Izbet Sartah Abecedary

A sherd from a small hill-country village bearing an eighty-letter inscription, the last line of which is the alphabet written out in order, left to right, in early proto-Canaanite forms. The other lines are largely unintelligible and the whole is generally read as a scribe's practice exercise. Its findspot is an unremarkable Iron Age I settlement of the kind associated with early Israelite settlement. It suggests that writing was being learned in ordinary highland villages at the very beginning of the Israelite period, centuries before the monarchy.