The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC.
The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a late date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, and by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively.[7]
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 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 c. 10th century BC).[8][9][10][11]
The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. To this may be 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 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.[12][13]
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 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 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.[14]
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 similarly-shaped Phoenician character, , 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 lbʿlt, meaning "to Ba'alat" or more accurately, "to (the) Lady" – that is, the "lady" Hathor. Likewise, this allowed another recurring word mʿhbʿlt 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".[15] 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.[citation needed]
The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr). 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.[13]
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.[16]
The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC.[17] An alternative view dates most of the inscriptions to the reign of Amenemhat III or his successor circa 1800 BC.[18]
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.
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.[13] They sometimes go by the name "Proto-Canaanite",[20] although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is also applied to early Phoenician or Ancient Hebrew writings.[9][10]
Wadi el-Hol inscriptions
Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions
The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions (Arabic: وادي الهولWādī 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.[21] They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, at approx. 25°57′N32°25′E / 25.950°N 32.417°E / 25.950; 32.417, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions..[22] Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date.[13]
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:[13] The first of these (h1) is a figure of celebration [Gardiner A28], whereas the second (h2) is either that of a child [Gardiner A17] or of dancing [Gardiner 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.
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.[citation needed]
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:
[Vertical] mšt r h ʿnt ygš ʾl
[Vertical] Excellent banquet (mšt r[ʾš]) of the celebration (h[illul]) of ʿAnat (ʿnt). [It] will provide (ygš) ʾEl (ʾl)
[Horizontal] rb wn mn h ngṯ h ʾ p mẖ r
[Horizontal] plenty (rb) of wine (wn) [and] victuals (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.[23]
Proto-Canaanite
Synonym for Proto-Sinaitic
Proto-Canaanite, also referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite,[1] is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 16th century BC), when found in Canaan.[24][25][26][27]
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, respectively, before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BC, with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic.[28]
While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC,[29] Proto-Canaanite is used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in Phoenicia.[30] However, the Phoenician, Hebrew, and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before the 11th century BC, and the writing system is essentially identical.[11] A possible example of Proto-Canaanite, the inscription on the Ophel pithos, 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.[25]
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.[31] Then the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by Alan Gardiner who identified the word bʿlt "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,[6] leading to the commonly accepted belief that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype.[citation needed]
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 hieratic and the Phoenician alphabet.[citation needed]
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).[30] 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.[need quotation to verify])
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 /b/, after the first consonant of baytu, the Semitic word for "house".[13][32] 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.[citation needed]
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, 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.[citation needed]
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.[33]
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.[34] For the Ancient South Arabian and Libyco-Berber scripts only the letters with Proto-Canaanite correspondences are shown.
Possible correspondences between Proto-Sinaitic, Ancient South Arabian and Phoenician letters. Also modern Hebrew, Arabic and Latin letters are shown.
^ abGarfinkel, Yosef; Golub, Mitka R.; Misgav, Haggai; Ganor, Saar (May 2015). "The ʾIšbaʿal Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa". Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 373 (373): 217–233. doi:10.5615/bullamerschoorie.373.0217. JSTOR 10.5615/bullamerschoorie.373.0217. S2CID 164971133.
^Rollston, C. (2020). The Emergence of Alphabetic Scripts. In R. Hasselbach-Andee (Ed.), A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages (1st ed., pp. 65–81). Wiley. doi:10.1002/9781119193814.ch4
^ ab"Sinaitic inscriptions | ancient writing". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-08-21.
^The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE (2009), Quote: "Naveh gives four major reasons why it is universally agreed that the Greek alphabet was developed from an early Phoenician alphabet.
According to Herodutous "the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus... brought into Hellas the alphabet, which had hitherto been unknown, as I think, to the Greeks."
The Greek Letters, alpha, beta, gimmel have no meaning in Greek but the meaning of most of their Semitic equivalents is known. For example, 'aleph' means 'ox', 'bet' means 'house' and 'gimmel' means 'throw stick'.
