THE FIRST ALPHABET: PROTO-SINAITIC WRITING

In my new book, Deciphering the Proto-Sinaitic Script, the first two chapters are dedicated to analyzing the actual inscriptions and their contents, meaning the detailed business of identifying the signs contained therein and presenting my proposed readings. There are two batches of proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (as described in my Introduction excerpt below); Chapter 1 deals with one of the batches, the pair of Wadi el-Hol (WEH) inscriptions, while Chapter 2 is dedicated to some of the Serabit el-Khadim epigraphic material. Thus, making up more than half the book (189 pages), this study is primarily an epigraphic one. Nonetheless, since language is not created in a vacuum and is inextricably linked to the people/culture who make use of it, the decipherment has led me to include a third chapter dedicated to exploring the folk memory of the Aamu (the inventors of the proto-Sinaic script), giving insight to their apparent influence on the early Israelite culture(s). For copyright reasons, I do not include on this website any images of proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (although copyright permissions were obtained in order to reproduce them in my book), but many of them (including both of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions) can be viewed online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

Introduction

At present, based primarily on what archaeology has taught us, the consensus view is that the alphabet was first invented over 3,500 years ago in the Near East by the Canaanites, a Semitic people. Through the acrophonic principle of attaching sounds (consonants) to visual signs (Egyptian hieroglyphs), to give it a very simple definition, the Canaanites invented a writing system in which a small number of visual signs (letters) are used to express basic sounds of a spoken language, and the particular arrangement of such letters allows one to phonetically read a word, a sentence, and so on.

One of the principle reasons for the importance of this first Canaanite alphabet is that it is these same ancient twenty-two consonants (without any vowels) that, throughout history and many complex processes of adoption and adaptation over long periods of time, would eventually become the model for nearly all of the world’s phonetic writing systems—including our own alphabet. Hundreds of phonetic alphabets descend from their Canaanite alphabetic forebear. The modern English alphabet, for instance, descends from the classical Latin one, which in turn comes from the Greeks, who had adopted and adapted the Phoenician letters to their own Indo-European language (unrelated to the Phoenicians’ own Semitic language), and so the story goes as it is often recounted by historians.

The Phoenicians were the inhabitants of ancient Phoenicia (corresponding more or less to present-day Lebanon), an ancient Semitic civilization originating from the earlier Canaanite culture. When historians either reference ancient inscriptions as belonging to the Canaanite or Phoenician alphabets, in essence, this is simply a modern convention in order to refer to inscriptions that predate the trading empire of Phoenicia; the term (proto-) Canaanite is usually reserved for inscriptions older than circa 1200 BC, while those that come after are termed to be Phoenician. As Frank Moore Cross remarks, the “steady accumulation of early alphabetic inscriptions” uncovered by archaeologists ever since Alan Gardiner’s identification of the Old Canaanite alphabet, in 1915, has ultimately prompted scholars to arbitrarily draw a line in the sand and create two headings under which the early alphabetic inscriptions can be classified:¹

• 1. Old Canaanite inscriptions, transparently pictographic in origin, found in Syria-Palestine. The proto-Sinaitic inscriptions belong to this group.

• 2. Linear Phoenician inscriptions, easily read, an alphabetic script which is ancestral to the Old Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek scripts.

The separation between Canaanite and Phoenician is therefore, for the most part, an artificial one; the Phoenicians were also Canaanites, their language and script nearly indistinguishable from the parent culture. And to understand what exactly is meant by ‘Canaanite’, (as Frank Moore Cross defines the term) it relates to “a people of homogeneous culture and speaking a related group of dialects who lived in Syria-Palestine” before 1200 BC.² Without going into any great detail, around this time, it will suffice to remark that there occurred a collapse in the Late Bronze Age. And Cross describes well what happened next, for after “the cataclysm which engulfed the Levant” finally came to pass, “the remnants” of the Canaanites, “whose centers were now restricted to the Lebanese coast and the coast of northern Palestine”, would subsequently become known as the Phoenicians, after their Greek name—meaning ‘the Purple (Dye) People’.³ Thus, the Phoenicians’ ancestors were Canaanites, and through their trading activities after the Late Bronze Age collapse, they would become the purveyors of civilization and transmit their writing system to other ancient peoples such as the Greeks—from whom we have inherited this Roman alphabet.

