WADI EL-HOL PROTO-ALPHABETIC INSCRIPTION

[V] "Feast (MShT) of the supreme (R) celebration (H) of `Anat (`NT). 'El ('L) will provide (YGSh) [H] plenty (RB) of wine (WN) and victuals (MN) for the celebration (H). We will sacrifice (NGTh) for her (H) an ox (') and (P) a prime (R) fatling (MKh)."
At the end of the discussion, a different meaning will be proposed for the first word (MShT).
(Another early West Semitic inscription about celebratory feasting for the Goddess is here.)
These are my own drawings, but photographs are available on the internet here.

These two inscriptions are among the most intriguing discoveries of recent times: they show us the alphabet as it originally was, pictorial, or pictophonic (images representing sounds), with an ox-head (A. 'Aleph, Alpha), a human head (R), an eye (`Ayin), a mouth (P), a boomerang (G), and many more picture-signs. They were found by Yale Egyptologists John Coleman Darnell and his wife Deborah, on a desert road near Thebes (Luxor), on a rock-face in the Wadi el-Hol ('Terror Gulch"). When they were first announced (New York Times, 13th-14th of November 1999) it was claimed that they were the oldest known alphabetic texts. However, other examples had previously turned up in Sinai and Syria-Palestine, and also elsewhere in Egypt, so the competition for being the earliest is fierce. Notice that I have registered these as Thebes 8 and 9, because other cases of proto-alphabetic writing had already come to light in the region of Thebes in Upper (Southern) Egypt, but these have been ignored in books written about the origin of the alphabet.

I began commenting on the the Wadi el-Hol proto-alphabetic material immediately after the first newspaper reports appeared (ANE forum), as it provided an opportunity for testing my own table of signs, constructed on the foundation of my readings of the Sinai inscriptions (Colless 1988 and 1990). Since then I have put a number of postings on the internet (on the ANE [Ancient Near East] discussion group).

An encyclopedia article is available on the subject (not written by myself, please note, and much of it is now consigned to the underworld of the discussion), which includes an outline of my views (based on my ANE internet postings) and a table of the original letters of the alphabet (according to my understanding, showing the Egyptian hieroglyphs that were borrowed to create the letters). My own table of the development of the signs is available on the web, and at the end of this essay, below.

What follows here is the culmination of my musings on the identity of the various signs, including a suggested translation of the inscriptions.

Actually, I think this is an example of 1 + 1 = 1 : there is one proto-alphabetic inscription, running down, then across to the left (so it is "one multiplied by one", 1 x 1 = 1). In my interpretation they talk about the same thing: a celebration for a goddess, and at the join the text has: [V] ... God will provide ... [H] plenty of wine ....

Notice that there is in fact a dividing line at the point of separation of the two statements.

 
A case can be made for single authorship: both the ox-heads have a line for the mouth, and this is somewhat unique; the boomerangs (G) each have one end open; the three heads (R) differ from one another; the snakes (N) are vertical on the horizontal line, and the snake on the vertical line is horizontal; but the two instances of the rejoicer (H) on the horizontal line do not share the same size and stance, so differences can not be decisive in this matter.

(Another early West Semitic inscription about celebratory feasting for the Goddess is here.)

Before we embark on decipherment, we always have to remind ourselves that only the person who wrote a particular proto-alphabetic inscription knew what it said and meant (what he/she meant it to say, with no separation of words, and no vowels registered, only consonants).

But first we need to identify the letters: a controversial procedure, and a daunting task. We begin with the vertical sequence of signs [V1 - V13]. Actually the characters move obliquely leftwards, presumably making their way to link up with the horizontal text [H1 - H16].

However, this inscription is accompanied by a drawing (on the left of H), which must be included in the discussion. I have already ruminated over this image elsewhere on the web, but it comes down to this: while this figure certainly resembles the Egyptian sign for 'life' (`ankh), it is better to see it as a goddess; the deity TNT (Tannit) is represented by a similar symbol in later West Semitic iconography (with forearms raised), and the name TNT is already found on a Bronze Age statuette from Sinai (347, in the temple of the turquoise miners at Serabit el-Khadim). Apparently there are two snakes (horned viper and cobra) denoting double N, in line with "Tannit".

