Proto-Sinaitic script

Proto-Sinaitic, also referred to as Sinaitic, and Proto-Canaanite (when found in Canaan), is a Middle Bronze Age (Middle Kingdom) 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 (and by extension, every other subsequent alphabet).

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."
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 (Byblos inscriptions 10th – 8th century BC, 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 strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC.

Epigraphy

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 (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 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  (to the Lady)

Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions 
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, 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 Hebrew inscriptions, respectively.

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The 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 B.C.  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 (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.
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.

Some scholars (Darnell et al.) think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe (chief; cognate with rabbi); 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 (representing a whole word, not just a single consonant) or rebuses [Antiguo Oriente 8 (2010) 91]
[V] "Excellent (r[ʾš]) banquet (mšt) of the celebration (h[illul]) of ʿAnat
(ʿnt). ʾEl (ʾl) will provide (ygš) [H] plenty (rb) of wine (wn) and victuals (mn)
for the celebration (h[illul]). We will sacrifice (ngṯ) to her (h) an ox (ʾ) and
(p) a prime (r[ʾš]) fatling (mX)."
This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation.

Proto-Canaanite 

Proto-Canaanite, also referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 16th century BC), when found in Canaan.

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" was found in 2012, the Ophel inscription, was found on a pottery storage jar during the excavations of the south wall of the Temple Mount by the 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  "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. Brian Colless (2014) notes 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.

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 BCE). 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).

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".
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.

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.

 The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, and Latin letters.

See also
 Abjad
 Ancient Hebrew writings
 Byblos syllabary
 Ugaritic alphabet

References

Further reading
Albright, Wm. 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.

Colless, Brian E., "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet", Abr-Nahrain / Ancient Near Eastern Studies 30 (1992) 15–62.

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

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.

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.
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, F., "Proto-Sinaitic – Progenitor of the Alphabet" Rosetta 9 (2011), 16–40.

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
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

 
Category:19th-century BC establishments
Category:1904 archaeological discoveries
Category:2nd millennium BC in Egypt
Category:Abjad writing systems
Category:Bronze Age writing systems
Category:Canaanite writing systems
Category:Canaanite languages
Category:Middle Kingdom of Egypt
Category:Scripts not encoded in Unicode
Category:Semitic writing systems
Category:Sinai Peninsula
Category:Undeciphered writing systems