Phoenician Moabite Font Documentation [2.0]

I designed this font to be both legible and true to the proportions of
the original letters.  Created and (c) by David Myriad Rosenbaum, March
1999/5759.


This is shareware; payment is on a sliding scale, based upon your
ability to pay.  Use is free for the first week. After that, students
need simply to send me a letter of comment.  Professors and others not
on a budget should send between ten and twenty dollars.  Critical
letters of comment are especially appreciated, so subsequent versions
of can be improved.

Permission is granted to freely copy and distribute this font packet,
if the entire folder, including this documentation, is included.
Academic use is granted, if the appropriate citation is given.

Your letters of comment will be greatly appreciated.  Contact me at:
David Myriad Rosenbaum
P.O. Box 21701 El Sobrante CA 94820-1701.

For the latest version of this font, some free Near Eastern Clip-Art,
and informal speculation on the Ancient Near East, visit my website at:

www.bigfoot.com/~davidmyriad

e-mail: davidmyriad@bigfoot.com

Keyboard Notes:

The are some challenges in fitting all the letters on the standard
keyboard, and in communicating their locations over cyberspace.  Note
that the image below is bit-mapped -- the letters will look much better
when printed, and in font size 24 point or 36 point on your computer
screen, honest.

The letters are arranged in their traditional order.  Upper case and
lower case are the same, aside from the following exceptions:
H (heth)/h ( heh), S (shin)/s (samekh), T (teth)/t (sadhe),
X(taw)/x(taw).  Word division (|) can be indicated by the (|)(\) key,
or by a period (.).

ABOUT PHOENICIAN MOABITE:

The Phoenician alphabet is the mother of virtually all modern
alphabets, the direct ancestor of our own Roman letters, as well as the
Runic alphabet of the Norse.  The first true alphabet, it was
originally developed circa 1,050 B.C.E. in Phoenicia (modern
Lebanon/Israel/Syria) it developed a standardized form that endured
for centuries.

This font is taken from The Moabite Stone, a stela of black basalt,
carved around 840 to 820 B.C.E. (ANET 320-321).  The relatively lengthy
inscription was written by  King Mesha of Moab.  The inscription, and a
picture of the stela can be found most readily in the paperback
The Ancient Near East -- An Anthology of Texts and Pictures, edited by
James B. Pritchard.

HOW IT'S DONE:

This font is a labor of love, as it takes about one-hundred hours to
make; at least that's when I stop counting.  I've decided to focus upon
creating primarily alphabets from the ancient Near East, out of
personal interest in my ancestors culture.  I strive for academic
accuracy, studying as many scholarly sources as I can find for each
text.

Photographs or careful tracings of the individual letters are then
scanned and outlined by Fontographer - a magnificent font creation
program.  Then comes many "happy" hours as I smooth the arkward lines
of a handwritten text into an idealized version of each letter.
This is done on a grid of one-thousand points by one-thousand points,
and to one-thousandth of a point accuracy.  This results in a font that
is true to the proportions of the original alphabet and is highly
readable, both on screen and in print.