seeking a Phoenician counterpart for one of the three Aleph characters, we are at a loss, but perhaps the key feature is not the stance but the crossbar, which breaks through one side or both sides. The Zayit Aleph is typical, pointing leftwards, the direction of the writing, and having a vertical line cutting through it. However, we must acknowledge that the various scribes had their idiosyncrasies (whether regional or personal) and possibly made their own rules for distinguishing the syllabic forms of each letter.
   Samek in the international consonantal alphabet was a “telegraph pole”, a stem with three (or just two) crossbars; it is actually an Egyptian djed, representing a spinal column. This character does not appear in any of the Iron Age I inscriptions, because they have a fish for their Samek. That is what we see in the Izbet Sartah abagadary between Nun and Pe; on the Qeiyafa text, in line 4, between Y and D (notice the dots indicating a fan-tail in each case); also on the Beth-Shemesh Ostracon; but prejudgement (rather than blind prejudice) does not allow most epigraphists to see it, because they are convinced that the fish in the Bronze Age proto-alphabet was D (from dag “fish”). Possibly the tree-shaped Samek functioned as SI in the syllabic alphabet, and it has not turned up in the extant inscriptions. There were presumably 66 signs, and we certainly have not seen them all yet.
   ‘Ayin in the Phoenician alphabet, as also on the Zayit Stone, is a circle, but without the centre-dot that is characteristic of the sign in the south in Iron Age I. However, on the Beth-Shemesh Ostracon [7] there is one of each, leading to the suspicion that the empty circle is the syllable ‘I. The sign for ‘U remains to be identified.
   Mem has a variety of forms in the documents, but there are three basic types: the Phoenician M is presumably MI and it has the top stroke pointing NE, and the bottom stroke SW (the number of intervening angles varies for MI in Israel); MA has the top as NE and the bottom as SE (and only one angle in between); MU has the top as NW and the bottom as SW (with two angles or only one in between). Confusion could occur between MA and SHU, and also between SHA and short versions of MU, but the Sha-signs have horizontal tops and bottoms.
   It should be emphasized that the letters in the Izbet Sartah abagadary are different from their counterparts in the Zayit alphabet, and this in itself supports the idea that the one gives the -a forms, and the other gives the -i forms acting as consonantal signs with no indication of its accompanying vowel. But the question is: whether the neo-consonantary preceded the neo-syllabary (and its letters were used for -i syllables) or whether the neo-consonantary came later (and the -i signs were chosen for the simple alphabet).  The first situation seems to fit the case, as the neo-consonantary is attesested around 1500 BCE, and the neo-syllabary appears around 1200 BCE. Thus the neo-syllabary would have been built around the letters of the neo-consonantary, with new forms and/or stances created for the -a and -u syllables.
   Looking back to the beginnings, the original prototype of the alphabet came out of the West Semitic syllabary in the Bronze Age.[8] At least eighteen  of the twenty-two letters (18/22) that survived into the Phoenician and Hebrew consonantal alphabet of the Iron Age were already in that proto-syllabary; this can be seen on the table of alphabet evolution appended below (note the BS [Byblos script] column in the Phoenicia section). For the most part, the syllabograms with –a were chosen for this purpose. The proto-alphabet was patterned after the Egyptian writing system, which did not indicate vowels, but the characters could also function as logograms, ideograms, and rebograms (rebuses).[9] We see this in the proto-alphabetic inscription from Wadi el-Hol in the Egyptian desert, which speaks of feasting in celebration of the goddess ‘Anat, in agreement with the Egyptian inscriptions reporting similar carousing in honour of Hathor.[10] 
   The new syllabary (the Hebrew neo-syllabary of the Early Iron Age, as distinct from the proto-syllabary of the Early Bronze Age) did not necessarily select the direct descendant of these proto-alphabetic originals for the set 0f syllabograms ending in -a:  for example, the Aleph corresponding to the ox-head is not ’a, but little more can be said on this score at present.
   Suddenly we realise that we are hearing the vowels as well as the consonants! The writer of the Izbet Sartah says, in my reading of his text (line 1b-2a): “I see that the eye gives the breath of the sign into the ear”. In this statement he uses the ‘Ayin sign for “see” and then for “the eye”, continuing the practice that goes right back to the inception of the proto-alphabet, and also to the West Semitic syllabary that preceded it, whereby the pictophonograms could act not only as consonantograms or syllabograms, but also as logograms, ideograms, and rebograms (rebuses), as happened with the hieroglyphs in the Egyptian writing system, which influenced the formation of these two West Semitic scripts.
   Thus, the early Hebrew alphabet of Iron Age I was not the same as the Phoenician alphabet of the Iron Age: it had sixty-six letters (not simply twenty-two), and each of them stood for a particular open syllable (consonant plus vowel, not merely a single consonant), and so there was every indication of the vowels in writing. Moreover, the signs were multifunctional, a concept that is never countenanced in the standard manuals of West Semitic epigraphy.
   In summary, here are some indicators for distinguishing the two early Iron Age alphabetic scripts, which we might call (1) the neo-syllabary and (2) the international consonantary.

(1)   ISRAELIAN SCRIPT AND HEBREW LANGUAGE

(2)  PHOENICIAN SCRIPT AND HEBREW LANGUAGE

(1) Various forms for each letter (’abugida syllabary)
(2) Single form for each letter (’bgd consonantary)

(1)  Dextrograde, sinistrodextral (L > R)
(2)  Sinistrograde, dextrosinistral (L < R)

(1)  Fish for Samek
(2)  Spinal column (djed) for Samek

(1)  Dot in circle of `ayin
(2)  No dot in circle of `ayin

(1)  Vertical and horizontal forms of Sh-sign (3 and W)
(2)  Horizontal Sh only (\/\/)

(1)  Logography and Rebography
(2) Consonantal writing only

   In the light of these criteria (none of which is determinative by itself), we may consider some examples.
   The broken inscription on the Ophel Pithos from Jerusalem is highly problematic, not having the key indicators (Samek, ‘Ayin, Shin), and with uncertainty about the direction of the writing.[11] It appears to have two forms of Nun (NI and a reversed version) or possibly two different instances of Mem (if the N on the far right is really M); its Het (Khet) is unusual, lacking a central crossbar, and so it seems to be neo-syllabic, possibly H.U (Khu) but not H.I (Khi); the Mem (first letter on the left) seems to fit the MI mould, rather than MU or MA, and so it is not prescriptive either way; the letter following could be R (facing in the wrong direction) or Q (which should have the stem piercing the oval for QI and Phoenician Q), and the next one P (a reversal of the Phoenician P) or L (inverted and reversed). It is thus anomalous as a Phoenician-style text, and this perhaps supports it as neo-syllabic; and so it might have been written before David established his capital there. But it was inscribed before it was baked, and it was not necessarily made in Jerusalem. Incidentally, it is under discussion whether this is a vessel for wine or water or whatever.

 

Fragmentary pithos inscription from Jerusalem

   Then there is the Qubur el-Walaydah bowl, usually dated early in the Iron Age, and it is quite instructive as far as it goes.

Drawing of the QW bowl (BEC January 2014)

   Transcribing the writing (from left to right) with consonants only, I read:
                  Sh M B? ` L | ’ Y ’ L | M Kh
The bulk of the text is a personal name, the second part (’ Y ’ L) being the patronymic. As stated above, the Sh-sign would be SHU (indistinct on this picture, but it is a "Sigma", not “3” SHA, nor “W” SHI) .  The Mem should be MI (though it has more angles than the Phoenician form). Thirdly B or P (but BA seems more likely than PA, because it is the god Ba`al). Then comes ‘Ayin with no dot, so it is ‘I. The Lamed here is not the same as the one further on, and I will not make a decision on their respective sounds; but it might be LI. Hence Shumiba`ili  (“name of Ba`al”). Regarding the Mem Khet combination (apparently separated from the rest by another dividing stroke), this could say mah.u “a fatling” (a sacrifice, as at the end of the Wadi el-Hol horizontal inscription, in my reading of it).
   Another intriguing inscription comes from Gath, the hometown of Goliath.[12]