There are, however, even earlier inscriptions that are related to the birth of the Canaanite/Phoenician alphabet(s). In recent years, a small number of inscriptions have been discovered at the site of Serabit el-Khadim, in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula—what specialists have termed to be writing made in the proto-Sinaitic script. The Serabit discoveries are of the utmost importance, since the proto-Sinaitic corpus consists of no more than thirty to forty inscriptions and fragments in all, most of which were uncovered at Serabit el-Khadim, the site of ancient Egyptian turquoise and copper mines where mining operations were possibly carried out as early as the Middle Kingdom period, perhaps the late Twelfth Dynasty ca. 18th–17th century BC.⁴ Although, because of many uncertainties surrounding these early proto-Sinaitic signs, there is still an ongoing debate in the scholarly world if indeed the proto-Sinaitic script qualifies as being the original progenitor of the whole Canaanite and Phoenician alphabetic tradition. While some scholars argue in favour of the Serabit inscriptions’ claim to fame, others refute it. There is nevertheless a direct link to be made between the early proto-Sinaitic signs with those belonging to the later Canaanite/Phoenician alphabetic inscriptions.

By and large, the better known history of the alphabet does certainly begin much later (after 1200 BC) with the Phoenician merchants bringing their writing system with them across the Mediterranean world. From here onwards, it can simply be stated that the history of the alphabet is known well enough to us, for the Phoenician alphabet would be adopted and adapted by the Greeks, and then these same Greek letters would eventually make their way into the Roman scribal tradition. The roots of the alphabet, in a sense, begin at the very birthplace of our Western civilization—with the ancient Greeks at the dawn of recorded or written history. Hence, whatever prehistory lies before the Phoenician alphabet, in its early formative stages, is for the most part still ill-understood. Apart from the great Phoenician historical saga, the fact remains that prior to this, archaeology has only been able to help connect some of the missing dots in order to help us gain some further insight into a distant era for which no written records survive.

Therefore, as already mentioned, even if the proto-Sinaitic script has been argued to be the primogenitor, or the original ancestor, of the whole Canaanite/Phoenician alphabetic tradition, it still cannot be proved incontrovertibly due to the scarcity of the inscriptions thus far discovered. There have, in fact, only been two major discoveries of what may be termed as proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. The first, in 1904–1905, located in the Sinai are the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions, dated to ca. 1800–1400 BC, were uncovered by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The second group of proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were stumbled upon in as recently as the 1990s, in Middle Egypt—these are the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, dated to around the 18th century BC, discovered by John and Deborah Darnell, both Yale University Egyptologists.⁵ The Wadi el-Hol is located near the middle of the Qena bend, where the Farshut Road descends into it, at a rough equidistance between Thebes and Hiw (the ancient capital of the 7th Nome of Upper Egypt); it is found on an ancient stretch of road that linked Thebes with Abydos to the north of it.⁶ The wadi (valley) is part of a desert shortcut in which a road “lay in a valley alongside cliffs of cream-colored limestone” where along the base of the cliffs are found carved into the stone hundreds of Egyptian inscriptions, quite literally “an open-air archaeological treasure ground, saved, by its remoteness, from the antiquities thieves who are the scourge of Egyptian archaeology”, as Sacks puts it in his apt description of the site.⁷

Of the two batches of proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol ones appear to be the more primitive. This is mainly due to the fact that, graphically, they more closely resemble the Egyptian hieroglyphs from which they are argued to have been derived and/or inspired. Moreover, there is the specific geophysical context where these two early alphabetic inscriptions were found that could further legitimize their greater antiquity. Carved into the limestone of a graffiti-covered cliff, these two early unusual proto-Sinaitic alphabetic inscriptions, at shoulder level, at about 20 feet apart, were surrounded by scores of other more conventional Egyptian inscriptions. When he first saw them, John Darnell recognized the pair of inscriptions as “a rock-writing style of the ancient Egyptian military,” messages written by ancient travellers in a “mishmash of hieroglyphic and hieratic symbols” (to borrow the words of David Sacks), and this in a distinct style belonging to the Middle Kingdom period.⁸ Darnell believes the WEH (henceforth, the abbreviated form for Wadi el-Hol) inscriptions to have been made around the 18th century BC. However, despite their seemingly older appearance, this dating basically makes them contemporaries to the second batch of proto-Sinaitic inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim, in the Sinai, since Benjamin Sass also argues in favour of the late Twelfth Dynasty (ca. the 18th century BC) for the Serabit inscriptions.⁹

To get to the crux of the matter, an important question that begs to be asked is the following: If the pair of Wadi el-Hol proto-Sinaitic inscriptions (usually dated to c. 1800 BC) is truly the oldest of the two batches of inscriptions, then do the WEH inscriptions represent the alphabet’s true ancestor? It appears that while the proto-Sinaitic script is generally recognized as the most likely progenitor of the whole alphabetic tradition, the problem remains that neither one of the two WEH inscriptions has yet to be successfully deciphered.

