ABSTRACT
Hebrew (see Chapter 9), Phoenician, languages of the area east of the Jordan River: Ammonite, Moabite and Edomite, moreover Ugaritic (see Chapter 8) and early Canaanite words and constructions in the Akkadian texts of El-Amama, Egypt, constitute the Canaanite branch of Semitic. Except for Hebrew, they all died out in antiquity and were forgotten till the inscriptions were deciphered, from the eighteenth century on (many were found in the nineteenth century, some recently). In the Eastern Mediterranean, Phoenician was used until the first century BeE. In North Africa it survived until the fifth century CEo
As against the well-attested Hebrew, its Canaanite neighbors are only known from a few hundreds of epigraphic sources (i.a. seals) from the first half of the first millennium BCE, many of them fragmentary or short. From the presumably rich literature of the Phoenicians, the inventors of the alphabetic script, nothing survived in the original. Many thousands of inscriptions, most of them the same type of votive formulae, have survived in North Africa, mostly at Carthage (in today's Tunisia), destroyed by the Romans in 146 BCE, written in the late Phoenician dialect, Punic. A few of these are in Greek or Latin letters. The Roman playwright Plautus inserted a Punic conversation, in Latin script, in his play Poenulus (about 200 BCE).