Gath Ostracon

   The line of writing probably runs from right to left, and this suggests it is the international alphabet, not the neo-syllabary; but the Aleph has the wrong stance (it is upright, not reclining) though it has the characteristic extension of its crossbar. The two instances of L seem to be the same, and they are reversed versions of those on the QW bowl above, and also of the Lamed in the Izbet Sartah abagadary. It is hard to determine whether the two Y-shaped characters represent Waw or Yod. The first Taw might be meant to be TU or TA, and the second one TI, or else the stance has no particular significance. It is supposed to say ’LWT WLT (the dividing line, as on the QW Bowl, could signify “son of”), and a resemblance to GLYT (Goliath) is pointed out.
   The Gath inscription is certainly Philistian, and perhaps its script is a local version of the consonantary or the syllabary. The Qeiyafa Ostracon is from a fort in the vicinity of Gath, but I have reasons for believing its script and language are Israelian. The Zayit alphabet is clearly the international consonantary, and this site is also in Philistia, near Gaza, but it could be Israelian, in the kingdom of David and Solomon. The Qubur Walayda inscription is supposed to be early, and its geographical position (south of Gaza in the Negev) hints that it might be Philistian rather than Israelian; the name Shumi-Ba`ili is not decisive.
   Consequently it may well be that the new syllabary was not only used by Israelites but also by Philistines, and possibly Jebusites (in Jerusalem, on the Ophel pithos). In any case, my guess is that the change from local syllabary to international consonantary came about when the Davidic dynasty established cultural and commercial ties with Phoenicia (2 Samuel 5:11-12, 1 Kings 5:1-18, Hiram of Tyre) and adopted the international consonantal alphabet, as used in Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos (the chief supplier of our inscriptional evidence).
   And now a question about priority (or priorness): which came first? Was the Phoenician consonantary a reduction of the Israelian neo-syllabary, employing only the -i characters? Or was the Hebrew neo-syllabary an expansion of the Phoenician alphabet, which became the i-column in the new construction?
   There are no known alphabetic inscriptions from Phoenicia in the Bronze Age. 
[3 September 2016: But see now an inscribed bowl from Byblos:
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2016/08/byblos-bowl-inscription.html]
It is not credible to surmise that the Phoenicians were not writing and recording in that era, but we might assume that they were favouring the original Byblos syllabary, which is attested all around the Mediterranean region and beyond (notably Jamaica[13] and Scandinavia[14]); and their written records would have been on perishable papyrus.
   Nevertheless, four Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions (or graffiti) have turned up on clay tablets, in Mesopotamia (from the Sealand, at the Persian Gulf) from the end of the First Dynasty of Babylon, that is, around 1600 BCE. Amazingly the letters have the same forms as the Iron Age consonantary. One of them is a transcription of the name Ali-dîn-ili. For our purposes it is unfortunate to see so many –i syllables in it, but we can say that the same form of Aleph is used in Ali and Ili (an acute angle with a vertical line running through both sides, and pointing leftwards, the expected direction of the writing). Another graffito begins with that form of Aleph, and, judging only from drawings, both texts have the regular forms known from the Iron Age (the Tel Zayit alphabet is invoked by the reporting researcher, for comparison). One exception is Yod, which is uncharacteristically reversed. This surprising evidence needs closer scrutiny and confirmation of its date.[15]
   In the nineteenth century the bones of the Ichthyosaurus lay “unpublished” in glass cases in the Ashmolean Museum for a hundred years or more; they were disturbing to the consensus.    In our own times, photographs of two ’abagadaries of the proto-alphabet (which were discovered in southern Egypt and included by William Flinders Petrie, in 1912, in the frontispiece of his book The Formation of the Alphabet) have been disregarded and not taken into account in all the published discussions and speculations that have gone on in this realm; and they are not mentioned in any of the handbooks on the subject.[16]
   The climate is changing drastically around us, and apparently the paradigm has now shifted in West Semitic epigraphy. Still, this neo-syllabary (which has been posited here) could be a hypothesis that can be easily falsified; but the variation in forms of letters in a single inscription such as the Qeiyafa Ostracon requires an investigation.
   I have chosen to announce my findings here, because of the strong connection with ASOR that the forerunners had, namely William Foxwell Albright and Frank Moore Cross, and I regret that they did not live to share in this new knowledge. Unfortunately their successors sometimes fail to test the theories of these masters, upholding the proposed identifications for the signs of the proto-alphabet without taking sufficient account of other possibilities.
   I have been inspired by the words of another keen practitioner of this art and science, namely Gordon J. Hamilton, who said (on the internet) that the recent discoveries of such inscriptions should have the effect of “motivating researchers to dig deeper and reconsider previous views”.
   We must also try harder to read these important texts. In line 3 of the Qeiyafa Ostracon, I discern this sequence: M T G L Y T B ` L D W D, and the syllables seem to reveal GULIYUTU and DAWIDU, and the meaning is: “Goliath is dead, David has prevailed (ba`ala)”.[17]

APPENDIX 

Ten-point theory of the origin and evolution 

of the alphabet.[18]

SYNOPSIS 

proto-syllabary (22 consonants represented, with vowels i, a, u, and logography)
proto-consonantary (proto-alphabet, closely related to the syllabary, but 27 consonants; also logographic)
neo-consonantary (22 letters, the basis of all alphabets)
neo-syllabary (the 22 letters have 3 forms and/or stances, as seen on the Izbert Sartah and Qeiyafa ostraca)

 

 (1) Before 3000 BCE in Mesopotamia a complex pictophonographic logosyllabary emerged; the rebus principle produced numerous phonetic syllabograms from its logograms; its pictorial and symbolic characters turned into cuneiform script, using wedge-shaped components. Four vowels were represented (i e a u).
(2) Before 3000 BCE in Egypt a complex pictophonographic logoconsonantary was created; its pictorial and symbolic hieroglyphs became stylized and unrecognizable (in the Hieratic script), but the original shapes of its logograms and phonograms (simple and complex consonantograms) were preserved for monumental inscriptions. Generally, vowels were not represented.
(3) Proto-syllabary  Before 2300 (in the Early Bronze Age) in Canaan (Syria-Palestine), probably at Gubla (Byblos), a simpler pictophonographic logosyllabary was constructed, largely from Egyptian characters, and using the acrophonic principle (a modification of the rebus principle) to form syllabograms (representing a single consonant with a vowel), which could also function as logograms and rebograms. Twenty-two consonants and three vowels (i a u) were represented.
(4) This became the model for other acrophonic syllabic scripts: Aegean (Cretan and Cyprian, 5 vowels) and Anatolian (Luwian, 3 vowels); also American (notably the Maya acrophonic logosyllabary, with 5 vowels).
(5) Proto-consonantary After 2000 BCE (in the Middle Bronze Age) in Egypt, apparently, the West Semitic proto-alphabet was constructed as a simple logoconsonantary, largely from elements in the West Semitic syllabary and thus based on Egyptian hieroglyphs; its phonograms were acrophonic consonantograms, which could also function as logograms and rebograms. The number of consonants was expanded from 22 to 27 (or possibly more). No vowels were represented.
(6) This proto-alphabet spread to the Levant (in the Hyksos period, 17^th century BCE?) and was used alongside the syllabary (in Egypt and Canaan). No vowels were represented. The number of consonants was retained at 27, but this was, sooner or later, reduced to 22 phonemes.
(7) In the Late Bronze Age, apparently at Ugarit, a cuneiform consonantary was devised, with cuneiform characters based on the pictorial forms of the proto-alphabet. There was a long version, with the full complement of consonants, and syllabic signs for ’a ’i ’u; and also a short version used beyond Ugarit.
(8) Neo-syllabary  Early in the Iron Age, in Israel (and Philistia?) a syllabic alphabet appears, “the neo-syllabary”, a new development employing the stylized forms of the proto-alphabet, with a reduced number of consonants (22, the same as in the earlier West Semitic logosyllabary), and with three vowels (u a i) represented by changing the shapes and stances of the letters. The practice of logography persisted, and the signs were multifunctional, as in the proto-alphabet.
(9) Neo-consonantary In the Levant, in the Iron Age, a simple consonantary with 22 letters, conventionally known as the Phoenician alphabet, became the international writing system for West Semitic languages (Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, Moabite, and others). In some cases matres lectionis were added, to compensate for the lack of vowel signs.
(10) In the Hellenic regions an alphabet was invented, with the elements of the West Semitic consonantary put to new uses, including the innovation of vowel-letters (“vocalograms”).