Early Greek letters are very similar and sometimes identical to the West Semitic letters.
The letter sequence between the Semitic and Greek alphabets is identical. (Naveh 1982)"
^ abWilliam F. Albright, The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment (1966)
^ ab"Earliest Known Hebrew Text in Proto-Canaanite Script Discovered in Area Where 'David Slew Goliath'". Science Daily. November 3, 2008.
^ ab. University of Haifa. January 10, 2010. Archived from the original on October 5, 2011. Retrieved November 5, 2011.
^ abNaveh, Joseph (1987), "Proto-Canaanite, Archaic Greek, and the Script of the Aramaic Text on the Tell Fakhariyah Statue", in Miller; et al. (eds.), Ancient Israelite Religion.
^Simons 2011, p. 24; quote: "The two latest discoveries, those found in the Wadi el-Hol, north of Luxor, in Egypt's western desert, can be dated with rather more certainty than the others and offer compelling evidence that the early date [1850 BC] is the more likely of the two"
^W. M. Flinders Petrie; C. T. Currell (1906), Researches in Sinai
^Gardiner, Alan H. "The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet". The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, vol. 3, no. 1, 1916, pp. 1–16. JSTOR. Accessed 18 May 2020.
^"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).
^Goldwasser (2010): "The alphabet was invented in this way by Canaanites at Serabit in the Middle Bronze Age, in the middle of the 19th century B.C.E., probably during the reign of Amenemhet III of the XIIth Dynasty."
^Wilson-Wright, Aren Max. “Sinai 357: A Northwest Semitic Votive Inscription to Teššob.” Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 136, no. 2, 2016, pp. 247–63
^Sass, B., Garfinkel, Y., Hasel, M. G., & Klingbeil, M. G. (2015). The Lachish Jar Sherd: An Early Alphabetic Inscription Discovered in 2014. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 374, 233–245. https://doi.org/10.5615/bullamerschoorie.374.0233
^Roger D. Woodard, 2008, The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts
^"Discovery of Egyptian Inscriptions Indicates an Earlier Date for Origin of the Alphabet". archive.nytimes.com.
^Baker, Dorie (13 December 1999). "Finding sheds new light on the alphabet's origins". Yale Bulletin and Calendar.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
^Woodard, Roger (2008), The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia.
^ abNgo, Robin (5 May 2017). "Precursor to Paleo-Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem". Bible History Daily. Biblical Archaeology Society.
^Gideon Tsur on the Proto-Canaanite text discovered at Keifa (Hebrew)
^Milstein, Mati (5 February 2007). "Ancient Semitic Snake Spells Deciphered in Egyptian Pyramid". news.nationalgeographic.com. Retrieved 10 April 2017.
^Coulmas, Florian (1996). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN0-631-21481-X.
^Hoffman, Joel M. (2004). In the beginning: a short history of the Hebrew language. New York, NY [u.a.]: New York Univ. Press. p. 23. ISBN978-0-8147-3654-8. Retrieved 23 May 2017. By 1000 B.C.E., however, we see Phoenician writings [..]
^ abJohn F. Healey, The Early Alphabet University of California Press, 1990, ISBN978-0-520-07309-8, p. 18.
^Joseph Naveh; Solomon Asher Birnbaum; David Diringer; Zvi Hermann Federbush; Jonathan Shunary; Jacob Maimon (2007), "ALPHABET, HEBREW", Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 1 (2nd ed.), Gale, pp. 689–728, ISBN978-0-02-865929-9
^This is in marked contrast to the history of adoption of the Phoenician alphabet in the Iron Age (where ʾālep gave rise to the Greek letter aleph, i.e. the Semitic term for "ox" was left untranslated and adopted as simply the name of the letter).
