Quf ࠒ

Quf is the nineteenth letter of the Samaritan alphabet and the first of the hundreds, carrying the numeral value one hundred. It stands for a consonant the older language kept distinct from plain k, made further back in the mouth, and it is the third member of the emphatic series after tit and tsaadiy. The name is the inherited Northwest Semitic one behind Hebrew qof.

Its afterlife in the European alphabets is the most direct of any letter in the sequence. Greek took the sign as qoppa, in this same nineteenth position. The distinction between qoppa and kappa made no difference in Greek, so the letter fell out of use in Greek writing and survived only as a numeral sign in the alphabetic numbering. Before it disappeared, the Etruscans and then the Romans had taken it, and it is the Latin letter Q. So a letter that Greek discarded because it had no use for the sound is still in daily use across the Latin alphabet, and the Samaritan script and the English one hold the same sign at the same point in the same list.

Between quf and the end of the alphabet there are only three letters, which is why the twenty-two letter numeral system runs nine units, nine tens and four hundreds, and has to build anything above four hundred by combination.

The character is encoded at U+0812.

Mount Gerizim is the centre of Samaritan religion. The community holds it to be the place God chose, its Torah names the mountain where the Masoretic text does not, the Passover sacrifice is performed on it, and the village of Kiryat Luza sits on its slope. It is also an archaeological site, and excavation there has produced a substantial body of material bearing directly on the community history.

The finds include the remains of a sacred precinct on the mountain and a large settlement around it, and, importantly for this alphabet, a considerable number of inscriptions. They are written in Aramaic and in the older Hebrew letters, they are mostly short dedicatory texts, and they belong to the period when the sanctuary was in use. For a script otherwise thinly attested between the Iron Age epigraphy and the surviving manuscripts, that is valuable evidence, and it lands in exactly the place where the written record is weakest.

It also settles a question of continuity in the most tangible way available. The letterforms in the ground on Gerizim, the letterforms in the scrolls kept at Nablus and the letterforms taught in the village school on the same mountain are one script, in one place, over a very long time. Excavation reports are not usually able to say that about anything. Here the excavated inscriptions and the living community are separated by a walk rather than by a discipline.