Table of the evolution of the Alphabet

Note that the neo-syllabary of Iron Age I is not shown

Click on it for an enlargement

---

NOTES

[1] Early Iron Age inscriptions, with comparative tables of signs:
http://www.rollstonepigraphy.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Rollston-op-TelZayit.pdf
Fig 8: Tel Zayit abagadary

[2] Izbet Sartah Ostracon: Photograph: http://storiadigitale.zanichellipro.it/media/images/070.jpg

[3] Qeiyafa Ostracon: Photographs and drawings of the inscription appear on the Qeiyafa website:
http://qeiyafa.huji.ac.il/ostracon12_2.asp

[4] Cuneiform alphabet:
 https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/cuneiformalphabet

[5] Gezer Calendar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gezer_calendar

[6] Tel Zayit ’bgdary (see also note 1 above):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zayit_Stone

[7] Beth-Shemesh ostracon: https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/winewhine

[8] West Semitic acrophonic logo-syllabary: https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/westsemiticsyllabary
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/03/oldest-west-semitic-inscriptions-these.html

[9] Technical terms (some are neologisms) in “paleogrammatology”: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2011/07/science-of-paleogrammatology-and.html

[10] Wadi el-Hol proto-alphabetic inscription: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2009/12/wadi-el-hol-proto-alphabetic.html

[11] Ophel Pithos from Jerusalem:
http://www.foundationstone.org/resources/Ophel-inscription.pdf
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2013/07/jerusalem-jar-inscription.html

[12] Gath Ostracon:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gath_%28city%29
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracon_de_Tel_es-Safi
Maeir, A.M., Wimmer, S.J., Zukerman, A. et Demsky, A. 2008. An Iron Age I/IIA Archaic Alphabetic Inscription from Tell es-Safi/Gath: Paleography, Dating, and Historical-Cultural Significance. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 351 (2008)

[13] Inscribed metal cup from Jamaica:
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2012/05/phoenician-bronze-cup-in-jamaica-below.html

[14] West Semitic syllabic inscription in Norway: http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2013/09/phoenicians-in-scandinavia.html

[15] Four Phoenician graffiti on Babylonian clay tablets:
Laurent COLONNA D’ISTRIA Université de Genève, Épigraphes alphabétiques du pays de la Mer, N.A.B.U. 2012, 3 (septembre), 61-63
http://sepoa.fr/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/NABU-2012-3-FINAL.pdf
Dalley S., 2009, Babylonian Tablets from the First Sealand Dynasty in the Schøyen Collection, CUSAS 9

[16] Two abagadaries of the proto-alphabet from Egypt:
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2007/10/gordon-hamiltons-early-alphabet-thesis.html

[17] My work-in-progress on the Qeiyafa Ostracon may be viewed here:
https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/qeiyafa-ostracon-2

[18] Evolution of the alphabet: https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/alphabetevolution

 

EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL AND ETHNOGENESIS

Avraham Faust

 

CHAPTER 9

The Emergence of Israel and Theories of Ethnogenesis

The Wiley BlackwellCompanion toAncient Israel

Edited by

Susan Niditch Oxford 2016 155 - 173

Notice his remarks on Qubur Walayda and Beth-Shemesh as Canaanian sites
not much pork at QW, no pigs at Beth-Shemesh (see below
Simplicity of undecorated pottery a marker of Israelian presence, versus the rest of the population.

relation with the Israelites (without elaborating the reasons for this relation) and/or its functional suitability to the needs of the IronAge peasants, regardless of their ethnicity.The former was viewed as simplistic and was abandoned by many in favor of the latter. Still, this functional explanation fails to account for the synchronic and diachronic dominance of the four-room house as a preferable architectural type in all levels of Iron Age settlement (from cities to hamlets and farmsteads), all over the country (both in high-lands and lowlands),for almost 600years(!).Moreover, the plan served as a template not only for dwellings, but also for public buildings, and even for the late Iron Age Judahite tombs.Thefact that the house disappeared in the sixth centuryBCE seems also to refute any“functional”explanation, as no changes in peasant life and no architectural or agri-culturalinventions took place at the time.We have therefore suggested that an adequate explanation for the unique phenomenon of the four-room house must relate to the ideological/cognitive realm (Bunimovitz and Faust, “Building identity”; Faust, including
EMERGENCE OF ISRAEL AND ETHNOGENESIS
The Historical Context for the Emergence of Israelite Traits: Israel and the PhilistinesSome of the Israelite traits seem like a straightforward way to differentiate this group from   t he

 Philistines.The  consumption of    pork ;   among thePhilistines peaked inthe󿬁nalphases of IronAgeI:morethan20 percentof the diet in places where data are available.
Canaanite sites exhibit either a lowlevel of pork consumption,
for example in Qubur el-Walaydah, or an avoidance of pigs, for example in Beth-Shemesh; cf. Faust and Katz.
In most cases (Gath being an exception) this decreases dramatically during Iron Age II (Faust andLev-Tov,including references). Therefore the time in which avoidance of pork could have become a meaningful ethnic trait must have been Iron Age I, and not later. Interestingly, while some question the sensitivity of even this trait for studying ethnic-ity in the Iron Age, it appears that new data further support its signi󿬁cance.
Detailed data on the percentage of pork in a number of IronI levels at Ekron show that while the Philistines consumed pork from the time of their arrival–no doubt food habits that carried no ethnic meaning at the time of their initial settlement–they gradually increased the percentage of pork in their diet during Iron I: from 14 percent to 26 percent in the

168 
AVRAHAM FAUST
course of some 150 years (see detailed discussion in Faust and Lev-Tov). Later, in IronIIA, the percentage of pork in the Philistine diet shrank dramatically, hence pointing not only to its ethnic sensitivity in theIronI,but also to the fact that IronI was the onlypossible historical context for the emergence of this trait as an Israelite-speci󿬁c ethnicbehavior. The tradition of not decorating pottery could also re󿬂ect an attempt to differentiate the Iron Age I highlands settlers from the Philistines, whose pottery was highly decorated. The Philistine decorated pottery of Iron Age I disappears during the transition to Iron Age II; hence, the absence of decorated pottery could have become an ethnic marker only in Iron Age I. Notably, Philistine pottery was clearly ethnically sensitive in Iron I, as can be seen in its very bounded distribution, that is, its complete absence intheEgyptian-Canaanitecentersof the󿬁rsthalf of thetwelfthcenturyBCE (Bunimovitzand Faust, “Chronological separation”). The fact that this pottery was ethnically sensitive is attested not only by its absence in Egyptian-Canaanite and, later, Israelite settle-ments, but also from sites within Philistia, as the percentage of this decorated pottery grew throughout IronAgeI,before completely  disappearing in IronIIA(FaustandLevTov). This is true for other traits aswell,but these examples are enough to show that these behavioral patterns could not have been created after Iron Age I. These factors alone make it highly unlikely that Israelite ethnic identity was created only in IronAgeII, and clearly point to Iron I as the time of Israel’s ethnogenesis. It is worth mentioning brie󿬂y the issue of circumcision. This trait can hardly be discussed on the basis of archaeological reasoning, but other lines of evidence clearly connect this trait with the Philistines.It is quite clear that the term“uncircumcised”isused in the Bible as an ethnic marker, and since many of the local population of the region practiced circumcision, the trait could have served as a marker only in relation to the Philistines who were foreign and uncircumcised (Bloch-Smith 415). Interestingly, the pejorative term “uncircumcised” is used only in texts that relate to Iron Age I; thus it appears that the Philistines adopted circumcision during Iron Age II as part of their acculturation process (see also Herodotus II:104). In other words, circumcision may have been practiced earlier but have become ethnically signi󿬁cant only as a result of the interaction with the Philistines, and this could have occurred only during the IronAge I.
The Historical Background for the Israelite-Philistine Interaction
At the end of Iron Age I and during the transition to Iron Age II, that is, the eleventh and beginning of the tenth century BCE, many highland settlements were abandoned.The population became concentrated in fewer settlements that, as a result, becamelarger. All the famous small Iron Age I “settlement sites,” such as Giloh, Khirbet Rad-dana, Ai, Izbet Sartah, Mount Ebal and many others, were abandoned, while sites likeTell en-Nasbeh (Mizpah), Dan, Bethel and others grew signi󿬁cantly in size, and eventually became towns in Iron Age II. The explanation for this process of abandonment is,󿬁rst and foremost, the Philistine military and economic pressure on the highlands, and

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PHOENICIANS IN SCANDINAVIA

This photograph, kindly supplied by Johan Jarnæs, shows an inscription located near an old silver mine at Kongsberg in Norway. Johan Jarnæs follows the Norwegian scholar Kjell Aartun in thinking that it is the Cretan Linear A script from the Bronze Age. Sven Buchholz has also added support to the idea, and he provides excellent pictures on his website, and these must not be overlooked. 

However, it is widely believed that no silver mining was done there before the Middle Ages, and if we invert the picture, and include the E-shaped engraving to the right of the letters, we might have the name of a European, ending in -LOS; or this is the initials of a name such as Lionel O'Sullivan, or Leif OlsSon. I am told that there are  in fact Kilroy-type inscriptions there, and so I would have to take these presumed Phoenician/ Canaanian examples to be exceptions, and this is reasonable. But those are three-letter acronyms of personal names (their 'initials'); this one has five letters, representing words. Incidentally, if the E is really a ship, it shows 'which way up' the writing should be read.

However. I can not see the characters in the inscription as being of the Linear A script and reading as Aartun alleges: 

WE TU YU PI TI

A summary of my research on Aegean scripts is found in the Creto-Cyprian section of:
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/

https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2017/06/aegean-syllabic-signs.html

Now, if this inscription (as shown in the photograph above) runs from left to right (dextrograde) the first letter looks like the sign for the syllable LA in the West Semitic (Canaanian) syllabary (derived from layl 'night' and the Egyptian hieroglyph for night); and the remaining signs can be transcribed according to the same system (HU hudmu 'footstool', ZA zanabu 'tail', QA qawu 'cord wound on a stick', with QI previously unattested, but presumably from qiru 'wall'):

LA HU ZA QA QI  "to be refined".