^Picker, Werner (2007). Origin and development of the Libyco-Berber. ebin.pub. Köln: Rüdiger Koppel Verlag. ISBN978-3-89645-394-5. Retrieved 2022-04-16.
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) ([1])
^Cross, F. M. (1980) Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 238, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/1356511
Further reading
Albright, William F. (1966). The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment.
I. Biggs, M. Dijkstra, Corpus of Proto-sinaitic Inscriptions, Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Neukirchener Verlag, 1990.
Butin, Romanus (1928). "The Serabit Inscriptions: II. The Decipherment and Significance of the Inscriptions". Harvard Theological Review. 21 (1): 9–67. doi:10.1017/s0017816000021167. S2CID 163011970.
Butin, Romanus (1932). "The Protosinaitic Inscriptions". Harvard Theological Review. 25 (2): 130–203. doi:10.1017/s0017816000001231. S2CID 161237361.
Colless, Brian E (1990). "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai". Abr-Nahrain / Ancient Near Eastern Studies. 28: 1–52. doi:10.2143/anes.28.0.525711.
Colless, Brian E (1991). "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Canaan". Abr-Nahrain / Ancient Near Eastern Studies. 29: 18–66. doi:10.2143/anes.29.0.525718.
Colless, Brian E., "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet", Abr-Nahrain / Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 (1992) 15–62.
Colless, Brian E (2010). "Proto-alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi Arabah". Antiguo Oriente. 8: 75–96.
Colless, Brian E., "The Origin of the Alphabet: An Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis", Antiguo Oriente 12 (2014) 71–104.
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
Darnell, John Coleman; Dobbs-Allsopp, F. W.; Lundberg, Marilyn J.; McCarter, P. Kyle; Zuckerman, Bruce (2005). "Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hôl". The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. 59: 63, 65, 67–71, 73–113, 115–124. JSTOR 3768583.
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 2000.
Sacks, David (2004). Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z. Broadway Books. ISBN0-7679-1173-3.
Goldwasser, Orly, How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Biblical Archaeology Review 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010.
Lake, K.; Blake, R. (1928). "The Serabit Inscriptions: I. The Rediscovery of the Inscriptions". Harvard Theological Review. 21 (1): 1–8. doi:10.1017/s0017816000021155. S2CID 161474162.
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.
B. Benjamin Sass (West Semitic Alphabets) – In 1988 a very important doctoral dissertation was completed at Tel Aviv University, *Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet and its Development in the Second Millennium BC, Ägypten und Altes Testament 13, Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1988.
Simons, Frank (2011). "Proto-Sinaitic – Progenitor of the Alphabet" (PDF). Rosetta. 9: 16–40.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Proto-Sinaitic script.
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
Archeology article on Wadi el-Hol from 2000 Jan
New York Times article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov
BBC article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov
January 07, 2023
proto, sinaitic, script, proto, sinaitic, also, referred, sinaitic, proto, canaanite, when, found, canaan, north, semitic, alphabet, early, alphabetic, considered, earliest, trace, alphabetic, writing, common, ancestor, both, ancient, south, arabian, script, p. Proto Sinaitic also referred to as Sinaitic Proto Canaanite when found in Canaan 1 the North Semitic alphabet 2 or Early Alphabetic 3 is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet 4 which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet 5 According to common theory Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script 6 The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula Egypt dating to the Middle Bronze Age 2100 1500 BC 4 Proto Sinaitic scriptNorth