The heart of the issue, though, is not merely that the pair of WEH inscriptions remains undeciphered, but rather that the proto-Sinaitic script remains, by and large, not really understood at all. In fact, ever since the initial discovery and publication of the first proto-Sinaitic inscriptions made by Flinders Petrie more than a century ago, of the thirty to forty inscriptions and fragments (of proto-Sinaitic) that have been uncovered since then, only one has been successfully deciphered; it is Alan Gardiner’s (1916) decipherment of Sinai 346, also known as the Ba'alat (“Lady”) inscription.¹⁰ It was Gardiner who propounded the theory that the Old Canaanite alphabet was a pictographic acrophonic script, meaning that it was a writing system that employed signs (letters) that were “acrophonically devised under the inspiration of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing”.¹¹ Gardiner already knew that the Hebrew writing system made use of the acrophonic system, as likely did the ancient Phoenician script. The acrophonic principle, as it is employed in the alphabetic writing system, is when a picture of an object is used to abstractly represent the sound found at the beginning of the word to describe this object, hence the only relationship with the sign (letter) and its original picture form is to be found in the letter’s name and to a certain extent its shape (e.g. ’aleph, “ox”). The Hebrew letter-names retain a memory of these ancient objects the primitive letters presumably represented. For example, the meaning of ’aleph is “ox”; bêt, “house”; gimel, “throwstick”; and so forth.¹²

Although, since Gardiner’s (1916) article was first published, even if many other scholars have attempted to explore graphic similarities between the proto-Sinaitic signs and their proposed Egyptian forebears, the fact remains that, over the past hundred years, the very real lack of progress in deciphering any of the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions has seemingly cast a shadow of doubt over any attempt to identify these hieroglyphic prototypes that the ancient Semitic scribes may have modelled their innovation upon. [...]

With all this said, this dissertation attempts to shed some much deserved light on the matter of understanding the proto-Sinaitic script. Chapter 1 contains my decipherment proposals for both of the WEH early alphabetic inscriptions. In Chapter 2, some of the Serabit epigraphic material will be revisited and, in so doing, I shall advance decipherment proposals for the Sinai 357 and Sinai 376 inscriptions, as they are most commonly referred to.¹³ In addition, Gardiner’s partially deciphered Ba'alat (Sinai 346) inscription from the Serabit el-Khadim statue of Hathor will be re-examined and, in light of my other findings, I shall propose to make sense of an important part of the rest of the inscription. With this original contribution, ultimately, the aim is to present the incontrovertible proof needed to demonstrate not only the alphabetic nature of the proto-Sinaitic signs, but also to provide an explanation on how they were originally derived from the Egyptian parent-system—and to really try and figure out exactly which Egyptian glyphs may have served as their prototypes.

Endnotes

1. Frank Moore Cross 1991: 80.

2. Ibid. 80.

3. Ibid. 80.

4. J. M. Golden 2004: 243; B. Sass 1988: 135-144.

5. J. Darnell et al. 2005; O. Goldwasser 2010; D. Sacks 2003: 29-41.

6. J. Darnell 2013b: 1-20.

7. Sacks 2003: 34-5.

8. Sacks 2003: 35.

9. Sass 1988.

10. Sacks 2003: 30-2; Mnamon 2014; Grimme 1923.

11. Cross 1991: 80.

12. Ibid. 80.

13. As noted by Mnamon (2014), the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions “are usually numbered according to the order of discovery (except for the most recent finds) starting with the catalogue of Gardiner 1916 (cf. also Sass 1988).” Mnamon’s website (see biblio.) also provides scholars with images of the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, each one with their number along with bibliographic data, referencing mostly the work of Sass (1988), Beit-Arieh (1978), Grimme (1923), and Rainey (1975).

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Below are a couple of snapshots from the decipherment proposal sections of my book—just to give you an idea of the presentation.