This is equivalent to the Hebrew hop`al infinitive (hoqtal) with the preposition la 'to'.

We find another use of that root ZQQ 'refine' (referring to gold) in a proto-alphabetic inscription from Thebes (Egypt); this consonantal inscription has the same idea, "for refining", written LZQQ (with two dots above the Q to indicate doubling)

http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2006/07/alphabet-when-young-above-is.html

The second Kongsberg inscription (3 metres from the other one) seems to me to be West Semitic consonantal (proto-alphabetic, not syllabic).

https://jarnaes.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/skann08-09-26-2050.jpg

I would like a clearer photograph of it, but I think it might say:

Sh Kh  K S P  "silver mine"

The word ShKh (Shin Het, 'pit') is found in the West Semitic inscriptions at the Sinai turquoise mines, at mines K and N (inscriptions 360 and 361):

http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/2007/11/ancient-metal-melting-sinai-inscription.html

A drawing of a tied bag, possibly a goatskin water-bag, would indicate where the water-bottles were kept.

https://araenil.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kgb153-2rz.jpg

And here is another interesting picture with a similar connection (photograph by James E. Knirk)

    First notice the inscription in Roman letters (and Latin language):
           PI AD  ANNO 1742
   The PI might be the writer's initals (Scandinavian Peter John[son]?)
   AD ought to be Anno Domini ('in the year of the Lord') but this would possibly make the following ANNO superfluous, and so it might be the initials of the beloved. By the way, the two forms of A are different. Is this significant? Two scribes?
   Now notice other marks inside the circle, which are not necessarily from the same time.
   With a magnifying glass, or an enlargement of the photograph (click once on it for a full-screen view for printing out), look for a striped object below the 7. A fish or a water bag. In
   To the left of it find a hand with its wrist below it. In the original pictorial form of the alphabet, that would be K. Above it, and touching the AN, I can discern a fish, rather than another bag; an early sign for S. This combination, KS, produces the West Semitic word for 'cup/bowl'.
   Further to the left of the hand, the strokes inside the circle make a wave pattern: this is the original M, and as logogram it says 'water', and this would be the place where drinking-water would be available, with a cup (KS), and the vessel that was there, back in the Bronze Age, would be filled from a water bag that would have been beside it.
   If there was a P (a human mouth) as in the other alphabetic inscription ('silver mine') we would have KSP 'silver', but KS 'cup' is better here. (The word kasu, written in the syllabic script, appears on a metal cup found in Jamaica, mentioned below.)
   The surprise for me is finding the two original icons for S (Samek) in the same place: the fish and the spine. But they are not in the same inscription.
   Next, to the left of ANNO is (possibly) an inverted Egyptian `Ankh, the symbol of life; it was ZA in the Aegean syllabary, and H.I in the West Semitic syllabary (both syllabograms derived from their respective word for 'life', in Hellenic and Semitic). This would not have been inscribed there in 1742 of the current era, but in ancient times.
   Moving now to the opposite side of the circle there is another fish or skin bag, only partly inside the circle.
   To the left, and inside the circle, there is (possibly) a bovine head, and above it a square a square. This is a combination of ox-head and house, the original aleph-beth, or alpha beta. It makes a possible word 'ob, meaning 'skin bag', also found as a label at the Sinai turquoise mines (Sinai 359), with a water sign, to indicate it means 'water-bag'.
   In this connection there is a star sign to the left of the alphabetic 'b. It has to be viewed as a wide X with the nether angle bisected by a short line, so a photograph is needed to turn the picture round: this is the WS syllabic BI, from bikitu 'weeping; the upper angle should be a curve, representing the eye; the three lower strokes are tears. (Aegean NA, from nama, is similarly a flow of tears, recognizable in its Linear A forms).
   It appears to have a water sign below it. If this corresponds to proto-alphabetic 'b m ('water bag') at the Sinai mines, I would look for a 'U syllabogram: either a human ear, or a rodent with big ears; such a sign might be lurking above the BI and the bag, showing a head on a stick figure with arms and legs.
   Alternatively, this could be an oblique K, a variant form and the forerunner of the Phoenician and Grecian K. If the oval-shaped figure is a fish, not a bag, then we have another scribe's KS, perhaps from a later expedition to the mine.
   There are other marks that could perhaps be added to the store of symbols from the Bronze Age that surround the Roman alphabetic letters. While it is obvious that I am struggling to decipher the intended meaning of the marks, it seems clear that this was a spot where the workers expected to get a drink of water, back in the Bronze Age.

The E-shaped boat, inscribed to the right of the ZQQ ('to be refined') inscription, resembles the later Viking and Venetian vessels, and more significantly it may be compared with the Uluburun shipwreck from the Mediterranean and the Bronze Age. It was carrying a cargo of metal (copper and tin ingots).

https://araenil.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kgb150-2rz.jpg 
https://araenil.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/eikona-72.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uluburun_shipwreck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Uluburun1.jpg

Small but noteworthy were some amber beads of Baltic origin in the contents of the ship's hold, as well as a jar full of glass beads.

Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian glass beads reached Scandinavia in the Bronze Age (3400 years ago), and have been found in graves in Denmark. 
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-egyptian-blue-glass-beads-reached-scandinavia
https://www.archaeology-world.com/beads-found-in-3400-year-old-nordic-graves-were-made-by-king-tuts-glassmaker/

The evidence is piling up now: 3600-year-old Swedish Axes Were Made With Copper From Cyprus;
Ancient rock carvings in Sweden evidently are not portraying local boats, but ships bringing the metal from the Levant.
 http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/archaeology/1.719125

I already have a collection of Canaanian (Phoenician) syllabic inscriptions from Syria-Palestine (the oldest from the Early Bronze Age), Sinai, Egypt, Trieste, Jamaica (a copper cup with an inscription including the words "a copper cup"), Puerto Rico (an astonishing collection), and here we see inscriptions and pictorial evidence from the region now known as Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway, Sweden).

Another astonishing document comes from Lake Huron in Michigan, as a testimonial to West Semitic presence in the copper-mining region of the Great Lakes:
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/huron-stone

It is said that the Phoenicians went to Britain (Cornwall) for tin, and it now emerges  that Mediterranean seafarers went northwards up the Atlantic Ocean as far as Scandinavia in the Bronze Age, and also westwards on the same route that Columbus took 3,000 years later.

Evidence of tin from the region of Cornwall and Devon has now come to light in Mediterrania (Haifa in the Levant, for example, 13th-12th C. BCE)
https://www.timesofisrael.com/groundbreaking-study-ancient-tin-ingots-found-in-israel-were-mined-in-england/
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/authors?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0218326

It is possible that this overseas trade was not simply the work of "Phoenicians", but could have involved the family of Jacob Israel, established in Goshen in the Nile Delta.
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/gebel-tingar-statue

JERUSALEM JAR INSCRIPTION

The official photograph of the inscription is here.
The article announcing the discovery of the inscription (IEJ 63: 39-49) is here.

17 May 2019
My latest suggestion
 Reading syllabically from right to left:
... N  [YA] NU H.U LU QU (U?) M ...
"... sour (h.ulqu) wine (yanu) and (u?) water (M...)"
Discussion of this possibility at the end of the essay, under this same date.

From her excavations at the Temple Mount (more particularly the Ophel) near the southern wall, Dr Eilat Mazar has brought to light two pieces of a pithos (a neckless ceramic jar) bearing a short inscription. The artefact is or was described here (audio-visually) by Eilat Mazar and Shmuel Ahituv.
    At one point Eilat reaches for her grandfather's book, and I was able to take my own treasured copy of it from the shelf right next to me, and turn the pages with her (Benjamin Mazar, The Early Biblical Period, 1986; King David's scribe, 126-138).
    As usual a priority claim is made:  it is the "earliest" West Semitic (or even Hebrew) inscription from Jerusalem (though there is cautious hinting that it might be in an unknown Jebusite language).
    Actually, there is an older graffito from the Temple Mount that appears to belong to the Bronze Age. One suggestion I made for it was: YSh S.NR P, "There is a water pipe here", including the word used by David in 2 Sam 5:8, "water shaft".  But it might be from the Iron Age, and the central three letters could be DWD (David).
    I was pleased to hear Shmuel Ahituv pronounce "Canaanite" (with the stress in the middle instead of the crazy English-speakers' practice of hitting the first syllable), and glad to see him personally pointing out with a stylus what he thought to be the direction of writing  (left to right) and giving the identity of each letter:
   M, Q or R, P, H.(Het), N, break, L?, N (a reversed form of the previous N).
    (The R and Q on the Qeiyafa ostracon are also confusing to modern interpreters.)
    Allegedly, this combination of letters has no meaning in known West-Semitic languages.
    We'll see about that.
George Athas examined the picture and gave out his customary admonition : if you haven't seen the inscription itself, having only looked at photographs, you haven't seen the inscription. He proposed:  
n lmnḥṣrm (note his Sadey for the P/L, which is not probable).
   But the second high-resolution photograph sent out by Dov Smith allows for detailed scrutiny.
   George Athas tried reading it from right to left, but Shmuel Ahituv says that the writing runs from left to right, opposite to the Hebrew Bible and Hebrew newspapers.
   Dextrograde (left to right) seems to have been the prevalent direction at that time.
    The Izbet Sartah ostracon has its abagadary and text dextrograde (sinistrodextral).
    The lines of the Qeiyafa ostracon (the David and Goliath inscription from Sha`arayim) each start on the left side.

