Semitic inscriptions

The Semitic inscriptions are the primary source for understanding of the society and history of the Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples. Semitic inscriptions may occur on stone slabs, pottery ostraca, ornaments, and range from simple names to full texts.[1][2][3][4]

Only 10,000 Phoenician-Punic inscriptions are known,[4][5] such that "Phoenician probably remains the worst transmitted and least known of all Semitic languages."[6] Within this corpus only 668 words have been attested, including 321 hapax legomena (words only attested a single time), per Wolfgang Röllig's analysis in 1983.[7] This compares to the Bible's 7000-8000 words and 1500 hapax legomena, in Biblical Hebrew.[7][8]

Primary printed collections
  • Gesenius, Wilhelm (1837). Scripturae linguaeque Phoeniciae monumenta quotquot supersunt edita et inedita. 1–3. In the 1830s, only approximately 80 inscriptions and 60 coins were known in the entire Phoenicio-Punic corpus[9]
  • Paul Schröder, 1869, Die phönizische sprache. Entwurf Einer Grammatik, Nebst Sprach- und Schriftproben; the first study of Phoenician grammar, listed 332 texts known at the time[10]
  • Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum; the first section is focused on Phoenician-Punic inscriptions (176 “Phoenician” inscriptions and 5982 “Punic” inscriptions)[1]
  • Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, considered the "gold standard" for the last fifty years[2]
  • George Albert Cooke, 1903: Text-book of North-Semitic Inscriptions: Moabite, Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, Nabataean, Palmyrene, Jewish [11]
  • Mark Lidzbarski, 1898: Handbuch der nordsemitischen Epigraphik, nebst ausgewählten Inschriften [11]
  • Wilhelm Gesenius, 1837: Scripturae Linguaeque Phoeniciae: Monumenta Quotquot Qupersunt

Bibliography
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See also

References
  1. Phoenician: A Companion to Ancient Phoenicia, ed. Mark Woolmer, p.4: "Altogether, the known Phoenician texts number nearly seven thousand. The majority of these were collected in three volumes constituting the first part of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS), begun in 1867 under the editorial direction of the famous French scholar Ernest Renan (1823-1892), continued by J.-B. Chabot and concluded in 1962 by James G. Février. The CIS corpus includes 176 “Phoenician” inscriptions and 5982 “Punic” inscriptions (see below on these labels)."
  2. Parker, H., & Rollston, C. (2019). Teaching Epigraphy in the Digital Age. In Marguerat A. (Author) & Hamidović D., Clivaz C., & Savant S. (Eds.), Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication (pp. 189-216). LEIDEN; BOSTON: Brill. doi:10.1163/j.ctvrxk44t.14, "Of course, Donner and Röllig’s three-volume handbook entitled KAI has been the gold standard for five decades now"
  3. Robert W. Suder (1984). Hebrew Inscriptions: A Classified Bibliography. Susquehanna University Press. pp. 13–. ISBN 978-0-941664-01-1.
  4. Brian R. Doak (26 August 2019). The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean. Oxford University Press. p. 223. ISBN 978-0-19-049934-1. Most estimates place it at around ten thousand texts. Texts that are either formulaic or extremely short constitute the vast majority of the evidence.
  5. Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2013). "Wilhelm Gesenius and the Rise of Phoenician Philology" (PDF). Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. 427: 209–266. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-04-08. Quote: "Nearly two hundred years later the repertory of Phoenician-Punic epigraphy counts about 10.000 inscriptions from throughout the Mediterranean and its environs."
  6. Rollig, 1983
  7. Rollig, 1983, "The Phoenician-Punic vocabulary attested to date amounts to some 668 words, some of which occur frequently. Among these are 321 hapax legomena and about 15 foreign or loan words. In comparison with Hebrew with around 7000-8000 words and 1500 hapax legomena (8), the number is remarkable."
  8. Ullendorff, E. (1971). Is Biblical Hebrew a Language? Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,34(2), 241-255. Retrieved August 12, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/612690
  9. "Review of Wilhelm Gesenius's publications". The Foreign Quarterly Review. L. Scott. 1838. p. 245. What is left consists of a few inscriptions and coins, found principally not where we should a priori anticipate, namely, at the chief cities themselves, but at their distant colonies... even now there are not altogether more than about eighty inscriptions and sixty coins, and those moreover scattered through the different museums of Europe.
  10. Rollig, 1983, "This increase of textual material can be easily appreciated when one looks at the first independent grammar of Phoenician , P.SCHRODER'S Die phonizische Sprache Entuurf einer Grammatik, Halle 1869, which appeared just over 110 years ago. There on pp. 47-72 all the texts known at the time are listed — 332 of them. Today, if we look at CIS Pars I, the incompleteness of which we scarcely need mention, we find 6068 texts."
  11. Bevan, A. (1904). NORTH-SEMITIC INSCRIPTIONS. The Journal of Theological Studies, 5(18), 281-284. Retrieved August 1, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/23949814
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