Proto-Sinaitic Script - Serabit Inscriptions

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 (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.

Most of the thirty 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. 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 l bʿlt (to the Lady) One of the instances of this collection of signs was on the small stone sphinx, which contained a bilingual inscription: The Egyptian reads The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise, and according to Gardiner's translation, the Proto-Sinaitic 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.

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 and that the script had a hieratic prototype. If correctly translated, 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.