78 holger gzella
traditions in palestine and transjordan. it is to some extent inherent in
the writing system.20
the three “vowel letters,” or matres lectionis, are used inconsistently,
however, and “defective” spelling of long vowels without vowel letters
continued as well: the surviving Samʾalian texts only have them for word
final long vowels, the inscriptions from central Syria regularly use them
for wordfinal long vowels but feature very few instances with word
medial ones (e.g., ymwt /yamūt/ ‘he will die’ in Kai 224: 16),21 and the tell
fekheriye inscription, despite its early age, contains a considerable num
ber of examples with both wordfinal and wordmedial vowel letters. this
curious distribution may result from a greater familiarity with cuneiform
spelling in eastern Syria. Matres lectionis are a device that became increas
ingly popular in the history of the aramaic script, but, like punctuation
in several modern european languages, they could be employed some
what unpredictably even in the same text as the oscillation between šʿryn
(Kai 309: 19) and šʿrn (Kai 309: 22) for /śaʿārīn/ ‘barley’ shows. in many
other respects, by contrast, the orthography of early aramaic between
Samʾal and tell fekheriye appears quite homogeneous. this points to a
fairly standardized scribal training that was adopted by the chancelleries
of the region.
2.4 Local Forms of the Alphabetidentifiable local forms of the West Semitic alphabet evolved during the 1st
millennium B.c.; the first distinctive traits of the aramaic family of scripts
appeared at the end of the 9th century B.c.: a {d} with a slightly elongated
final stroke and a {z} in the form of a modern zed with a wavy central
bar. the lion’s share of the evidence consists of monumental inscriptions
chiseled in stone and thus employing a “lapidary” style, whereas more
ephemeral documents were presumably written with ink on perishable
materials. cursive styles for daily use, at any rate, become visible during
the 7th century B.c. however, at least the aramaic hand of the tell deir
20 a combination of sounds like /iya/ in certain forms, for example, is customa rily
spelled y. following the strong tendency of such triphthongs to monophthongize in north
west Semitic, it would soon become /ī/. Yet orthography does not change at the same
pace as pronunciation, hence the traditional spelling y would quite naturally come to
denote the sound /ī/.
21 assuming that wordmedial vowel letters were occasionally used in Sefire is the easi
est explanation of this form and receives additional support from scribal practice at tell
fekheriye, cf. gzella 2004: 322 n. 60.