Script and language are different things. Script is what we might call an alphabet — the letters used to write a language. Different and even unrelated languages can be written in the same script, as is the case with English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian, for example. Conversely, the same language can be written in different scripts, as occurred, for example, when Mustafa Kemal Atattirk changed the alphabet used to write the Turkish language from Persian-Arabic to Latin (in 1928).
The earliest systems of writing (which were not technically alphabets) developed in the ancient Near East around 5000 years ago: cuneiform script in Mesopotamia and hieroglyphic script (hieroglyphs) in Egypt. The term cuneiform comes from the Latin word for wedge (cuneus), because wedgeshaped symbols were formed by making impressions in a raw (unbaked) clay tablet with the sharpened tip of a reed. Although cuneiform and hieroglyphic inscriptions have been discovered in Palestine, a native system of writing did not develop until the Late Bronze Age. This system of writing is called proto-Canaanite or proto-Sinaitic (because some of the first inscriptions were discovered in the Sinai desert). Proto-Canaanite is the earliest true alphabet. Unlike hieroglyphs (from which it adopted some symbols), in which each pictograph could represent up to three consonants, in Proto-Canaanite each symbol represents a single syllable. This reduced the number of symbols from hundreds to about two dozen, which could be combined as needed to form words. This innovation revolutionized reading and writing because it opened literacy to the masses, as a small number of symbols could be learned much more easily than hundreds of symbols (for which specially trained scribes who devoted a lifetime to learning were needed). Although literacy did not immediately become widespread as a result, it was the Canaanite invention of a true alphabet that eventually made mass literacy possible.
When the Israelites (and some of their neighbors, such as the Moabites) made the transition from a tribal society to monarchy, which is a type of government requiring record-keeping and official correspondence, they adopted a slightly modified version of the Canaanite-Phoenician alphabet. The early Hebrew alphabet is called paleo-Hebrew. The bullae from the “house of the bullae" in the City of David and the inscription from Hezekiah's Tunnel are written in paleo-Hebrew script. After 586 B. C.E. the Jews stopped using the paleo-Hebrew alphabet and adopted the Aramaic alphabet, which was used in the Persian Empire. Modern Hebrew is still written in Aramaic script.
Our alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet by way of the Greeks. In the Late Bronze Age a script called Linear B was used in Mycenean Greece (Linear B is unrelated to the later Greek alphabet, although the language is Greek). After the collapse of the Mycenean kingdoms ca. 1200 B. C.E., writing disappeared from Greece for several centuries. In the eighth century B. C.E., when the Greeks began to write again, they adopted the Phoenician alphabet, with which they had become familiar through trade with the Phoenicians. The Greeks modified and adapted the Phoenician alphabet to suit their needs. For example, the first letter of the Phoenician (and Hebrew) alphabet is aleph, a silent letter. The Greeks did not need a silent letter so they converted it into the vowel “A" or alpha (Phoenician, Hebrew, and other Semitic languages are written without vowels). The second letter of the Phoenician alphabet — the letter bet (or beth) — became the Greek beta (hence the word “alphabet"). Later the Greek alphabet was adopted by the Romans to write Latin, which is the source of our alphabet.
In 1880 a boy from the nearby village discovered an inscription high up on the wall of Hezekiah's tunnel, close to the pool. After the inscription was removed from the tunnel it was taken to Istanbul (because Palestine was under Ottoman rule at the time), and it is now displayed in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. The inscription is in biblical Hebrew and is written in paleo-Hebrew script (see the Sidebar). This remarkable document commemorates the completion of the tunnel — the moment when the two teams of men were so close they could hear each others' voices through the bedrock, and finally met:
[A]nd this was the matter of the tunnel: While [the hewers wielded] the axe(s), each man towards his fellow, and while there were still three cubits to be he[wn, there was hear]d a man's voice calling to his fellow; for there was a fissure (?) in the rock on the right and [on the left]. And on the day it was tunneled through, the hewers struck [the rock], each man towards his fellow, axe against axe. And the water flowed from the spring towards the pool for one thousand and two hundred cubits. And a hundred cubits was the height of the rock above the head(s) of the hewers. (from Amihai Mazar, Archaeology of the Land of the Bible, p. 484)
The pool of Siloam at the outlet of Hezekiah's Tunnel has acquired its current appearance since the Byzantine period (fifth century C. E.), when a church was erected there. Recent excavations by Reich and Shukron have brought to light an enormous pool below it (to the south), at the southern tip of the Tyropoeon Valley and City of David. This pool dates to the late Second Temple period (first century B. C.E.—first century C. E.), roughly on the spot where the original pool of Siloam (at the outlet of the Siloam Channel) must have been located. Not
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