On the last day of his 2005 archaeological dig in Israel, Ronald Tappy was up in a cherry picker, photographing his site, when a supervisor asked him to look at "some scratches" a college volunteer had found on a stone.

Lake Fong, Post-Gazette Ron Tappy, professor of Bible and archaeology at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, with the scratches found on a stone at Tel Zayit, a mound of ruins between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea -- "If I had known what it was ... I would have leaped out of the cherry picker and tried to fly to the ground." Click photo for larger image. Previous story Pittsburgh archeologist discovers ancient alphabet in Israel

"If I had known what it was ... I would have leaped out of the cherry picker and tried to fly to the ground," said Dr. Tappy, professor of Bible and archaeology at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

But inscriptions from the late 10th century B.C. -- which the Bible associates with King Solomon -- were virtually unheard of. He finished taking pictures of Tel Zayit, a mound of ruins halfway between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean that he has excavated since 1999.

When he saw the stone, early morning light fell so perfectly across its face that he could make out faint letters. They had been unnoticed earlier because they disappeared in the sun's glare.

"I was a bit speechless," he said yesterday.

It turned out to be an alphabet. "You could say this was Solomon's alphabet." he said.

Dr. Tappy and his colleagues believe the 38-pound stone holds the ancestor of all alphabets. They also believe it buttresses arguments that biblical stories of ancient kings could have a basis in historical fact.

Dr. Tappy is studying the stone with Kyle McCarter, a renowned expert on ancient Near Eastern writing at Johns Hopkins University, and directors of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California.

Because it was sealed in a layer of debris caused by a fire, roughly between 925 and 900 B.C., he knew it could have been written no later than that time.

"The remains of the building, including the inscription ... have been protected all this time. They have been lying there, sleeping silently all these 3,000 years," he said.

Some scholars argue that biblical accounts of King David and King Solomon were invented centuries later. These scholars claim that 10th-century Judeans were illiterate, but this stone shows that they could have recorded their history, he said.

One other purported 10th-century B.C. inscription surfaced in 1908, but is not from a proper archaeological excavation, said Dr. McCarter, who also spoke yesterday. Many archaeologists will not work with items from the antiquities market, because it is impossible to know their archaeological context and because of increasingly sophisticated forgeries, he said.

"The first [10th-century inscription] that can be securely dated by archaeology ... ceramic typology and so forth, is the Tel Zayit stone," he said.

Phoenicians, who lived on the coast, developed an alphabet, which Greeks and Romans later adapted.

The ruins it was found in reflect the inland culture of Jerusalem much more than the Phoenician coastal culture, he said.

"This is a site from the outskirts of a 10th-century kingdom that was establishing itself exactly at that time in Jerusalem. This is the time of the Solomonic kingdom in Jerusalem," he said.

"The fact that you can go to its western extreme, to the most remote part of the kingdom, and find literacy at the very beginning of its development says a great deal about the sophistication of that early state."