SINAI 347 TNT

The title given to the goddess in that setting is B`LT, 'the Lady', and she is identified with Egyptian Hat-Hor, as shown by the equivalent Egyptian and Semitic inscriptions on the sphinx statuette from that shrine (Sinai 345). Another representation of her is found on the front of a cuboid statuette, with B`LT (possibly) written beside it (Sinai 369); she has a triangular body; but her arms are not outstretched, as here; and she has her hair curling at the ends on each side of her face.

SINAI 369 Ba`aLaT

Hair is difficult to find on this figure from Wadi el-Hol (refer to the photograph here), but curved lines on the left hand (right side of the figure) might be the curl; incidentally, there seem to be facial features (eyes, mouth), and if so, it would not be an `ankh-sign. A lack of flowing hair would be consistent with the idea that this is an infant rather than an adult form of the goddess; this possibility will be examined below..

This person has a crook-like object hanging from the left hand (and I have been tempted to include it in the inscription, as a letter); it is probably hieroglyph S29, a piece of folded cloth (standing for s in Egyptian writing). Gardiner notes that it is often seen in the hands of statues, and was probably used as a handkerchief (as with trumpeter Louis Armstrong and tenor Luciano Pavarotti). Presumably it shows that the person is important. Another detail is the head, which is large in proportion to the body, as if a child is being depicted. This may be deliberate, as an Egyptian celebration for the birth of Hat-Hor is attested (Darnell 2002, 137). A feast for a divine infant is analogous to Christmas, likewise with copious consumption of food and drink. (Speculation: Tannit, mentioned above, whose symbol has this form,  is associated with the death of infants, natural or sacrificial?)

 

Another goddess-name found in Sinai is `Anat (Sinai 527), known from the Ugaritic myths as having a close relationship with Ba`al (his 'sister'), and therefore possibly to be identified as Ba`alat.

SINAI 527 `aNaT (eye, snake, cross)

As I see it, the name `Anat (`NT: eye, snake, cross) appears next to the handkerchief (V6-8).


Moving now through a survey of all the signs. In this exercise, the reader will need a photocopy of my annotated drawings (available right here or elsewhere on the web, I notice).

V1 (Darnell 2.1 m) M
No problems here: this is the Egyptian water sign (n), and it yields M acrophonically from West Semitic words for water (mu, mayim). There are two more examples (Darnell says three) in the horizontal line (H5, H14, but not H10).
V2 (D 2.2 th) Sh
Great uncertainty here: for Darnell and his team (and also Hamilton) this is a "clear and unambiguous" case of the Egyptian hobble-sign (standing for the sound tch, and conventionally transcribed as underlined t); and yet it is admitted that it has "an odd vertical orientation" and it is "shortened from its normal length"; in addition, both cases of this letter (V2 and V11) have a larger circle on the left, whereas the standard form has two small circles, one immediately above the other and almost touching each other; therefore the hobble is not a good candidate. When I first looked at it, I immediately compared it to the sign for Sh. It had long been my opinion (now acknowledged by Stefan Wimmer) that in the three West Semitic scripts (syllabary, consonantary/ proto-alphabet, and cuneiform alphabet) the word for "sun" (shimsh) had been the acrophonic agent for Sh: as a circle, or sun-disc with the uraeus serpent guarding it, or simply the snake without the disc (see examples on my table). Here (V2 and V11) the serpent has no tail, but the larger circle would represent the sun and the smaller circle the head of the snake. Darnell compares what we see here with South Arabian Th [o-o], and rightly so; but what must have happened in the borrowing of the proto-alphabet in Arabia is that the breast-sign (\/\/ from Thad 'breast', sign 10 on the horizontal inscription) has been used for Sh, and the sun-sign for Th. However, here we see a form of hieroglyph N6 (with the short tail omitted); but Alan Gardiner (who catalogued the characters of the Egyptian writing system, and was the first scholar to notice the connection between them and the letters of the alphabet) has N6 first appearing in the New Kingdom (Late Bronze Age), but Darnell argues that the Hol inscription belongs to the Middle Kingdom (Middle Bronze Age). Actually, the sun is sometimes portrayed in Middle Kingdom iconography with a serpent but without the tail. The typical form in the Sinai proto-alphabetic inscriptions is the sun with a serpent on each side (N6B), but the sun-disc is (apparently) omitted! 

