The Proto-Sinaitic alphabet

The story

Writing was a job for the few

Imagine having to learn to read and write with hundreds of different signs to remember by heart. In Egypt almost four thousand years ago that is how it was. Hieroglyphs were beautiful, but difficult: many signs stood for a whole idea, others for a syllable or a sound, and others only served to make the meaning clear. To become a scribe, that is, a professional writer, you had to study for years. Almost everyone else could not write at all.

Now imagine a group of foreign workers living far from home, in a remote place, who want to leave a simple message for a goddess. They have neither the time nor the means to learn hieroglyphs. So they invent a more convenient system. This is what scholars think happened in the Sinai desert.

The turquoise mines

In Sinai, a peninsula between Egypt and Palestine, lies Serabit el-Khadim, a rocky plateau where the Egyptians mined turquoise, a blue stone much prized for jewellery. The expeditions came from far away and, according to archaeologists' reconstruction, returned many times over about eight hundred years, above all in the 12th and 13th dynasties and then from the 18th to the 20th. On the spot stood a temple dedicated to Hathor, the Egyptian goddess who also protected miners and turquoise. According to scholars, among the workers were men from Canaan, the region that today corresponds to Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, and they spoke a Semitic language.

The Petries' discovery

In the winter of 1904–1905 the English archaeologist Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda explored Serabit el-Khadim. They found, carved on two small statues and a small sphinx, inscriptions that were neither hieroglyphs nor anything else known: signs that looked like drawings, such as a house, an eye, an ox's head, but set in order like letters. Scholars called them “Proto-Sinaitic”, that is, “the very first ones of Sinai”. We know of about thirty or forty, counting complete inscriptions and fragments.

How they are read

For more than ten years nobody managed to read them. Then, in 1916, the English Egyptologist Alan Gardiner had a flash of insight. He noticed that one sequence of signs came up often, and thought it must be an important word, suitable for a dedication. Assuming the language was Semitic, he read it as “to the Lady”, that is, to the goddess, who in the temple was Hathor, and an Egyptian formula found on the spot, “beloved of Hathor, lady of turquoise”, seemed to confirm it.

The principle behind it is called acrophony, and you can understand it with an example. The sign of the house in a Semitic language was called “bayt”. That drawing no longer meant “house”: it only stood for the sound “b”, the one the word begins with. The ox's head, “alef”, stood for the sound that word begins with; water, “mem”, for the sound “m”. With a few dozen drawings like these you could write any word of the language, without learning hundreds of signs. It was a simple and revolutionary idea.

When and where

The dates are debated. For the Sinai inscriptions many scholars think of the 17th or 16th century BC, others of about 1800 BC, in the time of Amenemhat III, a pharaoh of the 12th dynasty. In 1999 the American Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell, in Middle Egypt, in the valley of Wadi el-Hol, near a road that joined Thebes and Abydos, discovered two more inscriptions of the same kind, dated to around 1900–1800 BC. This is a sign that the invention was not born only in Sinai and that it may already have been widespread in Egypt among foreigners who worked there.

From a desert to half the world

Proto-Sinaitic writing was not yet the alphabet as we understand it, and we do not know everything about it. But its idea, one sign for one sound, survived. It is found again in the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions of the following centuries, and from there it passed to the Phoenician alphabet, to ancient Hebrew and to the scripts of southern Arabia. Greek derived from the Phoenicians, and Latin from Greek, that is, the alphabet of this page. The names of our first two letters, alpha and beta, come from “alef” and “bet”, ox and house in a Semitic language: an echo of those drawings in the desert.