    Here is my first view of the Jerusalem inscription (before I saw the other readings that have been issued, which are discussed below):
    M R P H. N [N [L?]  N
The first sequence could be divided into three words:
    ... M  RP  H.NN
"NICE PURE WATER"
M logogram or mu  or [M]M 'water'
RP (root rp' "heal') 'pure, purified' (cp 2 Kg 2:21-22, Ezk 47:8-9, 'healed water')
H.NN (root h.nn 'favour') 'nice, favourable'
(LN could be 'for us')

   The characters seem to have been incised on soft clay, before the pot was fired. If so, the purpose of the vessel must have been known in advance.
   Incidentally, a Halif jar handle has on it (incised before firing) L N S. T ("for firing") (Colless, 1991, 50-51).
   Here Colless's cardinal rule of epigraphy must be reiterated: Only the person who wrote an ancient inscription knew what it means.
   And their shorthand system made it hard for us to get their meaning: there is usually no separation of words; there are no indications of vowels, only consonants; and this text is (typically) damaged, so we do not know whether the inscription is complete (there is certainly one vital piece missing from the text we have).  
    However, my proposed reading (NICE PURE WATER, subtext: this pot is for clean water only; do not put milk or flour or flesh or fish in it) is almost self-authenticating. (!)
    This makes a change from LMLK jars (for or belonging to the king). Shmuel Ahituv said that the Jerusalem inscription could refer to the owner, or else the contents.
    Examples of such labels on jars are found in the Bronze Age. From Gezer there are storage vessels with early alphabetic signs on them, engraved before baking: two of them (9 and 10)  have a single M, and another has two side by side (11-12) (Sass 1988, Fig. 248; Colless 1991, 20, 22; ); this might mean they were water pots. More on this below.
    There is a another early "Canaanian" inscription on a potsherd, from Beth-Shemesh, which has the word H.NN meaning gracious, but with reference to a voice, though there is a liquid connection; the voice is lubricated with wine (apparently YN, and not YYN, the Biblical Hebrew form).
     I have plenty of other suggestions in the bizarre category, for which I am famously infamous:
"Myrrh/bitterness for John" (H.nn) (taking the P as L, like the one on the Wadi el-Hol graffito, and the Aramaic Fekheriye inscription ). On the Hol inscription from the Egyptian desert, we know it is L, because P appears as a full mouth on the horizontal line [ (|) ].
  
Please note that my approach to Early Iron Age inscriptions is different from the method of other interpreters: they are working back from the first millennium forms of letters, while I am looking at the signs in their evolution from their pictorial beginnings in the second millennium BCE (see my table of signs below). Thus, P was originally (and obviously) a human mouth, and the lower lip was gradually lost, as perhaps we can see happening in the example here (perhaps P, possibly L, a herdsman's crook). My account of this development, with a chart showing all the letters, is available here.

[16th of July 2013 onwards]
   I am now in a position to respond to other suggestions that have been offered.
    Douglas Petrovich has collected various interpretations of the letters (Ahituv, Rollston, Demsky, Galil, himself, myself) and has placed them at our disposal here. [PS. This has been expanded and published in permanent print in PEQ 147, 2, 2015; my response is recorded below.]
   Looking back to get our bearings, here is an extract from the original announcement (sent by Dov Smith on 10th of July, and widely disseminated):
"The inscription is engraved on a large pithos, a neckless ceramic jar found with six others at the Ophel excavation site....The inscription was engraved near the edge of the jar before it was fired, and only a fragment of it has been found, along with fragments of six large jars of the same type. The fragments were used to stabilize the earth fill under the second floor of the building they were discovered in, which dates to the Early Iron IIA period (10th century BCE).  An analysis of the jars’ clay composition indicates that they are all of a similar make, and probably originate in the central hill country near Jerusalem."
     If the inscription was incised into the clay before baking, then the text must have the same age as the pot itself.
    And we may assume that the object must be older than the building under which it was discovered?

    Here is my response to Christopher Rollston, who also attempted to read it on the 11th of July, and posted it on his site as The Decipherment of the New ‘Incised Jerusalem Pithos’.
            M Q L H. N [R [Sh
   For the five complete letters, I think his reading is possible.
    QLH. is understood as "pot", and NR as the name of its owner.
    If  this pot is a pithos (a large storage jar, and note that in its Greek setting a pithos was usually for wine), what would be the Classical Hebrew word(s) for such an object?
    In any case, if this is not a cooking pot, then Christopher Rollston's QLH. should not work, as the meanings it has in its Hebrew history are "cauldron, kettle, pot for cooking".
    Also, whether in its original Egyptian setting, or in Coptic, or Ugaritic, or Hebrew, it has a final -t, and it is difficult to spot a Taw near the Het, except by deconstructing the Het and making its bottom right corner a cross (+), thus constituting a unique  ligature (not impossible, I suppose).
    Incidentally, that is a strange Het, with two horns and two legs, and only two crossbars (as I argue, it started as a H.asir, a mansion with a courtyard), and we need to resort to the 9th-C. Moabite stone of King Mesha` to find a peculiar counterpart with the three characteristics we encounter here; but Ahituv shows two other similar examples (Batash and Eshtemoa`) on his comparative table (viewable here).
    I tentatively preferred R to Q, and P to L, producing:
     ... M R P H. N [N] [  ] N ...
     "Nice (h.nn) pure (rp) water (M logogram, or mu, or [M]M) ...."
    Contra Chris Rollston's M Q L H. N [R [Sh
    He goes to the Fekheriye Aramaic inscription for his Lamed, which is quite abnormal for its time; elsewhere, so as to distinguish them, P is upright, while the hook of the original crook of Lamed is at the bottom.  That is the situation on the Qeiyafa ostracon, though there we find more than one form for P and for L.
    Rollston argues that there is indeed a Resh that can be distinguished from his Q, but it is a head with a large cleft in its top (a bit wider than on his drawing), and an unusually long neck. Actually, with these features it should be Waw, if only one letter is constructed from the remnants.
    In general, Q (a cord wound on a stick) is round at the top, whereas R (a human head) is angular; but the stem of Q sometimes moves into the circle.
    However, supposing it is W, not R, and the last letter is N, not Sh, and with a Yod between them, we have WYN "wine"(attested as WN on the Wadi el-Hol inscription of the Middle Bronze Age;  but in the Iron Age the West Semitic form was YYN (yayin), or YN (yayn) as on the Beth-Shemesh ostracon.
    Gershon Galil has a view of it which chimes in with his interpretation of the Qeiyafa ostracon (which he interpreted as a set of instructions for social compassion, regarding oppression of widows, orphans, aliens, slaves, and poor people). Reading from right to left:

[nt]n [tt]n ḥlqm  Give them their share

The reference would be to "poor brothers".

But he issued another conjecture (also recorded with more detail here), again from right to left:

      […], mem, qop, lamed, ḥet, nun, [yo]d, [yo]d nun  

       ... N  YYN  H.LQ  M … spoiled wine from…

Douglas Petrovich has taken up this idea here, together with analogies from Egyptian practice in labeling jars of wine,  adduced by Gershon Galil, and with speculation about additional words at either end. The text would have stipulated a regnal year of a king, and declared that this "smooth wine" (yyn h.lq) was "from" (m) a particular place.