   Douglas Petrovich has chosen K for this character, and relates it to the Egyptian Ka (soul) symbol, which is basically a pair of  arms, extended or upraised; he adduces an instance of it from an Egyptian text (Sinai 92) with circles instead of hands, but the circles are too small to be compared with those on this Hol letter, which is clearly the "sun with uraeus" (N6), but with the tail omitted, as on Sinai 85 and 87; and significantly these two inscriptions mention Khebded brother of the Retenu ruler, and these two stelas are among the set of monuments that were produced by Semites for the Sinai temple; Petrovich and I have proposed that these two brothers were Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of Joseph.
Refer to my Israel in Goshen.
   David Vanderhooft has also made a pronouncement on this letter (2 and 11).
   Wadi el-Ḥôl Inscription 2 and The Early Alphabetic Graph *ǵ, *ǵull-, ‘yoke’
   Vanderhooft experienced a eureka moment when he saw a double ox-yoke, and connected it in his mind with this sign, and with the West Semitic word `l "yoke", which would originally have had initial Ghayin, as in Arabic; but each of the two instances of this sign has a larger circle on the left; the yoke has equal-sized rings. Moreover, Gh has already been identified in those informative Thebes tablets (1, 2, 3) and on a plaque discovered in Puerto Rico; it is derived from ghinab "grape", represented by a vinestand with grapes, which can be matched in the Arabian scripts; but it is not attested in a proto-alphabetic text yet. In my first published article on the origin of the Alphabet (Abr-Nahrain, 26, 1988, p. 63) I suggested Ugaritic GNB "grapes", taken together with the South Arabian letter G, and the Egyptian vine-hieroglyph (M43).   On a scale of frequency of use (measurable in Ugaritic texts) Ghayin is in position 24,  as opposed to 11 and 12 for Sh and Th; therefore it is unlikely that Ghayin would appear twice in a short inscription; the two words that he offers to justify its presence are suspect, and one of them has the throwstick as P instead of G.
V3 (D 2.3 t) T
The letter T (see also V8) is a simple cross (plus sign +, sometimes a multiplication sign x), and it goes by the name Taw, which means an identification mark, or the signature of an illiterate person. Here Darnell tacitly admits that no corresponding hieroglyph can be found, though Hamilton tries to find its origin in Z11 (also Z9 and Z10: X), apparently two crossed planks, or sticks, but not a taw). I think T, W, and Z did not have an Egyptian original.
V4 (D 2.4 r) R
This is a human head, and (beyond controversy) it is known to represent the consonant R, after the word ra'ish or rêsh, meaning 'head'. There are two other examples, at the beginning and end of the other line (H1, H16). No facial features are shown (in contrast to the Sinai examples with hairline indicated), but we may assume that all three heads are in profile, not front or back view. All are different, and this is not helpful to the view (strongly maintained by Darnell, and Hamilton) that an Egyptian prototype is being copied faithfully; rather it seems that to write the letter R you simply drew a man's head.
V5 (D 2.5 h) H
There are three examples of H (Darnell accepts V5, H7, H11 as H); the pictograph shows a person dancing (but, in a perhaps misguided endeavour to find a perfect match with an Egyptian hieroglyph, Darnell wants it to be "a seated man with hand to mouth" or even "a seated child" making the same gesture). But, as with R (the head), all three examples are different. My opinion has long been that the figure depicts a person jumping for joy, or dancing in celebration, and the Semitic root hll (as in Halleluyah) is involved (specifically the word hillul 'celebration'). Typically both forearms are raised and pointing to heaven (as in H7, corresponding to Hieroglyph A28, 'jubilation') but one arm may be up and the other down (as in H11 and here, V5, more reminiscent of A32, a person dancing, likewise denoting joy and jubilation). Ultimately, when the body had dropped off, this became E in the Greek alphabet. Note also that inverted examples can be found, with the person standing on his hands or head (Sinai 358, like Hieroglyph A29).
V6 (D 2.6 `) `(ayin)
The guttural consonant ` (named `ayin, and thus indicating its origin in an eye), appears only once in the inscription (H13 is not an eye but a mouth with two closed lips, and so P).
V7 (D 2.7 w) N
Uncertainty descends again, but my choice is for a snake, either a viper or a cobra; both are found representing N (from nakhash, 'snake'); in my interpretation H3 is the example of W (Darnell says it is L), and there are three other snakes (H4, 6, 8) all of them erect, or else turned sideways to fit the text into the available space, as with the M (H5, 14; contrast V1), the P (H13, mouth), the Th (H10, breast). The snake here (V7) could depict a cobra with its neck and head, but lying on its side, to conserve space, whereas the upright cobras in the other line are normal. An analogy of N with a straight vertical body and a head occurs on the Gezer sherd. Eventually the snake will assume the shape of N in the alphabet.
V8 (D 2.8 t) T
The second of the two instances of T (see V3 above).

