Proto-Sinaitic alphabet

A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which means 'to Baalat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l bclt.

The Proto-Sinaitic script is the presumably alphabetic script of a number of Middle Bronze Age inscriptions in the Sinai, Middle Egypt, and Canaan. It is ancestral to the Semitic abjads as they developed by the Early Iron Age, and via Phoenician and Aramaic to nearly all modern alphabets.

Proto-Sinaitic (named for the inscription corpus at Serabit el-Khadim, Sinai) is the stage of the alphabet at the end of the Middle Bronze Age. During the Late Bronze Age, the script splits into the South Arabian and the Canaanite groups. The latter group is influenced by the Byblos syllabary, evolving into Phoenician proper by 1100 BCE. The term Proto-Canaanite is extended to inscriptions of Canaan and Syria dating to the Late Bronze Age (13th to 12th century).[1]

Proto-Sinaitic was acrophonic in origin, with each letter illustrating a word that began with that letter, such as a square standing for בת bt (house) for the letter b. It was used sporadically, mostly in short bits of graffiti, for at least 500 years before being institutionalized by new Semitic kingdoms in the Mideast.[2]

There have been two major discoveries of inscriptions identified as this script, the first in the winter of 1904-1905 in Sinai by Hilda and William Petrie, dated to the mid 19th century BCE, and more recently in 1999 in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell, dated to the 18th century BCE.[2]

Contents

Serabit inscriptions

The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim (سرابيت الخادم) and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr). 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 "Asiatics", speakers of the Canaanite language that was ancestral to Phoenician and Hebrew, who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta.[2]

Most of the thirty or so alphabetic 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. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script. The script was partially cracked in 1916 by Alan Gardiner with the phrase לבעלת l bʿlt (to the Lady) found on numerous artifacts.[3] The sphinx contains a bilingual inscription: The Egyptian reads The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise, and the more legible of the Canaanite inscriptions reads m’hb‘l (the beloved of the Lady; m’hb beloved), with the final t of bʿlt (Lady) not surviving. Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser believes the script was most likely invented during the reign of pharaoh Amenemhet III of the Twelfth Dynasty.[2]

The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs. In the 1950s and 60s it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright's interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key. It was generally accepted that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic, that the script had a hieratic prototype and was ancestral to the Semitic alphabets, and that the script was itself acrophonic and alphabetic (more specifically, a consonantal alphabet or abjad). The word baʿlat (Lady) lends credence to the identification of the language as Semitic. However, the lack of further progress in decipherment casts doubt over the other suppositions, and the identification of the hieratic prototypes remains speculative.

Proto-Canaanite inscriptions

Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated from ca. the 17th century BCE. They are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt.[2] They go by the name Proto-Canaanite,[4] which shifted from a crude pictographic script to an abstract Phoenician script by 1200 BCE. (See Phoenician alphabet.)

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions (Arabic وادي الهول Wādī al-Hūl '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 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.[2]

Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. (Photos here and here)

H1 is a figure of celebration [Gardiner A28], whereas 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.

Hieroglyphs representing celebration, a child, and dancing respectively. The first appears to be the prototype for h1, while the latter two have been suggested as the prototype for h2.

Several scholars agree that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe (chief; cognate with rabbi). Several scholars have also asserted that the אל ’l at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ’el "(a) god".

Origin of alphabetic writing

Further information: history of the alphabet

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was logosyllabic, that is, consisted of signs that stand for words, sounds, or place a word in a category. There was a complete set of uniliteral glyphs from at least 2700 BCE — that is, the hieroglyphic script contained an alphabetic subsystem (not including vowels) within it. Purely uniliteral (alphabetic) writing was used mainly to transcribe foreign names.

However, from the 22nd to 20th centuries BCE, central rule broke down. John and Debby Darnell found contemporary hieratic references to an Egyptian named "Bebi, General of the Asiatics".

They speculate that:

In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these 'Asiatics.'

[Darnell] explains:

When you were captured, you were simply put to work doing your old job, but for the other side, and so these 'Asiatic' troops, who were probably already quite Egyptianized, had to find a way to talk to their new comrades.

They also had to deal with civil servants, all of whom could read and write hieratic. And somewhere out there in the desert, suggests Darnell, inventive scribes, to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information, apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand.

—Fellman (2000)

In other words, it was a utilitarian invention for soldiers and merchants. The assumption is that they developed a Semitic script based on acrophony, where the first sound of the Semitic name of an Egyptian glyph came to be the value of that glyph. Just as the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc. changed names but retained their graphic forms as they passed from India to Arabia to Europe, so the names of the letters were translated as they passed from the Egyptians to the Semites. For example, the name of the hieratic glyph for house changed from Egyptian pr to Canaanite bayt, and thus the glyph came to stand for /b/. House and most of the other letters were not uniliteral glyphs in Egyptian: the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the existing Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs. In fact, some of the letters, such as ה H, may have been determinatives (semantic complements), and thus had no sound value in Egyptian. However, the Semitic names are not attested until c. 200 BCE, and some scholars doubt that acrophony had anything to do with the invention of the alphabet. John D. Ray has stated that this principle should not be taken to imply that a root was always simplified to its first consonant.[5]

See also

References

  1. ↑ John F. Healey, The early alphabet University of California Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-520-07309-8, p. 18.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs" o Biblical Archaeology Review, Mar/Apr 2010
  3. ↑ baʿlat (Lady) is a title of Hathor and the feminine of the title Baʿal (Lord) given to the Semitic god.
  4. ↑ Roger D. Woodard, 2008, "The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts", in The Ancient Languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia
  5. ↑ Ray, 1986: 314

Literature

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