Proto-Sinaitic script

slight influence from Arabic 1989 CE

Proto-Sinaitic also intended to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, a North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing together with the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script in addition to the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who quoted a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to realise a different script. 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.

The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th early date and the mid-16th slow date century BC.

The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a unhurried date, around 1550 BC. The alternative of one or the other date decides whether it is for proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, and by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively.

However, the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River shows that the program originated in Egypt. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the various Proto-Canaanite scripts during the Bronze Age is based on rather scant Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription c. 10th century BC.

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 stronglya 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 Sinai Peninsula. During a dig at Serabit el-Khadim, an extremely lucrative turquoise mine used during 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 alive 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 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 coming after or as a a thing that is said of. year.

Ten years later, in 1916, , which Gardiner assigned the , and was very similar to the similarly-shaped Phoenician character, , which is called bet. The form bet itself was ordinarily thought to derive from the Semitic word for house, bayt, providing another layer of assist to his thesis. Using this hypothesis, Gardiner was professionals to affirm Petrie's hypothesis that the mystery inscriptions were of a religious nature, as his framework allowed an often recurring word to be reconstructed as ]