You’ll hear in this week NRC Today our series Wild centuries, the beginning. One of the narrative series we made this year: perfect for the days around Christmas.
It’s been 3,800 years. Miner Lachisch hides in a temple and learns strange signs there. How useful can that new alphabet be?
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For this episode, this literature was used, among other things:
Ludwig D. Morenz. ‘El(-GOD) as “Father in Regalness”. Mine M in Serabit el Khadim as a Middle-Bronze-Age (c. 1900 BC). Working Space sacralized by Early Alephbetic Writing’ in Working Paper 13 Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, 2023.
Martijn Jaspers and Toon Van Hal. ‘From house to hashtag, from ox head to monkey tail. A history of the alphabet’, Maklu publisher, 2023.
Silvia Ferrara. ‘The Greatest Invention. A History of the World in Nine Mysterious Scripts’, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2022 (Translated from the Italian by Todd Portnowitz).
Felix Höflmayer and others ‘Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish’ in Antiquity, June 2021.
Philip J. Boyes and Philippa M. Steele (eds). ‘Understanding Relations Between Scripts II Early Alphabets’, Oxbow books, 2020.
Miriam Lichtheim. ‘Ancient Egyptian Literature’, University of California Press, 2019 (first edition 1975).
Aaron Koller. ‘The Diffusion of the Alphabet in the Second Millennium BCE: On the Movements of Scribal Ideas from Egypt to the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Yemen’in Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections, in December 2018.
Steven R. Fischer. ‘History of Writing’, Reaktion Books, 2003.
Brian E. Colles. ‘The Proto-Alphabetic Inscriptions of Canaan’ in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, 1991.
Lina Eckenstein. ‘A History of Sinai’Macmillan 1921.
- Text and presentation:
- Hendrik Spiering
- Editing and direction:
- Mirjam van Zuidam
- Music, editing and mixing:
- Rufus van Baardwijk
- Image:
- Jeen Berting
- Design:
- Yannick Mortier
The journalistic principles of NRC