A horizontal line runs below the T. It could be a simplified snake-sign (another N). Or it is a divider, and in my interpretation it separates the heading (V1 - 8: `Anat celebration) from the main statement (V9 - 13, H1 - 16, describing details of the celebrations).

V9 (D - ) Y
Darnell and his team have overlooked this character, and they do not show the dividing line, either; but Hamilton has both on his drawing, and he opts for Y, as I do. Y is usually a hand with its forearm (yad, or yod), viewed from the side, while K (unfortunately not present in this text), still known by the name Kap ('palm of the hand'), shows fingers (three or more).
V10 (D 2.9 p) G
Darnell and Hamilton do not accept this as a boomerang, and hence as G (from gaml, 'throwstick'), but follow the erroneous line that it represents P (pê), a corner (Hieroglyph O38, a right angle, a corner of a wall). For my part, the true P is H13, a mouth. The other G is H9, and neither of them is a right angle. Both could well represent a bend in a wall, and the fact that they have an open end suggests continuation of a wall; but they may also be showing the blade of a boomerang, viewed from above.
V11 (D 2.10 th) Sh
This is a counterpart to V2 (the sun with its serpent).
V12 (D 2.11 ') '(alep)
The ox-head is the sign for the glottal stop ('), and it finally emerges, upside down, with its horns as legs, at the beginning of the Greek alphabet, as the vowel A, named Alpha (from 'alep, ox). An interesting feature is that in this example, and its twin (H12), the mouth is distinctly marked, and this detail is not found on any of the examples from Sinai, as far as I can see. The fact that the human mouth (H13, P) has an unusual lip line supports my unfashionable understanding of it as P.
V13 (D 2.12 l) L
There has been general agreement from the outset that this a case of L, and that in combination with the preceding 'Alep it forms the word 'l, meaning 'god' or 'the god El'. However, there is doubt whether it represents a shepherd's crook (Hieroglyph S39), as I and others have assumed, to go with the name of the letter, Lamed, from the root lmd, learn, teach, train. Darnell and Hamilton connect the sign with Hieroglyph V1, a coil of rope; this could likewise be connected with training animals, and the possibility is that they are allographs, graphic alternatives (as opposed to graphic variants, meaning different ways of drawing the same character). Be that as it may, this would be the only case of L in the inscription, though Darnell and Hamilton have H3 also as L; Darnell's drawing shows it as a clear counterpart of V13 (though inverted), with an opening; but Hamilton and I see the head of H3 as closed, and for me, that means it is W.




