Update: The 2007 Season 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. Since the early appearance of literacy at Tel Zayit will play a pivotal role in the current discussion of the hotly disputed archaeology and history of Israel and Judah in the tenth century BCE, in the 2007 season we will concentrate our excavation efforts on the area of the tel in which the stone was found.