   A difficulty with YYN (yayin) is (as noted above) that it has an additional Y,  whereas Ugaritic texts and the Beth-Shemesh ostracon (where we see bt yn for byt yyn, "wine house") have simply YN, and so the form yyn suggests written Hebrew that is later than we would expect in the 10th Century BCE. However, I have proposed to read BYT in two fragmentary LBA inscriptions from Lakish (Colless 1991, 40-41). It is a matter of diphthong contraction (or whatever) rather than use of matres lectionis ; the second Y is pronounced; it is not there to indicate î.
    The two hypothetical Yods are very large on Gershon Galil's drawing (perhaps on account of the stray line poking out from the gap and reaching lower than any of the other letters, which might belong to another letter or could be a mere scratch). The letter Yod began as a hand with its forearm (yad), and in the Iron Age it looks like a reversed F; the YYN conjecture has them both as an inverted form of this;  but the Qeiyafa ostracon has both types, as Galil would know.
   (Finally [January 2014], Gershon Galil has put his conclusions into print:
‘yyn ḫlq’ The Oldest Hebrew Inscription from Jerusalem, Strata 31 (2013) 11-26.
This seductive solution is discussed below, 25th of January 2014.)
     Another immediate attempt to reconstruct and transcribe the inscription was made by Reinhard Lehmann and Anna Elise Zernecke in KUSATU. The missing letters in the gap are possibly M and Sadey, hence:
     M Q P H. N M S. N   (or N S. M N H. P Q M)
The sequence S.N looks promising, as the name Siyyon (Zion) preceded by mi(n) "from"; so this would be the source of the contents of the pot? 
    Without the missing piece, the right-hand end of the text is a mystery. Can it be found, please?
    After our experience with the Tel Dan inscription, are we certain the join has been made correctly? It looks like a good connection to me.
    But there is no indication of word-separation, and so there are too many variables (including the gaps) for us to be reading this text completely, or to be dating it to its precise decade.
    We cannot tell (unless the missing pieces turn up) whether there were other letters preceding and following the part that we have.
   Thus Aaron Demsky supposes a Het on the left, and produces the word h.mr "fermenting wine"("for Hanan").
    But I think that the proverbial COOL CLEAR WATER is a good candidate for the contents of the vessel, and that this was stated on it when it was first made; it was not for milk or meat or fish.
   It needs to be added (as already intimated above) that I got this idea from a set of Bronze Age storage jars from Gezer, which were likewise inscribed before being baked (Colless 1991, 22, depictions; 31, discussion). Some have M (a vertical wavy water sign), others have MM; presumably, in both cases "water" is meant.
   Other inscriptions in this collection, all single letters, may be abbreviations of the commodities they contained:
   Y (yn wine) H. (h.mr fermenting wine) T (trsh new wine) Sh (shkr beer or shmn oil) H (hlb milk) S (smk fish).
    There are some other Bronze-Age vessels (of the pithos category) found in a cemetery near Tel Aviv (Colless 1991, 24, depictions; 51-52, discussion). One pithos has a vertical wavy line between a pair of strokes, possibly M, indicating that it was a water jar. Another has a long horizontal wavy line at the top, with a symbol below it: a cross inside a circle. This is an old form of Tet and Theta, and I presume it is a development of the Egyptian nfr sign (+o) which is attested in proto-alphabetic texts; it was used acrophonically for T. and logographically for T.ABU ("good and beautiful"); hence the Mem and Tet would say "good water".

    However, the contents of this rediscovered fragmentary Jerusalem jar are still to be ascertained.
    Nevertheless, there is another solution (bubbling up from a teeming source in my seething brain): if we accept the Sadey proposed by Lehmann and Zernecke, there are other possibilities besides "from Sion".
             M S. N [R]  "from the spout"
     As I said above, an older inscription from that area of Jerusalem may have mentioned the "water-pipe" (s.nr), which features in the capture of Jerusalem by David (2 Sam 5:8); on this interpretation, water would be collected there in or for this pot.
     Or, invoking the root S.NN, denoting coldness (with MS.N as a participle, or S.N or S.NN as an adjective or noun, and supposing H. N M S. N or H. N N S. N) we have a very seductive combination of hypothetical words:
             M  RP  H.N[N] [S.]N[N]
             NICE (h.nn) COOL (s.nn) CLEAR (rp) WATER (M) 

   In support of this reading, I could make the following case.
   There are many analogies for pots with the letter M for water marked on them (but there are examples of inscribed storage jars with indications of their contents, besides water).
   The direction of writing is not certain,  but the general consensus is that it is dextrograde, though Galil and Petrovich are convinced it is sinistrograde, and they produce a tempting reconstruction of the text. For syllabic writing in the Bronze Age and consonantal writing in the Iron Age, the orientation style in Byblos (and elsewhere in the north of Canaan) was right to left (sinistrograde). On the other hand, in the south (including Sinai and Egypt) it is hard to see a consistent direction, but the few substantial documents we have from southern Israel in the early Iron Age, namely the Qubur el-Walaydah bowl, the Izbet Sartah ostracon, and the Qeiyafa ostracon, run their lines of writing from left to right (dextrograde), but the Beth Shemesh ostracon has five columns (right to left with the last one running back horizontally and to the right. Then the Gezer calendar appears, and it is conforming to the Phoenician style, not only in line orientation but in the forms of the letters, and this becomes standardized in Israel.
    This adoption of the Phoenician form of the alphabetic script could have arisen from the diplomatic and commercial relations David had with Phoenicia (2 Samuel 5:11-12), and likewise Solomon (1 Kings 5), which did not happen in the time of King Saul; that is my working hypothesis, and I hope it works.
   The question is: on which side of the dividing wall is the Jerusalem pithos inscription standing? We would like to know whether it is an Israelite inscription like the two five-line ostraca (Izbet Sartah, Qeiyafa); but even if it is Canaanian or Jebusian, we would still like to establish its position on the spectrum, to decide whether it is before King David's capturing of Jerusalem or after; more particularly, whether it was written before the official changeover to the standard Phoenician alphabet for writing Hebrew, the language of Israel. We have a set of clues to assist us.
   Here are some of the differences between the characters on the three ostraca versus the calendar (as a representative of the newly adopted Phoenician style, observable to some extent on the table appended below):
   `ayin is everywhere a circle in the Iron Age, though it had a more natural eye-shape in the Bronze Age; it has a distinguishing dot in its circle on the three ostraca, but this point is lacking in the calendar, as in the Phoenician inscriptions;
    'alep will always have the original ox-head resting on its side with the snout pointing to the left (Qeiyafa has this, but pointing to the right, and also the original ox-head, and even the A that will turn up later as Alpha); the snout of the ox also indicates the direction of the writing, as does the triangular human head of the Rosh, and the two and three prongs of the Yod and He respectively;
    Shin now consistently has the shape W or VV rather than 3 (Qeiyafa has both in the second line);
    Lamed will not have the crook at the top (Beth Shemesh, Izbet Sartah, though not Qeiyafa) but will constantly be L or l;
    Pe  is a mouth that has lost part of one of its lips; it is consistently curved or angled at the top, and this should settle the question whether the Ophel letter is L or P; the early southern examples of L, whether the crook is at the top or at the bottom of the stem, generally have the round part curling right in (Walaydah, Beth Shemesh, Izbet Sartah, and Qeiyafa in most cases); the numerous instances of the Aramaic L in the long Fekheriye text also curl inwards, and do not really support reading the Ophel letter as L rather than P; but P occurs so rarely that there are few instances for comparison, and it has to be said that no known P bends round as much as this character; still, the next two letters, certainly identifiable as H. (Het) and N (Nun), are not conventional, as noted above;
    Qop was originally qaw, a cord wound around a stick, with the stick protruding at the top; in the Iron Age it was reduced to a circle atop a stem, and on the Gezer text the stem has penetrated right into the circle, which is a Phoenician feature;
    Rosh is indubitably a human head, and it is more triangular than circular (Q); but with only one of them present, R and Q are hard to separate in this case;
    Samek has a different letter (and here I am pointing out a significant detail that has been overlooked in the past): instead of the fish for S (as in the Sinai inscriptions, Beth Shemesh, and Izbet Sartah) the spinal column (Egyptian djed) becomes the standard Samek (the Qeiyafa ostracon apparently does not have this Samek,  but I think the fish is in line 4);
    Mem will always be vertical (falling water) not horizontal (level water).
    The M in the Ophel text is neither vertical  nor horizontal, but is leaning to the right, as also the presumed R (the head is facing rightwards, and yet all the heads in other inscriptions, except the one on the Beth Shemesh ostracon, are looking to the left). The first snake (actually a set of water-waves) is apparently looking where the writing is heading, even though this position is anomalously unique for the Iron Age. But the human head and the snake are perchance pointing in the right direction.
    Lacking 'alep, `ayin, shin, and especially samek, and with the Q/R and L/P confusion, as also the uncertainty over its traveling direction, this inscription is well and truly concealing its identity from us.
    For assistance in the inquest, we could call as witness the Kefar Veradim bowl (Rollston 27-33, with drawings of its inscription, and also the Gezer calendar and the Tel Zayit abgadary, and a discussion of their interrelationships). The bowl comes from a burial cave in northern Israel (between Akko and Hazor), and would date from the 10th C BCE (Iron Age IIA-B). Its inscription runs round in a circle, so it is hard to say whether its M is vertical or horizontal; it has the Phoenician features: Samek as spinal column, not fish; Shin as W not 3; K with no stem; but, to confuse the issue, its Het has no legs or horns, and surprisingly its `ayin has a central dot.

