Gordon Hamilton has issued a personal account of eleven West Semitic inscriptions discovered in recent times, on the site The Bible and Interpretation (http://bibleinterp.com). His article is available here:
http://bibleinterp.com/PDFs/SealOfASeer.pdf
It is good to have Gordon's drawings and opinions on these eleven inscriptions, most of which I have already examined closely, and I have promulgated my own interpretations of some of them on the internet, on my cryptcracker site.
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/
by Gordon Hamilton
+++++++
Jim West, ThD
Thanks for this, Jim. It is good to have Gordon's drawings and opinions on these eleven inscriptions, and very timely, because it includes two inscriptions I have just revisited, namely the Gath ostracon and the Qeiyafa (Sha`arayim) ostracon, and so I have held back from announcing that here, to give me time to consider his ideas. I will do that in a separate message.
First, I notice Gordon does not mention me, though I refer (though not defer) to him in my websites, and it can not simply be because I report my research in progress on the internet, since he has a lot of web addresses in his footnotes; and he did quote me in his book (mostly dismissively), but It would appear that after my review of it, the Albrightians (I am still an adherent of the Albright school, but not a believer of all the tenets , particularly with regard to West Semitic scripts) have ostracized me (as you do, with ostraca). They do not rank me as one of their 'peers', apparently, and therefore do not need to give peer reviews of my work.
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/10/gordon-hamiltons-early-alphabet-thesis.html
Never mind. At last I can see a picture (Fig 2, on p.4, a drawing, which I will accept as accurate for this critique) of the seal from Deir Rifa in Egypt (a border-post between the Hyksos and Theban sectors of the Two Lands). GJH has already published (JSS, 54, 2009, 51-79, not seen) his interpretation of it as a seal-amulet bearing a name and a title in alphabetic script, and he reads it as:
L QN H.Z Belonging to Cain (qn) the seer.
With his characteristic confidence (which seems insufficiently critical and 'scientific') he draws all kinds of conclusions from this, and boldly declares: "Only the first letter is ambiguous paleographically"; because 'Hamilton' (as he calls himself third-personally and objectively) says so. Still, I stopped subscribing to JSS many years ago, and so I must get a copy of his long article, which must have lots of details in its 29 pages.
Coincidentally, I have just put on a website a similar seal (apparently from a Hyksos set of scarabs, but it is the text that interests me).
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2010/03/inscribed-west-semitic-stone-seal-this.html
This one employs the West Semitic syllabary, not the consonantary, as does the signet ring from Megiddo (as acknowledged by Garbini and myself, but treated as consonantal by Hamilton):
http://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/megiddoring
Accordingly, the possibility has to be faced that the Deir Rifa inscription is likewise logo-syllabic (the Megiddo ring has one logogram in my interpretation: Sealed, the SCEPTRE of Megiddo).
This is one form of ambiguity which has to be considered. Hamilton simply chooses to read it consonantally, ignoring the syllabic option. Of course, since one-quarter of the syllabic signs are found in the consonantary, we can easily start of on the wrong track.
The way the object should be held is another source of conclusion-confusion. GJH has it so that an ax-head and a fence are upright at the bottom, hence ZH., but he wants it to be H.Z 'seer', another point of ambiguity. I am sure the fence is not the origin of H., and I doubt the ax is Z, preferring to see an ingot. At the top he sees L (coil of rope?) with an extra stroke attaching it to the 8-sign (Q on the Albrightian table, but actually S., Tsadey). Then comes a snake for N.
Holding the object so that there is a line of writing (with the # sign sitting on the ingot), the plausible snake sign (NA or N) becomes a face-profile, PA (panu). The # is presumably SA (or S), the Djed column, the backbone. At the left end I now see 'Alep, ox-head with horns (alphabetic ', or syllabic 'A). The 8 could be DU (dudu, jar).
So, if I had to read it alphabetically it would come out thus:
' S. N S Z.
I will think further about a syllabic reading, but 'ADUNA looks more promising than 'ADUPA at this stage.
Hamilton's study of the Gath ostracon allows the existence of a supralinear G (which I also accept), and so he reads 'LWT as 'LGWT; but, while muttering (n. 23) about "the sensationalistic connection" made with the biblical name golyat, 'Goliath', he does not see that the G could give us GLWT, a Philistine form of GoLYaT, and that is what I propose to do with it (that is, be sensationalistic, even if Aren Maeier has repented from seeking Goliath).