הכתובות הכנעניות והארמיות, הידועות גם ככתובות שמיות צפון־מערביות,[3] הן המקור החוץ־מקראי העיקרי להבנת החברה וההיסטוריה של הפיניקים, העברים והארמים הקדומים. כתובות שמיות נמצאו על לוחות ומצבים אבן, אוסטרקוני חרס וחפצים אחרים, והן נעות בין כתובות בנות מילה או שתיים לטקסטים מלאים ארוכים בני שורות רבות.[4][5][6][7] הכתובות הישנות יותר יוצרות רצף ניביםכנעני־ארמי, המודגם בכתבים שחוקרים התקשו לסווג באופן מובהק אחת הקטגוריות, כגון כתובת זכור וכתובת בלעם.[8][9][10][11]
הכתובות שנכתבו בשפות שמיות צפון־מערביות קדומות (כנענית וארמית) קוטלגו במספר רב של קורפוסים (כלומר רשימות) במהלך מאתיים השנים האחרונות. הקורפוסים ההיסטוריים העיקריים שנכתבו הם:
פאול שרדר (1869), Die phönizische sprache. Entwurf Einer Grammatik, Nebst Sprach - und Schriftproben. המחקר הראשון של הדקדוק הפיניקי, מנה 332 טקסטים ידועים באותה תקופה.[12][14]
הכתובות המפורטות להלן כוללות את הכתובות המוזכרות בחלק ממהדורות חלק הקורפוסים לעיל (המספרים בעמודת הקונקורדנציה מצליבים את המספורים השונים), וכן כתובות שלא פורסמו באף קורפוס, עם הפניות מתאימות בעמודה השמאלית.
Benjamin Sass, Chapter 1: "The West Semitic alphabet ca. 1150–850 BCE", The Alphabet at the Turn of the Millennium, Emery and Claire Yass Publications in Archaeology, 2005
^Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2013). "Wilhelm Gesenius and the Rise of Phoenician Philology"(PDF). Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. 427: 209–266. אורכב מ-המקור(PDF) ב-2016-03-04. נבדק ב-2015-04-08. Alas, all these were either late or Punic, and came from Cyprus, from the ruins of Kition, from Malta, Sardinia, Athens, and Carthage, but not yet from the Phoenician homeland. The first Phoenician text as such was found as late as 1855, the Eshmunazor sarcophagus inscription from Sidon.
^Turner, William Wadden (1855-07-03). The Sidon Inscription. p. 259. Its interest is greater both on this account and as being the first inscription properly so-called that has yet been found in Phoenicia proper, which had previously furnished only some coins and an inscribed gem. It is also the longest inscription hitherto discovered, that of Marseilles—which approaches it the nearest in the form of its characters, the purity of its language, and its extent — consisting of but 21 lines and fragments of lines.
^Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften. Worvort zur 1. Auflage, p.XI. 1961. Seit dem Erscheinen von Mark Lidzbarskis "Handbuch der Nordsemitischen Epigraphik" (1898) und G. A. Cooke's "Text-Book of North-Semitic Inscriptions" (1903) ist es bis zum gegenwärtigen Zeitpunkt nicht wieder unternommen worden, das nordwestsemitische In schriftenmaterial gesammelt und kommentiert herauszugeben, um es Forschern und Stu denten zugänglich zu machen.... Um diesem Desideratum mit Rücksicht auf die Bedürfnisse von Forschung und Lehre abzu helfen, legen wir hiermit unter dem Titel "Kanaanäische und aramäische Inschriften" (KAI) eine Auswahl aus dem gesamten Bestände der einschlägigen Texte vor
^ 12Mark Woolmer (ed.). Phoenician: A Companion to Ancient Phoenicia. p. 4. Altogether, the known Phoenician texts number nearly seven thousand. The majority of these were collected in three volumes constituting the first part of the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum (CIS), begun in 1867 under the editorial direction of the famous French scholar Ernest Renan (1823–1892), continued by J.-B. Chabot and concluded in 1962 by James G. Février. The CIS corpus includes 176 "Phoenician" inscriptions and 5982 "Punic" inscriptions (see below on these labels).
