Garbini, Giovanni; Maria Michela Luiselli & Guido Devoto (2004): "Sigillo di età amarniana da Biblo con iscrizione." Rendiconti dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei 9/15, 377-390.
The remarkable little object we see at the top is a cylinder stamp or seal (the photograph shows an imprint of its features), apparently emanating from somewhere in Phoenicia, possibly Byblos (Gubla), and published by Giovanni Garbini (now deceased); he recognized two striking features: it imitates the family portrait of Pharaoh Akhenaton and Queen Nefertiti, with their three daughters (Egyptian Museum, Berlin, 14145), and it has inscriptions in the West Semitic syllabic script (whereas the Egyptian counterpart has hieroglyphic writing). Since Akhenaton reigned in the middle of the fourteenth century before the current era (BCE), the Semitic artefact could not be earlier than that. One typical detail in each image is the sun disc (Aton) with its rays having hands to distribute its benefits, which are celebrated in the Hymn to the Aton.
Notice that the Phoenician image is reversed: the personage corresponding to Nefertiti (who is holding two children) is on the left side of the photograph, and the father (with one daughter) is on the right. It is not clear that the Semitic couple are meant to be Akhenaton and Nefertiti; the headdresses are not the same as those on the Egyptian royals. On the plaque the names of the Egyptian family members are recorded in hieroglyphs in columns and cartouches: the daughters are Meritaten, Meketaten, and Ankhesenpaaten; Tutankhaten (later King Tutankhamen, not a child of Nefertiti) is not in the picture. One suggestion is that the three columns of Semitic text provide the daughters' names (Michael Mäder), and this would assist us in deciphering this script.
However, this is not the result we get when we apply the system of decipherment proposed by George Mendenhall in 1985, and adopted and adapted by myself as the West Semitic logo-syllabary.
This exercise will be undertaken with the aid of a model prepared by Mäder.
Michael Mäder (University of Bern, personal communication) sets forth a prima facie case of circumstantial evidence, which is very attractive. This is an edited version of his statements (the original is reproduced at the end of this essay).
On the Egyptian Familenstele Berlin, 14145 (Krauss 1991) there are three inscriptions which include the names Meketaton, Meritaton and Ankhesen-pa-Amun.
On the Semitic seal, likewise, there are three short texts in corresponding positions, adjacent to the three daughters.
The names would be read in Egyptian: Meritaton on the legs of father, Meketaton on legs of mother, Ankhesen-pa-Amun on shoulder of mother.
They have the same relative extension, i.e. Meketaton and Meritaton short, Ankhesen-pa-Amun longer.
The two shorter ones begin with the same syllable (me) and end with the same (ATON [Egyptogram]).
In the longest of the names, Ankhesen-pa-Amun, has the expected syllable pa in its 4th position.
The 4th sign in the Byblos version has the form of a cross or "bird with outspread wings". This suits the fact that pa in Egyptian syllabic writing has the form of a cross (originating from a bird with outspread wings).
The sign in the shape of a "2" would be me (in Meketaton and Meritaton)
Second, if the initial signs of the two M...Aton sisters are supposedly mirrored, or rather the signs are facing the depiction of the person who is named, according to the Egyptian convention, I would have to say that these "2" letters are not the same; and the one on the left is actually the second letter in the sequence.
And the signs at the bottom of the cartouches are similar but not the same; they are supposed to represent the Aton, the disc of the sun. The sun-sign in this West Semitic syllabary is found in the long text, in second position: a circle with a dot in it (equivalent to Egyptian hieroglyph N5).
The proposed form Ankhesen-pa-Amun for the third sister comes as a surprise, but it can be validated: as noted above, Tutankhaten became Tutankhamen, when worship of the Aton was abandoned, and the same principle applies to Ankhesen-pa-aten; but I can not see her name on this cylinder seal. Incidentally, the Egyptian Ankh sign, representing "life", has a place in the West Semitic syllabary, as H.I (h.iwatu, life). It does not appear in these inscriptions, though it could perhaps have been used as logogram in her name.
Hence, I do not see this document as naming the children, but think it might relate to the boat in the upper half: solar barque, ship of the dead? The idea that a justified dead person could travel with the Sun in his ship?.
tu su `a ti salvation (root Y/W Sh/S `)
https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/03/oldest-west-semitic-inscriptions-these.html
NUSHI`U "saved"
HLL "Celebrate"
NIKAWANA "he is established"
This reminds me of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, with the deceased
passing through the hall of judgement and emerging "justified of voice"
(his claim to be innocent has been accepted by the divine judges).
