I have always had a fascination with ancient art, objects and communicative marks. The evolution of communication and the lost markings is always in the back of my mind and every now and then, the come to the forefront.
This script is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which posted about last year. The Phoenician Alphabet.
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Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in Canaan, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites who spoke a Semitic language (hypothetically reconstructed as Proto-Semitic) repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt dating to the Middle Bronze Age (2100–1500 BCE).
Computational linguistics has been used to show potential degrees of similarity of symbols used in several scripts used in the Mediterranean basin and beyond, including Cretan (Minoan writing systems) scripts. According to the method used, Phoenician, the Ancient Greek alphabet, and the South Arabic script were shown to be closely related, while the other scripts examined were more similar to the Cretan scripts. The proto-Sinaitic script was not examined, however.
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.
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