According to the BBC News ‘Oldest Hebrew script’ is found:
The shard was found by a teenage volunteer during a dig about 20km (12 miles) south-west of Jerusalem. Experts at Hebrew University said dating showed it was written 3,000 years ago – about 1,000 years earlier than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other scientists cautioned that further study was needed to understand it.
Preliminary investigations since the shard was found in July have deciphered some words, including judge, slave and king. The characters are written in Proto-Canaanite, a precursor of the Hebrew alphabet.
I found it interesting because of the implications that these findings might have on classifications of dead languages into more natural or artificial regarding the knowledge we have of them, especially about proto-languages like Proto-Canaanite (or Europe’s Indo-European), which can easily move from category 9 (‘hypothetical language’) to category 8 or even 7 (‘dead language’).
As we have said before, this implies that, despite the efforts of some conlangers to make their newly created conlangs (look) the same as proto-languages like PIE – in the sense of ‘artificiality’, they obviously aren’t.
