Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions in the context of "Phoenicians"

Phoenicians were an ancient Semitic people who inhabited city-states in Canaan along the Levantine coast of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily in present-day Lebanon and parts of coastal Syria. Their maritime civilization expanded and contracted over time, with its cultural core stretching from Arwad to Mount Carmel. Through trade and colonization, the Phoenicians extended their influence across the Mediterranean, from Cyprus to the Iberian Peninsula, leaving behind thousands of inscriptions.

The Phoenicians emerged directly from the Bronze Age Canaanites, continuing their cultural traditions after the Late Bronze Age collapse into the Iron Age with little disruption. They referred to themselves as Canaanites and their land as Canaan, though the territory they occupied was smaller than that of earlier Bronze Age Canaan. The name Phoenicia is a Greek exonym that did not correspond to a unified native identity. Modern scholarship generally views the distinction between Canaanites and Phoenicians after c. 1200 BC as artificial.

Biblical Hebrew (Hebrew: עִבְרִית מִקְרָאִית, romanized: ʿiḇrîṯ miqrāʾîṯ or לְשׁוֹן הַמִּקְרָא, ləšôn ham-miqrāʾ ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term ʿiḇrîṯ 'Hebrew' was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as שְֹפַת כְּנַעַן śəp̄aṯ kənaʿan 'language of Canaan' or יְהוּדִית Yəhûḏîṯ 'Judean', but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts.

Paleo-Hebrew is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE, when it was almost identical to Phoenician and other Canaanite languages, and spoken Hebrew persisted as a first language through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem. It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was employed as a second language until the 5th century.

The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It was one of the first alphabets, attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean basin. In the history of writing systems, the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction—while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during the Late Bronze Age, which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age, sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician, Hebrew, Moabite, Ammonite and Edomite, as well as Old Aramaic. It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language. Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor, and the Archaic Greek alphabets.

David (/ˈdeɪ.vɪd/; Biblical Hebrew: דָּוִד‎, romanized: Dāwīḏ, "beloved one") was a king of ancient Israel and Judah, according to the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.

The Tel Dan stele, an Aramaic-inscribed stone erected by a king of Aram-Damascus in the late 9th/early 8th centuries BCE to commemorate a victory over two enemy kings, contains the phrase bytdwd (𐤁𐤉𐤕𐤃𐤅𐤃), which is translated as "House of David" by most scholars. The Mesha Stele, erected by King Mesha of Moab in the 9th century BCE, may also refer to the "House of David", although this is disputed. According to Jewish works such as the Seder Olam Rabbah, Seder Olam Zutta, and Sefer ha-Qabbalah (all written over a thousand years later), David ascended the throne as the king of Judah in 885 BCE. Apart from this, all that is known of David comes from biblical literature, the historicity of which has been extensively challenged, and there is little detail about David that is concrete and undisputed. Debates persist over several controversial issues: the exact timeframe of David's reign and the geographical boundaries of his kingdom; whether the story serves as a political defense of David's dynasty against accusations of tyranny, murder and regicide; the homoerotic relationship between David and Jonathan; whether the text is a Homer-like heroic tale adopting elements from its Ancient Near East parallels; and whether elements of the text date as late as the Hasmonean period.

The Paleo-Hebrew script (Hebrew: הכתב העברי הקדום), also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions, including pre-Biblical and Biblical Hebrew, from southern Canaan, also known as the biblical kingdoms of Israel (Samaria) and Judah. It is considered to be the script used to record the original texts of the Bible. Due to its similarity to the Samaritan script; the Talmud states that the Samaritans still used this script. The Talmud described it as the "Livonaʾa script" (Jewish Babylonian Aramaic: לִיבּוֹנָאָה, romanized: Lībōnāʾā), translated by some as "Lebanon script". It has also been suggested that the name is a corrupted form (with the letters nun and lamed accidentally swapped) of "Neapolitan", i.e. of Nablus. Use of the term "Paleo-Hebrew alphabet" for the script follows the suggestion by Solomon Birnbaum, who in 1954 argued that "[t]o apply the term Phoenician [from Northern Canaan, today's Lebanon] to the script of the Hebrews [from Southern Canaan, today's Israel-Palestine] is hardly suitable". The Paleo-Hebrew and Phoenician alphabets are two slight regional variants of the same script.

The first Paleo-Hebrew inscription identified in modern times was the Royal Steward inscription (KAI 191), found in 1870, and described at the time as "two large ancient Hebrew inscriptions in Phoenician letters". Fewer than 2,000 inscriptions are known today, of which the vast majority comprise just a single letter or word. The earliest known examples of Paleo-Hebrew writing date to the 10th century BCE.

The Mesha Stele, also known as the Moabite Stone, is a stele dated around 840 BCE containing a significant Canaanite inscription in the name of King Mesha of Moab (a kingdom located in modern Jordan). Mesha tells how Chemosh, the god of Moab, had been angry with his people and had allowed them to be subjugated to the Kingdom of Israel, but at length, Chemosh returned and assisted Mesha to throw off the yoke of Israel and restore the lands of Moab. Mesha also describes his many building projects. It is written in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, closely related to the Paleo-Hebrew script.

The stone was discovered intact by Frederick Augustus Klein, an Anglican missionary, at the site of ancient Dibon (now Dhiban, Jordan), in August 1868. A "squeeze" (a papier-mâché impression) had been obtained by a local Arab on behalf of Charles Simon Clermont-Ganneau, an archaeologist based in the French consulate in Jerusalem. The next year, the stele was smashed into several fragments by the Bani Hamida tribe, seen as an act of defiance against the Ottoman authorities who had pressured the Bedouins to hand over the stele so that it could be given to Germany. Clermont-Ganneau later managed to acquire the fragments and piece them together thanks to the impression made before the stele's destruction.

Old Aramaic refers to the earliest stage of the Aramaic language, known from early Aramaic inscriptions and dated to the 10th century BC through the 8th century BC.

Emerging as the language of the city-states of the Arameans in the Fertile Crescent in the Early Iron Age, Old Aramaic was adopted as a lingua franca, and in this role was inherited for official use by the Achaemenid Empire during classical antiquity. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, local vernaculars became increasingly prominent, fanning the divergence of an Aramaic dialect continuum and the development of differing written standards.