Archaeologists have analyzed a brief ancient inscription in an alphabet that was the precursor to Hebrew. Ilan Ben Zion writes:
A potsherd slightly larger than a business card found in the ruins of a Late Bronze Age temple at the biblical site of Lachish in southern Israel has yielded a few tantalizing letters from a 12th-century BCE alphabet. . . . The inscription, three lines containing nine letters, . . . is believed to date from around 1130 BCE. . . . The letters were etched into a clay jar before firing, and are exceptionally clear.
The first line reads pkl, the second spr—the Semitic root for “scribe”—but the third has two letters of uncertain meaning (one is fragmentary). The text includes the earliest dateable examples of the letters kaf (the precursor to the Latin letter K), samekh (S), and resh (R). Samekh had never before been found in early Canaanite inscriptions.
The Canaanites began to develop the alphabet around 1800 BCE, over a thousand years after cuneiform writing first appeared in Mesopotamia. . . . But there are centuries of silence following the earliest known alphabetic inscription. . . .
The archaeologists . . . who studied the potsherd inscription determined that it was too fragmentary to make heads or tails of what it might say. The jar fragment’s discovery in a temple complex suggests the text may be dedicatory.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/at-biblical-site-researchers-discover-abcs-of-how-alphabet-came-to-be