Semitic scriptA specimen of Proto Sinaitic script The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l bʿlt to the Lady Script typeAbjadTime periodc 19th 15th century BCDirectionMixedLanguagesNorthwest Semitic languagesRelated scriptsParent systemsEgyptian hieroglyphsProto Sinaitic scriptChild systemsPhoenician alphabet Paleo Hebrew alphabet Ancient South Arabian script Geʽez script Ancient North Arabian scriptISO 15924ISO 15924Psin 103 Proto SinaiticThe earliest Proto Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid 19th early date and the mid 16th late date century BC The principal debate is between an early date around 1850 BC and a late date around 1550 BC The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto Sinaitic or proto Canaanite and by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively 7 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 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 c 10th century BC 8 9 10 11 The Proto Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904 1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie To this may be 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 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 12 13 Contents 1 Discovery 2 Proto Sinaitic inscriptions 2 1 Serabit inscriptions 2 2 Inscriptions in Canaan 2 3 Wadi el Hol inscriptions 3 Proto Canaanite 3 1 Synonym for Proto Sinaitic 3 2 Synonym for Paleo Phoenician or Paleo Hebrew script 4 History 4 1 Synopsis 5 See also 6 References 7 Further reading 8 External linksDiscovery EditIn the winter of 1905 Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda Petrie nee Urlin 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 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 14 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 similarly shaped Phoenician character 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 lbʿlt meaning to Ba alat or more accurately to the Lady that is the lady Hathor Likewise this allowed another recurring word mʿhbʿlt 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 15 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 citation needed Proto Sinaitic inscriptions EditFurther information Epigraphy Serabit inscriptions Edit The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor ḥwt ḥr 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 13 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 16 The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC 17 An alternative view dates most of the inscriptions to the reign of Amenemhat III or his successor circa 1800 BC 18 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 Iron Age I II transition 19 Inscriptions in Canaan Edit 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 13 They sometimes go by the name Proto Canaanite 20 although the term Proto Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Ancient Hebrew writings 9 10 Wadi el Hol inscriptions Edit Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el Hol inscriptions The Wadi el Hol inscriptions Arabic وادي الهول Wadi 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 21 They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile at approx 25 57 N 32 25 E 25 950 N 32 417 E 25 950 32 417 among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions 22 Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date 13 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 13 The first of these h1 is a figure of celebration Gardiner A28 whereas the second h2 is either that of a child Gardiner A17 or of dancing Gardiner 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 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 citation needed 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 Vertical mst r h ʿnt ygs ʾl Vertical Excellent banquet mst r ʾs of the celebration h illul of ʿAnat ʿnt It will provide ygs ʾEl ʾl Horizontal rb wn mn h ngṯ h ʾ p mẖ r Horizontal plenty rb of wine wn and victuals mn for the celebration h illul We will sacrifice ngṯ to her h an ox ʾ lp and p a prime fatling mẖ r ʾs 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 