Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in

Canaan Canaan (; Phoenician: 𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍 – ; he, כְּנַעַן – , in pausa – ; grc-bib, Χανααν – ;The current scholarly edition of the Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus T ...

, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician alpha ...

, which led to many modern alphabets including the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as we ...

. According to common theory,

ites or

Hyksos Hyksos (; Egyptian '' ḥqꜣ(w)- ḫꜣswt'', Egyptological pronunciation: ''hekau khasut'', "ruler(s) of foreign lands") is a term which, in modern Egyptology, designates the kings of the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt (fl. c. 1650–1550 BC). T ...

who spoke a

Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant a ...

repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at

Serabit el-Khadim Serabit el-Khadim ( ar, سرابيط الخادم ; also transliterated Serabit al-Khadim, Serabit el-Khadem) is a locality in the southwest Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, where turquoise was mined extensively in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egypt ...

in the

Sinai Peninsula The Sinai Peninsula, or simply Sinai (now usually ) (, , cop, Ⲥⲓⲛⲁ), is a peninsula in Egypt, and the only part of the country located in Asia. It is between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, and is a l ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

, dating to the

Middle Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...

(2100–1500 BC). The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. However, the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River indicates that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the various Proto-Canaanite scripts during the Bronze Age is based on rather scant

epigraphic Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

evidence; it is only with the Bronze Age collapse and the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the Levant that Proto-Canaanite is clearly attested ( Byblos inscriptions 10th–8th century BC,

Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription The Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon is a ostracon (a trapezoid-shaped potsherd) with five lines of text, discovered during excavations at Khirbet Qeiyafa in 2008. Hebrew University archaeologist Amihai Mazar said the inscription was the longest Proto-C ...

c. 10th century BC). The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in

Sinai Sinai commonly refers to: * Sinai Peninsula, Egypt * Mount Sinai, a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt * Biblical Mount Sinai, the site in the Bible where Moses received the Law of God Sinai may also refer to: * Sinai, South Dakota, a place ...

Hilda Hilda is one of several female given names derived from the name ''Hild'', formed from Old Norse , meaning 'battle'. Hild, a Nordic-German Bellona, was a Valkyrie who conveyed fallen warriors to Valhalla. Warfare was often called Hild's Game. Th ...

and Flinders Petrie. To this may be added a number of short Proto-Canaanite inscriptions found in

and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, and more recently, the discovery in 1999 of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, found in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC.

Discovery

In the winter of 1905, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda Petrie (née Urlin) were conducting a series of archaeological excavations in the

. During a dig at

, an extremely lucrative

turquoise Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula . It is rare and valuable in finer grades and has been prized as a gemstone and ornamental stone for thousands of yea ...

mine used between the Twelfth and Thirteenth Dynasty and again between the Eighteenth and mid- Twentieth Dynasty, Petrie discovered a series of inscriptions at the site's massive invocative temple to

Hathor Hathor ( egy, ḥwt-ḥr, lit=House of Horus, grc, Ἁθώρ , cop, ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky ...

, as well as some fragmentary inscriptions in the mines themselves. Petrie immediately recognized hieroglyphic characters in the inscriptions, but upon closer inspection realized the script was wholly alphabetic and not the combination of logograms and syllabics as in Egyptian script proper. He thus assumed that the script showed a script that the turquoise miners had devised themselves, using linear signs that they had borrowed from hieroglyphics. He published his findings in London the following year. Ten years later, in 1916, Alan Gardiner, one of the premier Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century, published his own interpretation of Petrie's findings, arguing that the

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s appeared to be early versions of the signs used for later

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigra ...

such as Phoenician, and was able to assign sound values and reconstructed names to some of the letters by assuming they represented what would later become the common Semitic

abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vowels ...

