How it began
The Byblos script, also called the Byblos syllabary or pseudo-hieroglyphic script, is known from fourteen inscriptions found at Byblos, a coastal city in Lebanon. The inscriptions are conventionally dated to the second millennium BCE, probably between the 18th and 15th centuries. Maurice Dunand excavated the first ten of them between 1928 and 1932 and published them in 1945 in his monograph Byblia Grammata. In 1978 he published four more, on stone slabs. Bronze Age Byblos stood on the territory of present-day Lebanon.
How it works
The ten main inscriptions contain 1,046 characters in all. Dunand counted 114 different signs, though his list includes badly damaged characters that may not be separate signs. A count of that size is too large for an alphabet and too small for a word-based script, so the system is thought to be a syllabary or a similar script. It remains undeciphered, and the language it records is unknown. Its other name, pseudo-hieroglyphic, reflects the look of some signs.
How it spread
Examples of the script have also been reported from Egypt, Italy and Megiddo. At Byblos itself, traces of it survive beneath later Phoenician texts. Five signs are visible on the Ahiram sarcophagus, and at least 26 on the Yehimilk inscription, where an older text was partly effaced and overwritten in Phoenician letters. One bronze spatula carries an erased inscription with a Phoenician text cut over it.
What lasted
A monumental stone from Byblos bears a text in a script that seems intermediate between the pseudo-hieroglyphs and the later Phoenician alphabet. Most of its 21 characters are common to both. Several objects with traces of the older script are dated to the 10th century BCE, which suggests it stayed in use longer than usually assumed. Edouard Dhorme proposed a decipherment in the 1940s, but the script is still described as unreadable.