raʾs This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation 23 Proto Canaanite EditSynonym for Proto Sinaitic Edit Proto Canaanite also referred to as Proto Canaan Old Canaanite or Canaanite 1 is the name given to the Proto Sinaitic script c 16th century BC when found in Canaan 24 25 26 27 Synonym for Paleo Phoenician or Paleo Hebrew script Edit Main article Phoenician alphabet Proto Canaanite is also used when referring to the ancestor of the Phoenician or Paleo Hebrew script respectively before some cut off date typically 1050 BC with an undefined affinity to Proto Sinaitic 28 While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c 1050 BC 29 Proto Canaanite is used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in Phoenicia 30 However the Phoenician Hebrew and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before the 11th century BC and the writing system is essentially identical 11 A possible example of Proto Canaanite the inscription on the Ophel pithos 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 25 History EditThe 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 31 Then the Proto Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by Alan Gardiner who identified the word bʿlt 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 6 leading to the commonly accepted belief that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype citation needed 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 hieratic and the Phoenician alphabet citation needed 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 30 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 need quotation to verify 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 b after the first consonant of baytu the Semitic word for house 13 32 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 citation needed 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 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 citation needed 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 33 Synopsis Edit 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 34 For the Ancient South Arabian and Libyco Berber scripts only the letters with Proto Canaanite correspondences are shown Possible correspondences between Proto Sinaitic Ancient South Arabian and Phoenician letters Also modern Hebrew Arabic and Latin letters are shown Hieroglyph Proto Sinaitic IPA value Reconstructed name Phoenician Imperial Aramaic Hebrew Nabataean from Aramaic Arabic Other 𓃾 ʔ ʾalp ox 𐤀 𐡀 א ء ا 𐌀 A A𓉐 b bayt house 𐤁 𐡁 ב بـ ب B 𐌁 B V𓌙 g gaml throwstick 𐤂 𐡂 ג جـ ج G C G G𓆛 𓉿 d dag fish 𐤃 𐡃 ד ﺩ D 𐌃 D D𓀠 h haw hillul praise 𐤄 𐡄 ה هـ ه E 𐌄 E Ye E𓅱 𓌉 w waw uph fowl 𐤅 𐡅 ו ﻭ Ϝ Y 𐌅 𐌖 F U W V Y Ѵ Ꙋ Ѹ U𓈔 or 𓍿 z zayn zayt oxhide ingot 35 sword 𐤆 𐡆 ז ﺯ Z Z 𐌆 Ꙁ Z d ḏiqq manacle ذ 𓉗 ħ ḥaṣr courtyard 𐤇 𐡇 ח حـ ح H H 𐌇 I𓎛 x ḫayt thread خـ خ 𓄤 tˤ ṭab good 𐤈 𐡈 ט ﻁ 8 𐌈 Ⱚ Ѳ𓂝 j yad hand 𐤉 𐡉 י يـ ي I 𐌉 I J I Yi Ј𓂧 k kap palm 𐤊 𐡊 כ ך كـ ك K 𐌊 K K𓋿 l lamd goad 𐤋 𐡋 ל لـ ل L 𐌋 L ϟ L𓈖 m maym water 𐤌 𐡌 מ ם مـ م M 𐌌 M M𓆓 n naḥas snake 𐤍 𐡍 נ ן نـ ن N 𐌍 N N𓊽 s ṡamk peg 𐤎 𐡎 ס سـ س 3 𐌎 Ѯ𓁹 ʕ ʿayn eye 𐤏 𐡏 ע عـ ـعـ ع O 𐌏 O O𓎛 𓎛 ɣ ġabiʿ calyx غـ ـغـ غ 𐎙𓂋 p pʿit corner 𐤐 𐡐 פ ף فـ ف P P 𐌐 P𓇑 sˤ ṣaday plant 𐤑 𐡑 צ ץ صـ ص Ϻ ϡ 𐌑 𐎕𓎗 kˤ or q qoba needle nape monkey 𐤒 𐡒 ק قـ ﻕ Ϙ F Q 𐌘 Ҁ F𓁶 r raʾs head 𐤓 𐡓 ר ﺭ R 𐌓 R R𓇴 ʃ sims sun 𐤔 𐡔 ש شـ ش S 𐌔 S S Ⱎ Sh ɬ sadeh field land ש 8 ṯann bow 𐡕 ת ثـ ث T 𐌕 T T𓏴 t taw mark 𐤕 ת تـ ﺕ The Other section shows the corresponding Modern Greek Etruscan Latin Glagolitic Old Cyrillic and Cyrillic letters See also EditTell es Safi inscription Ugaritic alphabetReferences Edit a b Garfinkel Yosef Golub Mitka R Misgav Haggai Ganor Saar May 2015 The ʾIsbaʿal Inscription from Khirbet Qeiyafa Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 373 373 217 233 doi 10 5615 bullamerschoorie 373 0217 JSTOR 10 5615 bullamerschoorie 373 0217 S2CID 164971133 North Semitic alphabet Encyclopedia Britannica Retrieved 2020 12 28 Rollston C 2020 The Emergence of Alphabetic Scripts In R Hasselbach Andee Ed A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages 1st ed pp 65 81 Wiley doi 10 1002 9781119193814 