The Tel Zayit Abecedary On the final day of the 2005 season, The Zeitah Excavations made a dramatic discovery: an inscription that bears the oldest known securely datable example of the linear alphabet — the alphabet in its mature form. All successive alphabets in the ancient world (including non-Semitic ones, such as Greek, and the letters you are reading right now) derived from the alphabet seen in the Tel Zayit Inscription. The importance of this discovery derives not only from its archaic alphabetic text—referred to an “abecedary”— but also from the stone's firmly datable archaeological context (tenth century BCE)—an extremely rare occurrence among the few extant inscriptions of this nature. The early appearance of literacy at Tel Zayit plays a pivotal role in the current discussion of the hotly disputed archaeology and history of Israel and Judah in the tenth century BCE. Future fieldwork will concentrate on the area of the tell in which the stone was found. The editio princeps for this inscription appeared in: R. E. Tappy, P. K. McCarter, M. Lundberg, and B. Zuckerman, "An Abecedary of the Mid-Tenth Century from the Judaean Shephelah," Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 344 (2006), 5–46. For additional studies relating to the abecedary and 57 high resolution photographs available on DVD, see: R. E. Tappy and P. K. McCarter, eds. Literate Culture and Tenth-Century Canaan: The Tel Zayit Abecedary in Context. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2008.