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Wadi el-Hol is a valley on the Farshut Road, north-west of
''WADI EL-HOL'' by John Darnell – UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
Linguistics
Wadi el-Hol is a valley on the Farshut Road, north-west of Luxor
Luxor ( ar, الأقصر, al-ʾuqṣur, lit=the palaces) is a modern city in Upper (southern) Egypt which includes the site of the Ancient Egyptian city of ''Thebes''.
Luxor has frequently been characterized as the "world's greatest open-a ...
on the Qena Bend, situated on the west bank of the river Nile
The Nile, , Bohairic , lg, Kiira , Nobiin: Áman Dawū is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa. It flows into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile is the longest river in Africa and has historically been considered the longest riv ...
in Egypt
Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...
. Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date.
History
In 1993, American egyptologists Deborah Darnell and her then husband John Darnell found letters in two single-line rock inscriptions carved into limestone cliffs in the Wadi el-Hol valley. They returned to the site for several seasons through the 1990s to further study the inscriptions. In 1999, they finally published their research, concluding that they had found the earliest survivingalphabet
An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...
, dating back to around 1800 to 1900 BCE. In particular, the inscriptions appear to resemble the Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, 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 ...
from Serabit el-Khadem.
See also
* Theban Desert Road Survey * Patterns of Evidence *Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, 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 ...
*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 ...
*Writing system
A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...
References
Further reading
* {{cite journal , first1=John Coleman , last1=Darnell , author-link1=John Coleman Darnell , first2=F. W. , last2=Dobbs-Allsopp , author-link2=F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp , first3=Marilyn J. , last3=Lundberg , first4=P. Kyle , last4=McCarter , author-link4=P. Kyle McCarter Jr. , first5=Bruce , last5=Zuckerman , year=2005 , title=Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hôl , journal=The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research , volume=59 , pages=63, 65, 67–71, 73–113, 115–124 , jstor=3768583External links
''WADI EL-HOL'' by John Darnell – UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology
Linguistics