ch4 a b Sinaitic inscriptions ancient writing Encyclopedia Britannica Retrieved 2019 08 21 The Development of the Greek Alphabet within the Chronology of the ANE 2009 Quote Naveh gives four major reasons why it is universally agreed that the Greek alphabet was developed from an early Phoenician alphabet According to Herodutous the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus brought into Hellas the alphabet which had hitherto been unknown as I think to the Greeks The Greek Letters alpha beta gimmel have no meaning in Greek but the meaning of most of their Semitic equivalents is known For example aleph means ox bet means house and gimmel means throw stick Early Greek letters are very similar and sometimes identical to the West Semitic letters The letter sequence between the Semitic and Greek alphabets is identical Naveh 1982 a b William F Albright The Proto Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment 1966 Simons 2011 p 24 Coulmas 1989 p 141 a b Earliest Known Hebrew Text in Proto Canaanite Script Discovered in Area Where David Slew Goliath Science Daily November 3 2008 a b Most ancient Hebrew biblical inscription deciphered University of Haifa January 10 2010 Archived from the original on October 5 2011 Retrieved November 5 2011 a b Naveh Joseph 1987 Proto Canaanite Archaic Greek and the Script of the Aramaic Text on the Tell Fakhariyah Statue in Miller et al eds Ancient Israelite Religion Simons 2011 p 24 quote The two latest discoveries those found in the Wadi el Hol north of Luxor in Egypt s western desert can be dated with rather more certainty than the others and offer compelling evidence that the early date 1850 BC is the more likely of the two a b c d e f Goldwasser Orly Mar Apr 2010 How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Biblical Archaeology Review Washington DC Biblical Archaeology Society 36 1 ISSN 0098 9444 Retrieved 6 Nov 2011 W M Flinders Petrie C T Currell 1906 Researches in Sinai Gardiner Alan H The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology vol 3 no 1 1916 pp 1 16 JSTOR Accessed 18 May 2020 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 Goldwasser 2010 The alphabet was invented in this way by Canaanites at Serabit in the Middle Bronze Age in the middle of the 19th century B C E probably during the reign of Amenemhet III of the XIIth Dynasty Wilson Wright Aren Max Sinai 357 A Northwest Semitic Votive Inscription to Tessob Journal of the American Oriental Society vol 136 no 2 2016 pp 247 63 Sass B Garfinkel Y Hasel M G amp Klingbeil M G 2015 The Lachish Jar Sherd An Early Alphabetic Inscription Discovered in 2014 Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 374 233 245 https doi org 10 5615 bullamerschoorie 374 0233 Roger D Woodard 2008 The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts Discovery of Egyptian Inscriptions Indicates an Earlier Date for Origin of the Alphabet archive nytimes com Baker Dorie 13 December 1999 Finding sheds new light on the alphabet s origins Yale Bulletin and Calendar a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint url status link 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 Woodard Roger 2008 The Ancient Languages of Syria Palestine and Arabia a b Ngo Robin 5 May 2017 Precursor to Paleo Hebrew Script Discovered in Jerusalem Bible History Daily Biblical Archaeology Society Gideon Tsur on the Proto Canaanite text discovered at Keifa Hebrew Milstein Mati 5 February 2007 Ancient Semitic Snake Spells Deciphered in Egyptian Pyramid news nationalgeographic com Retrieved 10 April 2017 Coulmas Florian 1996 The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems Oxford Blackwell ISBN 0 631 21481 X Hoffman Joel M 2004 In the beginning a short history of the Hebrew language New York NY u a New York Univ Press p 23 ISBN 978 0 8147 3654 8 Retrieved 23 May 2017 By 1000 B C E however we see Phoenician writings a b John F Healey The Early Alphabet University of California Press 1990 ISBN 978 0 520 07309 8 p 18 Joseph Naveh Solomon Asher Birnbaum David Diringer Zvi Hermann Federbush Jonathan Shunary Jacob Maimon 2007 ALPHABET