H1 (Darnell 1.1 r) R
See the note on V4, and compare also H16.
H2 (D 1.2 b) B
This is the only instance of B, and the form is slightly unusual; for one thing it is turned on its side (like several other letters in the line; see the note on V7 N), but it is from this version that the Greek Beta will be made. The character represents the ground plan of a simple dwelling (bayt or bêt, house), usually a square, normally with a gap for the entrance (Hieroglyph O1), but sometimes a porch is added. The sign we see here is like Hieroglyph O4, a field-house, or reed-hut,
H3 (D 1.3 l) W
The sign for W is rare but it is usually a circle on a stem (-o), the same as Q in its later development, but Q is -o-; Darnell has V7 as W (N in my view) and this (H3) as L; but as noted under V13 (L), the sign here has a closed head, and should not be L (as either a crook or a coil).
H4 (D 1.4 n) N
This is an upright snake (nakhash) and therefore N; also H6 and H8; see the note on V7.
H5 (D 1.5 m) M
See the note on V1, and compare also H14; H10 is Th, not M).
H6 (D 1.6 n) N
See the note on V7, and see also H4 and H8.
H7 (D 1.7 h) H
See the note on V5, and compare also H11.
H8 (D 1.8 n) N
See the note on V7, and see also H4 and H6.
H9 (D 1.9 p) G
See the note on V10.
H10 (D 1.10 m) Th (Hamilton th/sh)
This would not be M, because it has only two angles; the three instances of M (H1, V5, V14) have three or more waves. It represents female breasts (thad), and is the source of Phoenician and Hebrew Sh (covering Th and Sh together), and as we can see from this example, it will become the Greek letter Sigma. See V2 above for the Sh-sign.
H11 (D 1.11 h) H
See the note on V5, and compare also H7 and H11.
H12 (D 1.12 ') '
See the note on V12.
H13 (D 1.13 sh) P
This is a good example of a human mouth (pu) representing P; it is in a vertical stance, but the lip line (unique among the few attested cases) makes its identity clear; see under V12 for the point that the ox-signs also indicate the mouth, an unusual feature.
H14 (D 1.14 m) M
See the note on V1, and compare also H5.
H15 (D 1.15 kh) Kh
This is a double helix, and it possibly represents a skein of thread (khayt 'thread') or a wick of twisted flax (kharam, Hamilton); the Egyptian hieroglyph stands for Hh [h.] not Kh [h_].
H16 (D 1.16 r) R
See the note on V4, and contrast H10 (Th).

TRANSCRIPTION
Vertical: M Sh T R H ` N T Y G Sh ' L
Horizontal: R B W N M N H N G Th H ' P M Kh R

TRANSLATION

VERTICAL
M Sh T R H
If we divide this sequence into two words, we have Moses (MoShe) and the Law (ToRaH). This is a seductive reading but quite impossible. We can play with the many possibilities, but I have been saying right from the start (November 1999) that the first word on the down-column is M-Sh-T (the predecessor of Hebrew mishteh, banquet, symposium, from the root Sh-T-Y 'drink') Samson made such a feast, and it lasted seven days (Judges 14:10-12).

Support for this 'drinking-party' interpretation can be found in the Egyptian graffiti from the same area, apparently referring to holidays with drinking and eating feasts for the goddess, as reported by Darnell; there it was Hat-Hor, here it is the West Semitic goddess `Anat, named in V6-8 (`NT), and depicted with her handkerchief.

The intervening R and H are puzzling. A solution would be to interpret them as logograms, that is, the head says ra'ish (not simply R) and the jubilater stands for hillul, 'celebration' (not just H). In Hebrew the word ro'sh ('head') can also mean chief, top, first, and beginning. So, R H could say 'beginning of the celebration'; or the head could modify the feast as 'first', or 'top'.