. One example was the character Proto-semiticB-01

, to which Gardiner assigned the ⟨b⟩ sound, on the grounds that it derived from the Egyptian glyph for 'house' EgyptianB-01

, and was very similar to the similarly-shaped Phoenician character, Phoenician beth

, which is called ''bet''. The name ''bet'' itself was commonly thought to derive from the Semitic word for ''house'', ''bayt'', providing another layer of support to his thesis. Using his hypothesis, Gardiner was able to affirm Petrie's hypothesis that the mystery inscriptions were of a religious nature, as his model allowed an often recurring word to be reconstructed as '' l bʿl t'', meaning "to Ba'alat" or more accurately, "to (the) Lady" – that is, the "lady"

. Likewise, this allowed another recurring word '' m ʿ hbʿlt'' to be translated as "Beloved of (the) Lady", a reading which became very acceptable after the

lemma Lemma may refer to: Language and linguistics * Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word * Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered Science and mathematics * Lemma (botany), a ...

was found carved underneath a hieroglyphic inscription which read "Beloved of Hathor, Lady of Turquoise". Gardiner's hypothesis allowed researchers to connect the letters of the inscriptions to modern Semitic alphabets, and resulted in the inscriptions becoming much more readable, leading to the immediate acceptance of his hypothesis.

Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions

Serabit inscriptions

The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved

graffiti Graffiti (plural; singular ''graffiti'' or ''graffito'', the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from s ...

and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called

and its temple to the Egyptian goddess

('). The mountain contained

mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years. Many of the workers and officials were from the

Nile Delta The Nile Delta ( ar, دلتا النيل, or simply , is the delta formed in Lower Egypt where the Nile River spreads out and drains into the Mediterranean Sea. It is one of the world's largest river deltas—from Alexandria in the west to Po ...

, and included large numbers of Canaanites (i.e. speakers of an early form of Northwest Semitic ancestral to the

Canaanite languages The Canaanite languages, or Canaanite dialects, are one of the three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Ugaritic, all originating in the Levant and Mesopotamia. They are attested in Canaanite inscription ...

of the Late Bronze Age) who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. Most of the forty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous

hieratic Hieratic (; grc, ἱερατικά, hieratiká, priestly) is the name given to a cursive writing system used for Ancient Egyptian and the principal script used to write that language from its development in the third millennium BC until the ris ...

and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple. The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. An alternative view dates most of the inscriptions to the reign of

Amenemhat III :''See Amenemhat, for other individuals with this name.'' Amenemhat III ( Ancient Egyptian: ''Ỉmn-m-hꜣt'' meaning 'Amun is at the forefront'), also known as Amenemhet III, was a pharaoh of ancient Egypt and the sixth king of the Twelfth Dy ...

or his successor circa 1800 BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script. Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon

Inscriptions in Canaan

Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC. They are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name "Proto-Canaanite", although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is also applied to early Phoenician or

Ancient Hebrew writings The earliest known precursor to Hebrew, an inscription in the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet, is the Khirbet Qeiyafa Inscription (11th–10th century BCE), if it can be considered Hebrew at that early a stage. By far the most varied, extensive, and histo ...

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions ( ar, وادي الهول ''Wādī al-Hawl'' 'Ravine of Terror') were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and

Abydos Abydos may refer to: *Abydos, a progressive metal side project of German singer Andy Kuntz * Abydos (Hellespont), an ancient city in Mysia, Asia Minor * Abydos (''Stargate''), name of a fictional planet in the '' Stargate'' science fiction universe ...

, in the heart of literate Egypt. They have been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 BC. They are in a

wadi Wadi ( ar, وَادِي, wādī), alternatively ''wād'' ( ar, وَاد), North African Arabic Oued, is the Arabic term traditionally referring to a valley. In some instances, it may refer to a wet (ephemeral) riverbed that contains water onl ...

in the

Qena Qena ( ar, قنا ' , locally: ; cop, ⲕⲱⲛⲏ ''Konē'') is a city in Upper Egypt, and the capital of the Qena Governorate. Situated on the east bank of the Nile, it was known in antiquity as Kaine (Greek Καινή, meaning "new (city)"; ...

bend of the Nile, at approx. , among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions.. Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date. The inscriptions are graphically very similar to the Serabit inscriptions, but show a greater hieroglyphic influence, such as a glyph for a man that was apparently not read alphabetically: The first of these (''h₁'') is a figure of celebration ardiner A28 whereas the second (''h₂'') is either that of a child ardiner A17or of dancing ardiner A32 If the latter, ''h₁'' and ''h₂'' may be graphic variants (such as two hieroglyphs both used to write the Canaanite word ''hillul'' "jubilation") rather than different consonants.

A28 A17 A32

Hieroglyphs representing, reading left to right, celebration, a child, and dancing. The first appears to be the prototype for ''h₁,'' while the latter two have been suggested as the prototype for ''h₂.''

Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in which some of the signs are treated as

logogram In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...

s (representing a whole word, not just a single consonant) or

rebus A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) ...

es: : ertical''mšt r h ʿnt ygš ʾl'' : erticalExcellent banquet (''mšt r'' 'ʾš'' of the celebration (''h'' 'illul'' of ʿAnat (''ʿnt''). twill provide (''ygš'') ʾEl (''ʾl'')
: orizontal''rb wn mn h ngṯ h ʾ p mẖ r'' : orizontalplenty (''rb'') of wine (''wn'') ndvictuals (''mn'') for the celebration (''h'' 'illul''. We will sacrifice (''ngṯ'') to her (''h'') an ox (''ʾ'' 'lp'' and (''p'') a prime fatling (''mẖ r'' 'ʾš''')." Here, ''

aleph Aleph (or alef or alif, transliterated ʾ) is the first letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician , Hebrew , Aramaic , Syriac , Arabic ʾ and North Arabian 𐪑. It also appears as South Arabian 𐩱 and Ge'ez . These letter ...

'', whose glyph depicts the head of an ox, is a logogram used to represent the word "ox" (''*ʾalp''), '' he'', whose glyph depicts a man in celebration, is a logogram for the words "celebration" (''*hillul'') and "she/her" (''hiʾ‎''), and '' resh'', whose glyph depicts a man's head, is a logogram for the word "utmost/greatest" (''*raʾš''). This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation.https://repositorio.uca.edu.ar/bitstream/123456789/6753/1/proto-alphabetic-inscriptions-wadi-arabah.pdf Antiguo Oriente vol. 8 (2010) p. 91 Note: The 'y' appears in the Colless article p. 95, but not in the Wikimedia Commons trace image inscr1.jpg

Proto-Canaanite

Synonym for Proto-Sinaitic

Proto-Canaanite, also referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 16th century BC), when found in Canaan.

Synonym for Paleo-Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script

''Proto-Canaanite'' is also used when referring to the ancestor of the Phoenician or

Paleo-Hebrew script The Paleo-Hebrew script ( he, הכתב העברי הקדום), also Palaeo-Hebrew, Proto-Hebrew or Old Hebrew, is the writing system found in Canaanite inscriptions from the region of biblical Israel and Judah. It is considered to be the script ...

, respectively, before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BC, with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic. While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC, Proto-Canaanite is used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in

Phoenicia Phoenicia () was an ancient thalassocratic civilization originating in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenician city-states extended and shrank throughout their histor ...

.John F. Healey, ''The Early Alphabet'' University of California Press, 1990, , p. 18. However, the Phoenician,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, and other

Canaanite dialects The Canaanite languages, or Canaanite dialects, are one of the three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Ugaritic, all originating in the Levant and Mesopotamia. They are attested in Canaanite inscriptions ...

were largely indistinguishable before the 11th century BC, and the writing system is essentially identical.. A possible example of Proto-Canaanite, the inscription on the

Ophel pithos The Ophel pithos is a 3,000-year-old inscription on a fragment of a ceramic jar found near Jerusalem's Temple Mount by Israeli archeologist Eilat Mazar. Discovery The Ophel pithos was found in 2012 during excavations and the find was announced in ...

, was found in 2012 on a pottery storage jar during the excavations of the south wall of the Temple Mount by Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar in Jerusalem. Inscribed on the pot are some big letters about an inch high, of which only five are complete, and traces of perhaps three additional letters written in Proto-Canaanite script.

History

The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages have been shown to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform, Cretan hieroglyphs, the Cypriot syllabary, and

Anatolian hieroglyphs Anatolian hieroglyphs are an indigenous logographic script native to central Anatolia, consisting of some 500 signs. They were once commonly known as Hittite hieroglyphs, but the language they encode proved to be Luwian, not Hittite, and the ter ...

. Then the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by Alan Gardiner who identified the word ' "Lady" occurring several times in inscriptions, and also attempted to decipher other words. In the 1950s and 1960s, William Albright published interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from

,William F. Albright, ''The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment'' (1966) leading to the commonly accepted belief that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype. The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, along with the contemporary parallels found in Canaan and Wadi el-Hol, are thus hypothesized to show an intermediate step between Egyptian

and the

. According to the "alphabet theory", the early Semitic proto-alphabet reflected in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions would have given rise to both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Proto-Canaanite alphabet by the time of the

Late Bronze Age collapse The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, between c. 1200 and 1150. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near East ...

