Proto-Sinaitic script

The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite languageJohn F. Healey, ''The Early Alphabet'' University of California Press, 1990, , p. 18. repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script.

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 two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River suggests that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the small number of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions from the Bronze Age is based on rather scant epigraphic 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 first published group of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. These ten inscriptions, plus an eleventh published by Raymond Weill in 1904 from the 1868 notes of Edward Henry Palmer, were reviewed in detail, and numbered (as 345–355), by Alan Gardiner in 1916. To this were added a number of short Proto-Canaanite inscriptions found in Canaan and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, and more recently, the discovery in 1999 of the two 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

According to William Albright, in his book "The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions And Their Decipherment", the first inscriptions in the category now known as Proto-Sinaitic were discovered and copied by E.H Palmer in Wadi Magharah during the winter of 1868–1869. His text was not published until 1904. However, E.H. Palmer notes that he was not the first, others had done work before him and as such his work was more of a "Re-discovery". In the winter of 1905, Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda were conducting a series of archaeological excavations in the Sinai Peninsula. During a dig at Serabit el-Khadim, an extremely lucrative turquoise 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, 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 not the combination of logograms and syllabics as in Egyptian script proper. He thus assumed that the inscriptions 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 glyphs appeared to be early versions of the signs used for later Semitic languages 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. One example was the character , to which Gardiner assigned the ⟨b⟩ sound, on the grounds that it derived from the Egyptian glyph for 'house' , and was very similar to the Phoenician letter ''bet'', whose name derives from the Semitic word for “house”, ''bayt''. 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" Hathor. 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 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.

Development

The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages were 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. 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 hieratic.

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 (1200–1150 BC).

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".

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

Inscriptions

Serabit inscriptions

The Sinai inscriptions are best known from the Serabit el-Khadim proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor ('). The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites (i.e. speakers of an early form of Northwest Semitic ancestral to the Canaanite languages 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 and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple."The proto-Sinaitic corpus consists of approximately forty inscriptions and fragments, the vast majority of which were found at Serabit el-Khadim" (Simons 2011:16).

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 or his successor circa 1800 BC. It has been suggested that the dating period includes the reign of pharaoh Senwosret III.

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.

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions ( ''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, in the heart of literate Egypt. They have been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 BC. They are in a wadi in the Qena 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 logograms (representing a whole word, not just a single consonant) or rebuses:
: 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'', 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.

Other possible inscriptions

Archaeological excavations at the site of Umm el-Marra have uncovered four inscribed clay cylinders dating to ca. 2300 BC whose incisions have been hypothesized to be Early Alphabetic Semitic writing, which would make them the oldest such examples.

In 2009, Stephanie Dalley published several tablets from the Schøyen Collection dating to the times of the First Sealand dynasty, four of which have been identified as examples of Early Alphabetic inscriptions. Other probable examples of Early Alphabetic inscriptions include an ostracon from a tomb in western Thebes and a inscribed sherd from Lachish, both dating to the 15th century BC.

In 2010, Stefan Wimmer published an inscription discovered at Timna Valley which he also identified as written in proto-Sinaitic writing, although he also noted that its authenticity is not certain.

Table of Symbols

Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. A full repertoire of the currently known letterforms can be found on pages 8 and 9 here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19299-revisiting-proto-sinaitic.pdf. Also shown are the reconstructed sound values and names.See also: Simons (2011),

*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: 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

* Tell es-Safi inscription
* Proto-Canaanite
* Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

References

Bibliography

Primary sources

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Secondary sources

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* I. Biggs, M. Dijkstra, ''Corpus of Proto-sinaitic Inscriptions'', Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Neukirchener Verlag, 1990.
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* Colless, Brian E., "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet", Abr-Nahrain / Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 (1992) 15–62.
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* Hamilton, Gordon J, ''The origins of the West Semitic alphabet in Egyptian scripts'' (2006)
* Fellman, Bruce (2000) "The Birthplace of the ABCs." ''Yale Alumni Magazine,'' December 200

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* Goldwasser, Orly
How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
''Biblical Archaeology Review'' 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010.
* Millard, A. R. (1986) "The Infancy of the Alphabet" ''World Archaeology.'' pp. 390–398.
* Ray, John D. (1986) "The Emergence of Writing in Egypt" ''Early Writing Systems; 17/3'' pp. 307–316.
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* Stefan Jakob Wimmer / Samaher Wimmer-Dweikat: ''The Alphabet from Wadi el-Hôl – A First Try'', in: '' Göttinger Miszellen. Beiträge zur ägyptologischen Diskussion'', Heft 180, Göttingen 2001, p. 107–111

External links

Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (byu.edu)

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

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