Putting it all together, one possible translation would be:
   "First-class feast for the celebration of `Anat".

However, the literal meaning of m-sh-t- is 'drinking place', and, in discussing the details of this site, Darnell (2002, 134-135) suggests that this could have been an official "drinking place" for the consumption of wine and beer in the celebrations for the goddess. This idea is supported by my reading of this inscription; indeed it seems to provide verification of my interpretation of the sequence of signs. The occurrence of 'plenty of wine' at the start of the horizontal line gives additional confirmation.

Accordingly, an alternative translation needs to be offered:
    "Drinking-place for the super celebration of `Anat"

Y G Sh ' L
The sequence 'L was immediately recognized as 'god' by all who saw the inscription, and as probably indicating the chief god 'Il, or 'El in the Bible. In the past I have noted that GSh could be a word for 'army' (found in Arabic and Hebrew), and this suits the known circumstances of soldiers stationed on the desert road from Thebes; hence "the army of the god 'El".

Another possibility lurking there is: "the voice (gu) of (sha) God ('il)" .

However, the whole combination could be a personal name, Yigash'el (like Yisra'el), the signature of the writer.

Nevertheless, sense can be made of YGSh as a verb from the root n-g-sh 'approach, draw near'; in the h- causative form, and with the n dropped by assimilation to g, it could mean 'bring in, present'. An example is found in Genesis 27:25, where Jacob brings (wygsh) game for his father Isaac to eat, and wine (yayin) to drink (root sh-t-y, as in MShT above). The rock is pock-marked, but there is possibly a dot in the boomerang, indicating that the consonant G is doubled; this feature is observable at the Sinai turquoise mines, where the phrase "beloved of Ba`alat" (m'hbb`lt) is sometimes reduced to mhb`lt, with a doubling dot in the B.

"El will provide ...." (The objects of the verb can be found in the next line)



HORIZONTAL
R B W N M N H

The across-line begins with RB WN 'plenty of wine'; the RB corresponds to Hebrew rob, 'much, plenty', and WN goes with Ugaritic yn and Hebrew yayin, which would have developed from an earlier form *wayn (difficult to document, but found in Arabic as wayn 'vineyard, grapes', and early Greek woin- 'wine', and ultimately Hittite wiyana 'vine'). This might be the earliest-known instance of the international word "wine"(18th century BCE). Note that Hamilton sees a yod below H3, and this could make the word wyn, but he reads it as yln.

MN
I would like this to mean 'provisions' (food to go with the wine). Possibilities are: min, 'from'; mina, a measure of weight; manna, 'bread from heaven'; mnh 'portion', though mnt would be expected in the Bronze Age, but its use in the Hebrew Bible is interesting. In the Book of Esther we see the King of Persia giving a banquet (1:5, mishteh, as in V1-3 above); he provides Esther with her 'portion' (of food, rations, 2:9); and on a holy day of rejoicing the Jewish people distributed 'portions' to one another (9:19-22, cp Nehemiah 8:10-12); and 'portion' was used in connection with meat offered as sacrifice (Exodus 29:26, 1 Samuel 1:4:4-5); that seems to be in evidence here (an ox and a fatling are apparently mentioned at the end of this line). Arabic has a root MWN 'provision', mûna(t) 'provisions', Old S Arb mwnn 'victuals, provisions'.

H
This could be the third person pronoun suffix, 'his' or 'her' (portion); or the hillul logogram again (as in V5), hence:
"provisions for the celebration".