^ 12Parker, Heather Dana Davis; Rollston, Christopher A. (2019). "9". In Hamidović, D.; Clivaz, C.; Savant, S. (eds.). Teaching Epigraphy in the Digital Age. Ancient Manuscripts in Digital Culture: Visualisation, Data Mining, Communication. Vol. 3. Alessandra Marguerat. LEIDEN; BOSTON: Brill. pp. 189–216. ISBN9789004346734. JSTOR10.1163/j.ctvrxk44t.14. Of course, Donner and Röllig's three-volume handbook entitled KAI has been the gold standard for five decades now
^McCarter Jr., P. Kyle (1 בינואר 1991). "The Dialect of the Deir Alla Texts". In Jacob Hoftijzer and Gerrit Van der Kooij (ed.). The Balaam Text from Deir ʻAlla Re-evaluated: Proceedings of the International Symposium Held at Leiden, 21–24 August 1989. BRILL. pp. 87–. ISBN90-04-09317-6. It may be appropriate to observe at this point that students of the Northwest Semitic languages seem to be becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the usefulness of the Canaanite-Aramaic distinction for categorizing features found in texts from the Persian Period and earlier. A careful reevaluation of the binary organization of the Northwest Semitic family seems now to be underway. The study of the Deir 'Alla texts is one of the principal things prompting this reevaluation, and this may be counted as one of the very positive results of our work on these texts… the evidence of the Zakkur inscription is crucial, because it shows that the breakdown is not along Aramaic-Canaanite lines. Instead, the Deir 'Alla dialect sides with Hebrew, Moabite, and the language spoken by Zakkur (the dialect of Hamath or neighboring Lu’ath) against Phoenician and the majority of Old Aramaic dialects.{{cite book}}: (עזרה)
^ 123Lehmann, Reinhard G. (2013). "Wilhelm Gesenius and the Rise of Phoenician Philology"(PDF). Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter. 427: 240. אורכב מ-המקור(PDF) ב-2016-03-04. נבדק ב-2015-04-08. Basically, its core consists of the comprehensive edition, or re-edition of 70 Phoenician and some more non-Phoenician inscriptions... However, just to note the advances made in the nineteenth century, it is noteworthy that Gesenius' precursor Hamaker, in his Miscellanea Phoenicia of 1828, had only 13 inscriptions at his disposal. On the other hand only 30 years later the amount of Phoenician inscribed monuments had grown so enormously that Schröder in his compendium Die phönizische Sprache. Entwurf einer Grammatik nebst Sprach - und Schriftproben of 1869 could state that Gesenius knew only a quarter of the material Schröder had at hand himself.
^"Review of Wilhelm Gesenius's publications". The Foreign Quarterly Review. L. Scott. 1838. p. 245. What is left consists of a few inscriptions and coins, found principally not where we should a priori anticipate, namely, at the chief cities themselves, but at their distant colonies... even now there are not altogether more than about eighty inscriptions and sixty coins, and those moreover scattered through the different museums of Europe.
^Rollig, 1983, "This increase of textual material can be easily appreciated when one looks at the first independent grammar of Phoenician, P.SCHRODER'S Die phonizische Sprache Entuurf einer Grammatik, Halle 1869, which appeared just over 110 years ago. There on pp. 47–72 all the texts known at the time are listed — 332 of them. Today, if we look at CIS Pars I, the incompleteness of which we scarcely need mention, we find 6068 texts."
^ 12Bevan, A. (1904). NORTH-SEMITIC INSCRIPTIONS. The Journal of Theological Studies, 5(18), 281–284. Retrieved August 1, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/23949814
^Schmitz, Philip C. “The Name ‘Agrigentum’ in a Punic Inscription (CIS I 5510.10).” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 53, no. 1 (1994): 1–13. http://www.jstor.org/stable/545353
^Tekoglu, R. & Lemaire, A. (2000). La bilingue royale louvito-phénicienne de Çineköy. Comptes rendus de l'Académie des inscriptions, et belleslettres, année 2000, 960–1006. Important additions to the interpretation of the Luwian version were made in I. Yakubovich, Phoenician and Luwian in Early Iron Age Cilicia, Anatolian Studies 65 (2015), pp. 40–44
^Aaron Demsky (2012). "An Iron Age IIA Alphabetic Writing Exercise from Khirbet Qeiyafa". Israel Exploration Journal. Israel Exploration Society. 62 (2): 186–199. JSTOR43855624.