Proto-Sinaitic alphabet
| Proto-Sinaitic script |
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|---|---|
A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script. The line running from the upper left to lower right may read mt l bʿlt "... to the Lady"
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| Type | |
| Languages | Northwest Semitic languages |
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Time period
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c. 18th – 15th century BCE |
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Parent systems
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Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Child systems
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Phoenician alphabet, Ancient South Arabian script |
Proto-Sinaitic is a term for both a Middle Bronze Age (Middle Kingdom) script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, and the reconstructed common ancestor of the Phoenician and South Arabian scripts (and, by extension, of most historical and modern alphabets). It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite.
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." 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 the direct ancestor of the Iron Age Phoenician alphabet, also known as "Proto-Canaanite", is clearly attested (Byblos inscriptions).
The so-called "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, and more recently, the discovery in 1999 of the so-called "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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