16th of November 2013
   Note that the final presumed N on the Ophel pithos inscription is a reversal of the previous one, and this could help us date the text. As I see it, there was a change in script in the time of David and/or Solomon, with the Hebrew version of the alphabet now conforming to the international Phoenician alphabet, which was a consistent consonantary with only one form for each letter, whereas in Israel in the era of the Judges and King Saul an inscription could contain two or three versions of a  particular letter; for example, the Beth-Shemesh ostracon has 'ayin as a circle with and without a dot in it, and two forms of B; similarly the Qeiyafa ostracon has three different stances for 'A (also D, W, Y, L, T). We know that the consonantal alphabet of the 1st millennium BCE did not indicate vowels; but it now appears possible that Hebrew inscriptions in early Israel (Iron Age I) used the alphabet as a syllabary, with forms for ba, bi, bu, and so on. Hence, with two versions of N (or else M), this inscription might belong to the time before King David occupied Jerusalem. But it depends on the dating of the pithos, if that is possible.

25th of January 2014
As noted above, Gershon Galil has put his latest ideas into print:
‘yyn ḫlq’ The Oldest Hebrew Inscription from Jerusalem, Strata 31 (2013) 11-26.
The wine (yyn) is no longer "spoiled" (or "smooth" as Douglas Petrovich had it) but "low-grade". A counterpart for Hebrew YYN H.LQ is found in Ugaritic YN HLQ, which could mean wine that is "lost" or "perished" or "gone sour", and not fit for the king's table, but good enough for the workers and the soldiers. As he did with his interpretation of the Qeiyafa Ostracon, Gershon  adds a wealth of background material, which will remain useful, even if his hypothetical reconstructions of the inscriptions turn out to be incorrect.
   Let us consider his summing up (p 22).
"The inscription also indicates that there were scribes able to write texts in Jerusalem as early as the second half of the 10th century BCE. These scribes may have been Canaanites or other non-Israelites since David and Solomon employed non-Israelites in their government, even in very senior positions, including the office of the Chief Scribe. David’s scribe was Shisha [or Shawsha or Shewa, perhaps a Hurrian name or title, and his Hebrew name Seraiah, BEC], and his sons were appointed as Solomon’s chief scribes (Mazar 1986: 111–138) [read 126-138, BEC]. So it would not be surprising that this inscription was written in the ‘Late Canaanite script’ (as was the Qeiyafa inscription), and that it indeed reflects the southern Hebrew dialect; but it also uses archaic technical terms like ḫlq to define this inferior wine.
"The forms and stances of the letters in this inscription (as well as in the Qeiyafa inscription) are not yet fixed – a phenomenon typical of pictographic scripts. But this inscription is written from right to left, while the Qeiyafa inscription runs from left to right. This fact may indicate that it is the beginning of the regulation of the reading direction."
    GG sets the pot and its inscription in "the second half of the 10th century BCE", because this is a Type B pithos, "dated by archaeologists not earlier than the late 10th–9th century BCE" (p 13). May we ask whether this is high or low chronology? It is supposed to be Iron Age IIA (starting around 1000). Can we get clarification on this? How can it ever be claimed that this is a Jebus inscription, if the pot dates from the time of Solomon?
   GG speaks of "the southern Hebrew dialect" and insists that this always has YYN for wine, not simply YN, overlooking the Beth-Shemesh Ostracon, which apparently has BT YN for "tavern (wine house)" (Colless 1991, 45-49).
"The similarity between this [Qeiyafa] inscription  and the new Ophel inscription is already well attested. Therefore, the following discussion will focus on the letter yod." (p 16)
   What similarity is meant? The two Yods on his drawing are hypothetical; the Nun, Het, and Lamed have no counterparts on his drawing of the Qeiyafa text (UF 41, p 196); and Mem is always a zigzag. No matching forms are observable on Phoenician inscriptions, either; nor on Hebrew inscriptions in Phoenician style, such as the Gezer Calendar and the Tel Zayit Stone. Perhaps this is the work of a scribe who had his own personal version of the alphabet, or else we are looking at forms that have not cropped up in extant inscriptions, but each has its place in a larger scheme, such as a syllabary with 66 signs, not merely the 22 letters we know from the Phoenician consonantal alphabet.
   GG says that the forms and stances of the letters "are not yet fixed", and he offers an analogy with "pictographic scripts"; true enough, but we are a long way from that stage of the alphabet (see the table below). As I have just suggested above, these variations in form and stance may not be arbitrary but significant: the alphabet was functioning as a syllabary in that period.
   I have already made detailed comparisons of the characters in the inscriptions from Iron Age I and IIA, and I have a tentative table in my work-in-progress sheets of paper. I would like to apply these syllabic values to the signs on this Jerusalem jar, as reconstructed by Gershon Galil. I do this in the spirit of Rabbinic discourse, where one scholar will give support to the arguments of his cobber (h.br), even though he himself is following a different line of reasoning, and, of course, I have argued here (but only hypothetically and tentatively, and without conviction) for a water-jar interpretation, rather than a wine-vessel approach.
   Reading from the right (but setting aside the M or N): YA YA NU  H.U LU QU.
The two Yods (as plausibly reconstructed) are not really different, and can indeed be compared with one of the three Qeiyafa forms (the Yod at the end of line 2, as GG says) the one which I propose as YA. But if the word is YAYIN, then we would expect the second Yod to be different. However, in syllabic writing when confronted by a word like YAYN it is customary to give the vowelless syllable the same vowel as a neighbouring syllable, and the same will occur in the accompanying word H.ULQU. The -u vowel on the end of each word signifies the nominative case (or it is a "dead vowel", if case endings had ceased to be used by then).
   The presumed LU-sign is an inversion of the standard Phoenician L. The QU with a sloping stem is actually found near the end of Qeiyafa line 5, but GG has chosen to identify it as R there, and he wants the R (with an upright stem) in line 4 to be Q. The forms of the two Mems do not match perfectly with the standard models
    Accordingly, the whole line could read: -ma yaynu h.ulqu mi-
And it tells us ("formulaicly") that this jar was made in a particular regnal year of a particular king to contain vinegary wine from a specified place.
    Regarding the direction of the writing, GG suggests "it is the beginning of the regulation of the reading direction", and so he apparently recognizes that the turnabout was the result of a decree. Nevertheless, the writing system in this inscription is still the old style, which I am inclined to call the Neo-syllabary (distinct from the original West Semitic syllabary, particularly connected with Byblos).
    My watered down version does not work so well, if RP is actually LQ.
   MI QU LU H.U NU .  . NI
    And forcing the root H.NN (be gracious) to apply to water is not natural or normal or nice (but "nice" is what I want it to say).

12th of July 2014. It has occurred to me that if Gershon Galil's proposed restoration of two yods is right, then we have another indication that this is before "standardization" (and thus neo-syllabic): that particular stance is not found in the international consonantary, but it appears on the Qeiyafa ostracon, and that is where Gershon got the idea. Also, given the possibility that the letter to the right of the YY could be N rather than M, a reading YYN is possible whichever direction the writing is running.

3rd of August 2014. A  reason for the oddness of the letters of this inscription (when treated as syllabic) is that there are so many -u syllabograms: QU LU H.U NU, which differ from the a-forms of the Izbet Sartah abagadary, and the i-forms of the standard consonantary.

   Much ingenuity has been applied by scholars to this bunch of ancient letters on the Jerusalem jar, but we can not attain certainty, because of the many variables (not least of which are the many missing letters) since the writer (who by my first principle was the only person who knew the meaning) has not obeyed my fundamental rule, that every early alphabetic inscription should be accompanied by a copy of the complete alphabet in the scribe's own handwriting, so that we can tell which letter is which (as in the  Izbet Sartah text, but even there we are still left with puzzles by its author, who actually says "I am learning the letters" [ ' LMD ' TT ]); and he should have shown us 44 more versions of the letters, if he was actually using the alphabet as a syllabary with 66 characters.
   However, this is what we have so far: an incomplete collection of scattered bones from which to construct a dinosaur. But, as I now see it, these are the clues to work with: the Izbet Sartah alphabet (abagadary) represents that scribe's set of -a syllable-signs; the Phoenician consonantal alphabet is using the -i signs to represent all the vowels (or vice versa); the remaining signs (including four on this Jerusalem jar) are the -u syllabograms. Those are the new rules for West Semitic epigraphy with regard to Iron Age I inscriptions. I have said more about this on the ASOR site, now being updated here.