(1200–1150 BC). Albright hypothesized that only the graphic form of the Proto-Sinaitic characters derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs, because they were given the sound value of the first consonant of the Semitic translation of the hieroglyph (many hieroglyphs had already been used acrophonically in Egyptian.) For example, the hieroglyph for ''pr'' "house" (a rectangle partially open along one side, "O1" in Gardiner's sign list) was adopted to write Semitic , after the first consonant of ''baytu'', the Semitic word for "house". According to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. An alternative hypothesis was recently proposed by Brian Colless (2014), who believes that 18 of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet have counterparts in the

Byblos syllabary The Byblos script, also known as the Byblos syllabary, Pseudo-hieroglyphic script, Proto-Byblian, Proto-Byblic, or Byblic, is an undeciphered writing system, known from ten inscriptions found in Byblos, a coastal city in Lebanon. The inscription ...

, and it seems that the proto-alphabet evolved as a simplification of the syllabary, moving from syllabic to consonantal writing, in the style of the Egyptian script (which did not normally indicate vowels); this goes against the Goldwasser hypothesis (2010) that the original alphabet was invented by miners in Sinai. A transitional stage between Proto-Canaanite and Old Phoenician (1000–800 BC) has been proposed by authors such as Werner Pichler as the origin of the

Libyco-Berber The Libyco-Berber alphabet or the Libyc alphabet (modern Berber name: ''Agemmay Alibu-Maziɣ'') is an abjad writing system that was used during the first millennium BC by various Berber peoples of North Africa and the Canary Islands, to write an ...

script used among

Ancient Libyans The Latin name ''Libya'' (from Greek Λιβύη: ''Libyē'', which came from Berber: ''Libu'') referred to North Africa during the Iron Age and Classical Antiquity. Berbers occupied the area for thousands of years before the recording of histor ...

(i.e. Proto-Berbers) – citing common similarities to both Proto-Canaanite proper and its early North Arabian descendants.

Synopsis

Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters.Based on Simons (2011), * Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs" (p. 38), * Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 39), * Figure Four: "Representative selection of later proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to early proto-Canaanite and proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 40). See also: Goldwasser (2010), following Albright (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters"
fig. 1
. A comparison of glyphs from western ("Proto-Canaanite", Byblos) and southern scripts along with the reconstructed "Linear Ugaritic" (Lundin 1987) is found in Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, ''Die Keilalphabete: die phönizisch-kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit'', Ugarit-Verlag, 1988, p. 102, reprinted in Wilfred G. E. Watson, Nicolas Wyatt (eds.), ''Handbook of Ugaritic Studies'' (1999)
p. 86
See also Colless (2010)

For the Ancient South Arabian and Libyco-Berber scripts only the letters with Proto-Canaanite correspondences are shown. * The Other section shows the corresponding Greek alphabet, Modern Greek,

Etruscan __NOTOC__ Etruscan may refer to: Ancient civilization *The Etruscan language, an extinct language in ancient Italy *Something derived from or related to the Etruscan civilization **Etruscan architecture **Etruscan art **Etruscan cities **Etruscan ...

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, and

Cyrillic , bg, кирилица , mk, кирилица , russian: кириллица , sr, ћирилица, uk, кирилиця , fam1 = Egyptian hieroglyphs , fam2 = Proto-Sinaitic , fam3 = Phoenician , fam4 = G ...

letters.

References

External links

Proto-Sinaitic - 18th-14th cent. B.C.
Mnamon Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean
Escritura Proto-sinaítica (in Spanish)
Promotora Española de Lingüística (Proel). ;Wadi el-Hol
USC West Semitic Research Project site on Wadi el-Hol, with photos

BBC article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov
{{List of writing systems Proto-Sinaitic script, 19th-century BC establishments 1904 archaeological discoveries 2nd millennium BC in Egypt Abjad writing systems Bronze Age writing systems Canaanite languages Canaanite writing systems Middle Kingdom of Egypt Semitic writing systems Sinai Peninsula Undeciphered writing systems