HEBREW Encyclopaedia Judaica vol 1 2nd ed Gale pp 689 728 ISBN 978 0 02 865929 9 This is in marked contrast to the history of adoption of the Phoenician alphabet in the Iron Age where ʾalep gave rise to the Greek letter aleph i e the Semitic term for ox was left untranslated and adopted as simply the name of the letter Picker Werner 2007 Origin and development of the Libyco Berber ebin pub Koln Rudiger Koppel Verlag ISBN 978 3 89645 394 5 Retrieved 2022 04 16 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 phonizisch kanaanaischen 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 1 Cross F M 1980 Newly Found Inscriptions in Old Canaanite and Early Phoenician Scripts Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 238 1 20 https doi org 10 2307 1356511Further reading EditAlbright William F 1966 The Proto Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment I Biggs M Dijkstra Corpus of Proto sinaitic Inscriptions Alter Orient und Altes Testament Neukirchener Verlag 1990 Butin Romanus 1928 The Serabit Inscriptions II The Decipherment and Significance of the Inscriptions Harvard Theological Review 21 1 9 67 doi 10 1017 s0017816000021167 S2CID 163011970 Butin Romanus 1932 The Protosinaitic Inscriptions Harvard Theological Review 25 2 130 203 doi 10 1017 s0017816000001231 S2CID 161237361 Colless Brian E 1990 The proto alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai Abr Nahrain Ancient Near Eastern Studies 28 1 52 doi 10 2143 anes 28 0 525711 Colless Brian E 1991 The proto alphabetic inscriptions of Canaan Abr Nahrain Ancient Near Eastern Studies 29 18 66 doi 10 2143 anes 29 0 525718 Colless Brian E The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto alphabet Abr Nahrain Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 1992 15 62 Colless Brian E 2010 Proto alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi Arabah Antiguo Oriente 8 75 96 Colless Brian E The Origin of the Alphabet An Examination of the Goldwasser Hypothesis Antiguo Oriente 12 2014 71 104 Stefan Jakob Wimmer Samaher Wimmer Dweikat The Alphabet from Wadi el Hol A First Try in Gottinger Miszellen Beitrage zur agyptologischen Diskussion Heft 180 Gottingen 2001 p 107 111 Darnell John Coleman Dobbs Allsopp F W Lundberg Marilyn J McCarter P Kyle Zuckerman Bruce 2005 Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el Hol The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 59 63 65 67 71 73 113 115 124 JSTOR 3768583 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 2000 2 Sacks David 2004 Letter Perfect The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet from A to Z Broadway Books ISBN 0 7679 1173 3 Goldwasser Orly How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs Biblical Archaeology Review 36 02 Mar Apr 2010 Lake K Blake R 1928 The Serabit Inscriptions I The Rediscovery of the Inscriptions Harvard Theological Review 21 1 1 8 doi 10 1017 s0017816000021155 S2CID 161474162 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 B Benjamin Sass West Semitic Alphabets In 1988 a very important doctoral dissertation was completed at Tel Aviv University Benjamin Sass The Genesis of the Alphabet and its Development in the Second Millennium BC Agypten und Altes Testament 13 Otto Harrassowitz Wiesbaden 1988 Simons Frank 2011 Proto Sinaitic Progenitor of the Alphabet PDF Rosetta 9 16 40 https archive org details isbn 9780195079937 page 89 mode 1upExternal links Edit Wikimedia Commons has media related to Proto Sinaitic script Proto Sinaitic inscriptions byu edu Proto Sinaitic 18th 14th cent B C Mnamon Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean Escritura Proto sinaitica in Spanish Promotora Espanola de Linguistica Proel Wadi el HolUSC West Semitic Research Project site on Wadi el Hol with photos Yale news article on Wadi el Hol from 2000 Dec Archeology article on Wadi el Hol from 2000 Jan New York Times article on Wadi el Hol from 1999 Nov BBC article on Wadi el Hol from 1999 Nov Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Proto Sinaitic script amp oldid 1129322674, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