15th of July 2015 As noted above (post-scriptually) Douglas Petrovich has published his study of the inscription: Palestine Exploration Quarterly 147, 2  (2015) 130-145.
   He is substantially supporting Gershon Galil's reconstruction and interpretation of the text (but "inferior wine" becomes "pseudo-wine", which might be going too far in downgrading the liquor):
  (L < R) ...N YYN H.LQ M...
"[In the firs]t [(regnal) year]: pseudo-[wi]ne from [the garden of ??]"
This is set out on one of his clever icons (Fig. 4) with transcriptions in Hebrew characters.
For bashana ("in the year") he rightly omits the final -h of the Massoretes as anachronistic, but his inclusion of ha- (definite article, in ha-ri'shona, 'the first') is also premature for this period of the Hebrew language (it is not yet attested at that time).
   He assumes the hypothetical "first year" would apply to Solomon's reign.
   For a comparative table of signs he reproduces in Fig.2 the chart of Shmuel Ahituv from IEJ. This is not entirely helpful; as there are only five complete letters, and two or three incomplete signs, the six consonants offered are insufficient to distinguish R/Q/ and P/L, and to illustrate the two reconstructed Yods. It is gratifying to see my own table of the evolution of the alphabet presented there as Fig. 5, but it lacks the details needed for this exercise.
   He has opted for two forms of Nun, and this suggests to me that the text is syllabic.
   He confuses language and script on p. 139, with regard to the terms Phoenician and late-Canaanite (as applied to types of script, not language). He insists that the language is Hebrew, as also on the Qeiyafa ostracon (with its SH-P-T., `BD, and MLK,  but Rollston has questioned this). However, it seems that all these new inscriptions are in the language of Canaan, which even Philistines (and presumably Jebusites) were using to communicate.  And on p. 142 he emphasizes his point that the newly-discovered inscriptions "represent an earlier phase of the Hebrew language". But he includes as evidence the alphabets (abecedaries) on the Tel Zayit stone and the Izbet Sartah ostracon, which can not tell us anything about language or dialects. (Not all texts written in Roman letters are Latin language.)
    Douglas admits (p. 141) that "several readings are possible", but his is "the best option". If I had to make a choice, I would put it first as the most plausible, but still hold that my own suggestions are not impossible. This is a nice defense of an attractive hypothesis (with a good discussion of the dating of the pithos), but the inscription, as we now have it, is illegible (incomplete letters) and unreadable (no correct interpretation is possible).

    Once again, when a cluster of scholars can not agree on the interpretation of an ancient text, we seem to have glaring proof that epigraphy, despite its refined academic jargon and its cautious technical methodology, is not an exact science. This new inscription has made fools of us all. Of course, if we had the missing pieces of the pithos puzzle we might be able to do better, so we live in hope that they may be found in the searching and sifting.
    Under the present circumstances it is absolutely impossible to read this incomplete inscription; but it is quite possible that my reading of it was on the wrong track (direction-wise and liquidly). No sour grapes, and no champagne, but my personal secret is that I drink my water with a dash of vinegar (apple not grape).

9th of  January 2019
Well, here I am, still alive: I have not perished (hlq) in the meantime.
Raz Kletter has published some notes on the Ophel pithos inscription, in PEQ (2018) 265-270.
   My first observation is that he misspells my name (as Colles, instead of Colless) on p.269, in his reference to this cryptcracker essay; that double S marks our family out distinctively amidst the Coles, Collis, Colles variants; but he has it right on p.265.
   While I am grateful for the mention, he is able to dismiss my contribution to the discussion, by declaring web-published readings as 'preliminary' (fair enough, mine are certainly tentative, and to be considered as work in progress); and my suggestion ('nice, cool, clear water') "finds no parallel in the form of Iron Age wares from Palestine inscribed with a label 'water' ". This sounds suspiciously like an argument from silence, and yet I gave two instances (five inscriptions in total) from the Late Bronze Age: from Gezer (M and MM for 'water') and Tel Aviv (M for 'water', and M T. as logograms or abbreviations for 'good' and 'water'). Recently I had occasion to read out in church the story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee, involving water jars having their contents turned into wine (Gospel of John, 2:7-9).
[problem: singular forms of adjectives with plural noun mayim?]

This script is not the Phoenician (or international) consonantal alphabet of the Iron Age (as on the Gezer Calendar and the Zayit Stone, and the Phoenicia column of my table, below): its letters are anomalous.
   First, the Het disqualifies it from that category; its lack of a third cross-stroke in the middle corresponds to the Het on the Moabite Stone, but none of the other letters has a  counterpart there.
   Second, the Nun next to the Het is the wrong way round, though the incomplete character on the far right could be the standard Nun, or else a Mem.
   Third, the stance of the letter on the left of the Het is  the reverse of the standard form of Pe, or else it is an inverted Lamed.
   Fourth, the Mem on the far left is almost correct, but it seems to have six strokes instead of five.
   Fifth, the two hypothetical Yods are only found on the Qeiyafa Ostracon, as one of three variant forms.

Although its presumed direction of writing (sinistrograde, right to left) fits the style of the international consonantal alphabet, its characters are so unusual that it could well be neo-syllabic.

17 May 2019
My latest suggestion
 Reading syllabically from right to left (sinistrograde):
 ... N  [  ] [YA] NU H.U LU QU (U?) M ...
"... bad/sour (h.ulqu) wine (yanu) and (u?) water (M...)"
This interpretation follows the line laid down by Gershon Galil and Douglas Petrovich.
The pot was  a vessel containing inferior wine, possibly for workers on building sites in Jerusalem.
Perhaps the full text contained a word for "jar" or even "pithos"; Ugaritic dn (also Arabic and Aramaic) was a jar for wine (and vinegar, Yoma 28b, Jastrow 315a). But Raz Kletter (268) says "Galil's reading does not fit the Jerusalem pithos, since it is not a wine vessel", and Kletter maintains that position because it has "a very large, open mouth",  and this would allow the wine to have contact with oxygen and be ruined. This might support my first idea that it was for storing water, rather than wine; but if this was intended to be a container for spoiled wine, which was placed on open access for drinkers to put a ladle or cup into it, then there can be no objection.
   Kletter dismisses my water-jar solution because I cannot adduce such an inscribed vessel from the Iron Age, although I can find apparent examples in the Late Bronze Age (see above).
   Similarly, he points out that the term h.lq is not found with reference to wine in any other inscription in Palestine/Israel, nor in the Bible. But this could be an isolated and welcome instance of that usage, already attested at Ugarit; and maybe the language of Yebus (Yerushalayim) was closer to Ugaritic than to Israelian Hebrew. At the same time he ridicules the thought that a container of wine could be labeled as "inferior" or "bad". But that would only apply if the commodity was for sale, not if it was being offered gratis. This jar was perhaps made and marked as a receptacle for such liquid, and so it would probably not have royal references on it.
  
   I still need to justify the reading [YA]NU H.ULUQU, as opposed (but not violently so!) to [YY]N H.LQ.
   For his YYN, Gershon Galil posits two cases of Yod in the style of a character that appears three times on the Qeiyafa ostracon: the arm has the hand (two strokes) pointing downwards, and that would make a total of four vertical lines, one of which is visible, emerging from the gap. However, these reconstructed figures are huge in comparison with the Qeiyafa model; that is not impossible, and its plausibility could be tested if the missing piece of the pot turns up; but I am proposing the alternative prototype of Yod with the hand at the top (as apparently on the Izbet Sartah ostracon, and on the Lakish bowl sherd); the two strokes of the hand (looking like pincers) are partly discernible above the empty space, with the end of the arm protruding at the bottom. However, this leaves a space before the Yod, increasing our frustration that the missing pieces are not available for inspection. There could have been another Yod there, as Gershon Galil suggested, indicating the southern Hebrew form of the word yayin.
   Regarding the syllabic reading, most of the letters are not the standard forms of the international alphabet,

If the first letter on the right is N, rather than M, and if it is syllabic and not simply the standard Phoenician Nun, then it possibly represents NI, having the reverse form of the other N, which I take to be NU.
HI? HINI hin measure? hén? hinnè? "Here is" or "This is".
The letter He appears twice on the Beth-Shemesh vertical inscription, engraved on two shards from a vessel. The first H has the form of Greco-Roman E. The second H seems to be the same, though the photographs show a projection from the bottom of the spine; this would make it the same as the standard Phoenician form, though reversed (so that its three vertical lines could point in the direction of the writing.
   Kyle McCarter's drawing is disappointing to me, in that he shows the projecting line as a surface defect in the clay (although it seems to be attached to the letter in photographs)  (McCarter, 188, Figure 5, and 185, n.2). He favours a meaning hin (measure) for the word, and this syllabic sign would provide the HI syllable. When there are a few letters only, it is difficult to establish whether the text is syllabic or consonantal, and that is likewise the problem with the Ophel pot.


(Click on this table of the evolution of the alphabet to view it in enlargement)

References:
Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet (1988)
Brian E. Colless, The Proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Canaan,  Abr-Nahrain (Ancient Near Eastern Studies) 29 (1991) 18-66.
Gershon Galil, ‘yyn ḫlq’ The Oldest Hebrew Inscription from Jerusalem, Strata 31 (2013) 11-26.
Douglas Petrovich, The Ophel Pithos Inscription: Its Dating, Language, Translation, and Script, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 147, 2  (2015) 130-145.
Raz Kletter, Notes on the Jerusalem Iron IIA pithos inscription, Palestine Exploration Quarterly 150, 4 (2018) 265-270.
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.co.nz/
https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/

Brian Colless
School of Humanities, Massey University, NZ