Does Brian Colless refuse the me-ke-t-ATON ≈ me-ri-t-ATON proposal?
We appreciate Brian Colless’ great and almost live-long efforts and contributions to the deipherment of the Byblos syllabary, and we agree that IF one of the former claims for full decipherment should be partially taken for serious, then it is clearly Mendenhall’s (1985) work, who integrates Dunanats (1945) basic observations better and more cautiously than anyone since and before.
And, to be honest, several inscriptions could only be included into the [Byblicon Online Corpus of Byblos Inscriptions] (https://center-for-decipherment.ch/tool/#byblos) thanks to Brian’s countless hours spent by browsing through peripheral archaeological journals and scanning down dusty excavation reports in the search of possible Byblos inscriptions, namely [sup]BYBL[/sup]q, [sup]BYBL[/sup]r (The seal published by Garbini 2004 that lead to the readings discussed here), and some of the «possibly representing Byblos script» inscirptions added at the end of the corpus, e.g. [sup]BYBL?[/sup]z.
But regarding all his scientifically accepted corpus work, is it really necessary to cling to his purely internally evidenced «full decipherment» claim even now, when the first iconographically evidenced sound value proposals have been done so convincingly? How could the short inscriptions on the Garbini seal, clearly placed close to the heads of Nofretete’s daughters, seriously naming the boat (!) (https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2019/06/west-semitic-syllabic-cylinder.html) on the upper half of the cylinder seal? It is ovious that in his «debunking» of the [GEAS sound value proposals] (https://www.academia.edu/101593242/Zwei_Lautwertvorschl%C3%A4ge_zum_Byblos_Syllabar_me_und_pa_Mit_einer_Kritik_am_Entzifferungsvorschlag_von_Best_Woudhuizen), Brian is simply not ready to rethink his previous sound value attributions, based on circular reasoning and an exaggerated use of the acrophonic princible) within Mendenhall’s bubble. Brian, we are willing to integrate any credible, sequence based observations achieved by your structural analyses to our progress, so why don’t you try to converge your sound value attributions to our externally evidenced proposals, instead of shutting close the door to your bunker even more? You know well that it is rather interdependent, interdisciplinary (i.e. archaeological, mathematical, and linguistic) small step progresses which usually end up in a success, much more than one-man-decipherments. Let us bet on collaboration instead of forced mutual disregard, together with Andreas Fuls who will soon present his own structural analysis, that can be compared and maybe converged with the [morpheme boundary proposals] (https://bop.unibe.ch/baf/article/view/7186) presented at BAF two years ago – and with parts of your own research. At the end of the day, the name inscriptions of the three daughters of Nofretete, *anch-e-se-pa-*AMUN, *me-ke-t-*ATON , and *me-ri-t-*ATON are the first sound values corroborated by external iconographic evidence.