Here is the interpretation of Michael Mäder (University of Bern); he is forceful in his presentation, but he does not have a signary for the script (which he considers to be undeciphered, and after rejecting my solution he is determined to crack its code, following possible clues on this cylinder seal):
Photographs by Jane Schwarting of Carthage, NC, from her vast collection of artefacts discovered on her own piece of land.
For comparison, here are three images from North Carolina, Cape Fear River region, Carthage (Phoenician QRTH.DShT, "new city: !!). Each of them apparently depicts a seated male adult (presumably a deity) holding a child (as on the nbzt cylinder seal, above). The red one (PICT0138) has lost some of its details, but the lower right area has some writing: | Y Sh ` | (arm with thumb and fingers, breast, eye); the two strokes show the beginning and end of the text, presumably, but not which is which; it is a single word, from the same root YSh` (meaning unclear, but basically "be free", I suggest) as in the inscriptions on the two proto-syllabic documents examined above. The same sequence of letters, running from left to right, is observable on the left side of the blue object (PICT4660), viewed on a printout on paper, with the light behind it! The third artefact (IMG8095) bears the same image of two seated persons, and also two standing figures, with the YSh` text on the far right, running downwards; this could perhaps function as a stamp-seal, or as a personal memento.
The YSh` in each case is proto-alphabetic, not proto-syllabic, and the script is probably the short neo-consonantary, not the long proto-consonantary; so no vowels are represented, only consonants.
YSh` could mean "he saves" (Hip'il, the god being the subject of the verb), or "he (the child) is saved" (passive voice, but necessarily Hop`al, or Nip`al, as on the Tuba cylinders); or simply "salvation" (masculine noun).
Another mysterious cylinder seal is begging to be brought into this discussion: it was published by A. Goetze in 1953 (BASOR 129: 8-11), and has received considerable attention since then, but nobody (including myself in 1991) has succeeded in cracking the code of its seven-letter proto-alphabetic inscription. It is variously known as the Grossman or Saint Louis or Goetze Seal, since it came into the possession of Edwin Grossman and his wife, residents of Saint Louis, MO. In the light of the documents we are examining here, it would not be unreasonable to suppose that this seal was also found in America; but it was purchased from an antiquities dealer in London, UK, and is now preserved in the Harvard Semitic Museum.
The photograph I use is in Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet (1988), fig. 252; and a sketch (a trustworthy tracing from a good photograph of an impression made by the seal) is available in Gordon Hamilton, The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet (2006), 397, fig. A.66. Sass is skeptical of anything that he is unable to read, and so he dismisses it as a forgery with a pseudo-inscription; but Hamilton reports that the price of the object was 5 English pounds, and a forger would have expected more than that for all his nefarious labour, and so we gladly accept its authenticity. However, our attempts at reading its text have all been wrong.
Now, in 2023, with my long acquaintanceship with early West Semitic writing, and my theory of the Quadrinity enabling me to distinguish the four types (Protosyllabary, Protoconsonantary, Neoconsonantary, Neosyllabary), I can see that the script on this seal is the protoconsonantary, since it has Th (\/\/ thad breast) and Sh (O_o shimsh sun), as in the Wadi el-Hol protoconsonantal text. It has bars to indicate how the two lines run, as on the red object above:
| L B Th Y Sh R P |
L (For) B (Ba`al?) ThY (an offering) ShRP (of burning)
The B could be a logogram, BAYT, "house", meaning "temple, house of a god, or else it is an abbreviation of the name of a god, probably Ba`al.
So, we are looking at a "burned offering" (sic).
With regard to the depiction on the cylinder, there are three persons standing before a seated dignitary, presumably a deity. Surprisingly, this is the same as the upper level scene on the other cylinder seal, though there is no hint of a boat on the Grossman seal, neither in the picture nor the text. A shared detail is the person immediately in front of the god has one arm up and the other arm down.
The lower scene on the protosyllabic seal is certainly reminiscent of Akhnaton and Nefertiti at home with their daughters, and the Aton sun-disc with its characteristic rays reinforces this interpretation; but rather than a picture of domestic bliss, this may be a sinister portrayal of a god (Baal) and a goddess (Baalat) clutching children that have been offered as a sacrifice by their pious parents, who are present in most of the images shown here (and there are more).
We know that this sort of human sacrifice was typical of West Semitic religion notably in Carthage, Tunisia (offered to the goddess TNT), and apparently also in Carthage, NC.
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