The categories outlined in this chapter and summarised in Table 3 are designed to help explore the implications of how writing was used in the Bronze Age Levant, and should be seen as suggestive rather than definitive. In actual fact writing often functioned in more than one context, and thus an ownership inscription could be seen as a way of identifying the donor of an object when it was used as a votive offering, or an amulet that protected a person in life could be taken to the grave to extend that protection into death. Similarly inscribed artefacts can belong to multiple owners, with consequent shifts of context and meaning over the life of the object.
One striking fact about the data is how many sites have produced examples of multiple scripts in a range of materials and techniques, in some cases even when the actual sample size is very small. This appears to be a phenomenon of the Late Bronze Age, with the most cosmopolitan cities on the Canaanite map in this respect being Beth Shan and Lachish. Both shared the full range of Egyptian scripts (hieroglyphs, cursive hieroglyphs and hieratic) and the presence of cuneiform and Proto-Canaanite (while no cuneiform has been discovered at Lachish itself, this site is known to be the source of some of the Amarna correspondence, Goren et al. 2004: 289; Millard 1999: 318, fig. 2). Lachish was also the home of a rare example of an Aegean script, thought to be related to Linear A, cut into the shoulder of a vessel made of local limestone (Finkelberg et al. 2004: 1631).
Despite the diversity of scripts available at many sites, it is difficult to determine whether individual scribes were conversant in writing multiple languages. One way to demonstrate this would be through the presence of single objects with multiple scripts. Actual examples of this sort of practice are very rare. There is a clay stopper from Megiddo, stamped on its upper face with an Egyptian hieroglyphic seal (most probably a scarab), and impressed on the sides in cuneiform, giving an Egyptian personal name and a Sumerian unit of capacity (Horowitz et al. 2006: 107– 108, Megiddo 5). This might point to an Egyptian scribe with cuneiform training, a scenario that makes sense for a region which represents an interface between the two writing technologies. However, it should be pointed out that the hieroglyphic element of the object was produced by a seal, and so is not actual proof that the scribe in this case was able to render both hieroglyphs and cuneiform, or indeed, even read the former. Another example cited earlier was a cylinder seal with both cuneiform and hieroglyphic elements in the design (Teissier 1996: 110, cat. 226). In this case, there is even less proof of a craftsperson familiar with both languages, as the use of script as a decorative element has very different implications compared with script intended to be read, and the inaccurate rendering of many of the signs points to a lack of understanding of their meaning.
In actual fact most forms of script appear to have been used in discrete environments. Cuneiform, for example, was primarily an administrative script that was adopted for diplomatic communication, and otherwise used only within what appears to be a very small and largely closed community of professional scribes (Gianto 1999: 127). This probably explains the strong formality in the way the script tends to have been executed, irrespective of the surface material involved. Hieratic appears to have been used primarily in sites in the South Sharon plain and Negev; the bulk of examples have a votive or ritual use, with one possible legal text and an inspection marking (Goldwasser 1984: pl. 7.2; Wimmer 2007), and all appear to have functioned within the context of the Egyptian administration of the region. These sorts of texts would have been used in settings which made them inaccessible to the majority of the population, so it is not surprising that they had so little impact on Canaanite material culture and practices in general.
One possible exception to this trend may be seen with Egyptian hieroglyphs. These have the strongest visibility of all scripts, largely due to their use on a range of personal jewellery and amulets, and the spread of some elements of this script into contemporary decorative art. These personal uses of writing parallel the more official or governmental ones, and set the scene for transformations of meaning and use of the type that we do not see occurring elsewhere. Signs that were adopted into Canaanite repertoires in scarab and other workshops do not appear to have been transferred along with mechanisms that would allow new users to be trained in the ‘correct way’ of using them. Indeed, the pictorial nature of the signs left users free to assign new meanings, and use them in ways that the originators of the script had never intended (Goldwasser 2006: 126, 131, 134, 151). As such, these signs lost their ability to record Egyptian speech and language. Goldwasser concludes that it was the informal context in which these signs were now being used, and this very lack of formal scribal training that paved the way for the evolution of new applications of script and the invention of the alphabet (Goldwasser 2006: 152–153). Interestingly, while the meanings of individual signs were being renegotiated, the objects on which these signs appeared did not seem to undergo the same level of transformation, and so the overall design of the scarab amulet retained strong links with its Egyptian counterparts.
The Iron I period, 1150–1000 bc, saw a gradual falling away of the visibility and use of all the scripts previously found in the Southern Levant. However it was the cuneiform and hieroglyph/hieratic traditions that appear to have suffered the most, as the urban administrative systems that supported technical training fell into disarray and the international networks that provided much of the rationale for their use dissolved. Many major centres were abandoned or went into decline, with urban populations moving into smaller village communities, while the Egyptians eventually closed down their Levantine strongholds altogether. The Report of Wenamun, discussed earlier and thought to be set in this period, points to the continued existence of writing in Lebanon where there appears to have been stronger cultural and urban continuity at this time. But elsewhere in Canaan, archaeological evidence for the use of cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and hieratic, suggests that these scripts became increasingly irrelevant to activities within Canaan itself. In contrast, the Proto-Canaanite alphabets that had been apparently peripheral to core activities became more valued in the newly reconfigured geopolitical landscape of the Iron Age Levant. This may be because they were less formally tied to official purposes and scriptoria, traditionally being used in a more private context to mark personal property and offerings. The use of a greatly simplified sign list that was visually less complicated and more memorable than cuneiform may also have helped its spread amongst the wider community and made it less vulnerable to social and economic change. Ultimately it was this accessibility that led to transformed varieties of this writing such as Phoenician and Hebrew becoming an important tool for use by the emerging new polities in the region.
