Proto-Sinaitic script
Proto-Sinaitic, also referred to as Sinaitic, and [|Proto-Canaanite], or Early Alphabetic, is a Middle Bronze Age script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing, and the common ancestor of the Ancient South Arabian script and Phoenician alphabet. According to common theory, it was developed by Canaanites, who spoke a Semitic language, by repurposing Egyptian hieroglyphs. Computational linguistics have shown that the likely origin was Cretan scripts.
The earliest "Proto-Sinaitic" inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th 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." However the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River shows 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.
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.
Discovery
In the winter of 1905, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda Petrie 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, Sir 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 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 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 Using this 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 Lady" — that is, the "lady" Hathor. Likewise, this allowed another recurring word mʿh
[|Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions]
Serabit inscriptions
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. 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 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 date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century 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.
In 1916, Alan Gardiner, using sound values derived from the alphabet hypothesis, translated a collection of signs as לבעלת lbʿlt
Inscriptions in Canaan
Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC. Researchers also claim to have discovered Canaanite snake spells: The passages date from between 2400 to 3000 BC and appear to be written in Proto Sinatic, a direct ancestor of Biblical Hebrew. They are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners, soldiers from Egypt or early Israelites. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is also applied to early Phoenician or Ancient Hebrew writings, respectively.Wadi el-Hol inscriptions
The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions 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.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 is a figure of celebration , whereas the second is either that of a child or of dancing . If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants.
Some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe ; and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel "god".
Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in which some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses
"Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat
. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals
for the celebration. We will sacrifice to her an ox and
a prime fatling."
This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation.
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, when found in Canaan.Synonym for Paleo-Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script
The term 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.While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC, "Proto-Canaanite" is a term used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in Phoenicia. However, the Phoenician, Hebrew, and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before the 11th century BC. 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.
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. 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. William Albright in the 1950s and 1960s published interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, 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 Hieratic and the Phoenician alphabet.
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. 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.
For example, the hieroglyph for pr "house" 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, 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 ; this goes against the Goldwasser hypothesis that the original alphabet was invented by miners in Sinai.
Synopsis
Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. For the Ancient South Arabian script only the letters with Proto-Canaanite correspondences are shown.| Hieroglyph | Proto-Sinaitic | IPA value | Reconstructed name | Proto-Canaanite | Arabian | Phoenician | Archaic Greek | Imperial Aramaic | Hebrew | Nabataean | Arabic | Other* |
| /ʔ/ | ʾalp "ox" | א | ? A | |||||||||
| /b/ | bayt "house" | ב | ? B | |||||||||
| /g/ | gaml "throwstick" | ג | C G | |||||||||
| /d/ | dag "fish" | ד | ? D | |||||||||
| /h/ | haw/hillul "praise" | ה | Ε ? E | |||||||||
| /w/ | waw/uph "fowl" | ו | ? ? F U W V Y | |||||||||
| /z/ | zayn/zayt "oxhide ingot", "sword" | ז | I Z ? | |||||||||
| /ð/ | ḏiqq "manacle" | ז | I Z ? | |||||||||
| /ħ/ | ḥaṣr "courtyard" | ח | H ? | |||||||||
| /x/ | ḫa | ח | H ? | |||||||||
| /tˤ/ | ṭab "good" | ט | ? | |||||||||
| /j/ | yad "hand" | י | ? I J | |||||||||
| /k/ | kap "palm" | כ, ך | ? K | |||||||||
| /l/ | lamd "goad" | ל | ? L ϟ | |||||||||
| /m/ | maym "water" | מ, ם | ? M | |||||||||
| /n/ | naḥaš "snake" | נ, ן | Ν ? N | |||||||||
| /s/ | ṡamk "peg" | ס | ? | |||||||||
| /ʕ/ | ʿayn "eye" | ע | ? O | |||||||||
| ? | /ɣ/ | ġabiʿ "calyx" | ע | غ ? | ||||||||
| /p/ | pʿit "corner" | פ, ף | P ? | |||||||||
| /sˤ/ ~ /tθ’/ ~ /ðˤ/ | ṣaday "plant" | צ, ץ | ϡ ? ? | |||||||||
| /kˤ/ or /q/ | qoba "needle/nape/monkey" | ק | Q ? | |||||||||
| /r/ | raʾš "head" | ר | ? R | |||||||||
| /ʃ/ | šimš "sun" | שׁ | ? S | |||||||||
| /ɬ/ | "field, land" | שׂ | ? S | |||||||||
| /θ/ | "bow" | ת | Τ ? T | |||||||||
| /t/ | tāw "mark" | תּ | Τ ? T |
- The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, and Latin letters.