NGTh
This root means 'seek' in Ugaritic (`Anat searches for Ba`al when he disappears), and here it might mean something like 'supplicate'; but there is possibly another N-G-Th denoting 'sacrifice'; the word MGTh refers to something that is slaughtered for King Krt (16.6.18), parallel to 'imr 'lamb', perhaps related to Hbr muggash 'sacrificial offering'; or else 'a fat lamb'. Again, as with YGSh in V 9-11, the n of the root would be assimilated to g, and there is possibly a doubling dot here as well as there.
"We will sacrifice"

H
Pronominal suffix relating to 'him' ('El) or 'her' (`Anat), and presumably dative rather than accusative.
"for her"

' P M Kh R
The 'alep (ox-head) could be a logogram: 'ox' as the object of the verb. The P might function likewise, 'mouth'; or simply represent p, 'and' (copula, known in Ugaritic, for example). MKh would go nicely with Hebrew MeaHh, 'fatling'. The final R could have the same function as in V4: "super celebration" there, and here (in a context of animals for food) "a prime fatling".

Putting the pieces of this line of interpretation together, the result is:

[V] "Drinking-place (MShT) of the excellent (R) celebration (H) of `Anat (`NT). 'El ('L) will provide (YGSh) [H] plenty (RB) of wine (WN) and victuals (MN) for the celebration (H). We will sacrifice (NGTh) for her (H) an ox (') and (P) a prime (R) fatling (MKh)."

This interpretation gives the gist of the inscription, but work still needs to be done on refining the syntax and defining some of the terms; and there may be other more plausible ways of dividing the sequence of letters.

For example, Michael Sheflin's interpretation, involves Athtar and El; but that does not suit the context of celebrations for the goddess in the desert, though he acknowledges that this was apparently a place where such festive rituals took place; but he follows a number of false trails, and offers a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs in dating and interpreting. He does laudably make a single text from the two inscriptions.

Douglas Petrovich (The World’s Oldest Alphabet—Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script, Carta, Jerusalem, 2016.) has publicised this translation of the horizontal text, which likewise has no connection with its environment:"Wine (yyn for wn!) is more abundant (rb) than (mn) the (h) daylight/dawn (ng), than (m) the (h) baker ('p), than (m) a freeman (h.r)". He would doubtless be able to explain infallibly the profound meaning of this poetry (something to do with the years of famine in Egypt? or the effect of the alcohol on the poet?), but it has several flaws to undermine it: the definite article is not active in the Bronze Age, so he needs to find other functions for the three cases of H (I would drop a speculation in here that the article ha, with doubling of the initial consonant of the noun it is attached to, derives from the demonstrative word han, having the -n assimilated; the Arabic 'al may be related to the Hebrew demonstrative 'el (plural); the analogy for "that" > "the" may already be in that English pair, but Latin "that/those" ille, illa, illos, illas developed into definite articles, il, le, la, los, las; the shining (ngh) must have its final aspirational consonant, and it is lacking here; his third "than" is not M but Th (thad breast); the underlying defect that brings his whole construction tumbling down, and falsifies his grand unified theory, is his stubborn insistence that the Hebrew Patriarchs spoke the language of the Bible, and no allowance is made for sound-changes over the epochs, such as wn > yn (which, according to Petrovich, must be written yyn, as in Biblical Hebrew).
   With regard to the vertical line, he interprets the recurring sun-sign (Sh from shimsh, already as Shi in the Protosyllabary) as the Egyptian KA sign (|__|), for K; thus his entire reading of the text will be invalid.
    Petrovich has included his faulty translations of several Sinai proto-alphabetic inscriptions in his second book: Origins of the Hebrews: New Evidence of Israelites in Egypt from Joseph to the Exodus (Nashville, 2021). However, the thesis of this monograph is worthy of our attention, and I am presenting my favourable response to it in my essay Israel in Goshen:
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/gebel-tingar-statue

DATING
What is the date of the inscription? If it is contemporaneous with the Sinai corpus it could be LATE BRONZE AGE or MIDDLE BRONZE AGE, though the Sh-sign (sun with uraeus serpent) is supposed to belong to the New Kingdom period (= LBA) not the Middle Kingdom (= MBA). See the note on V2 above. Nevertheless, the sun is sometimes portrayed in Middle Kingdom iconography with a serpent but without the tail. Therefore the evidence presented by Darnell (2005, 86-90, 102-106) is important, and it points to the reign of Amenemhet III (in the 19th century BCE). An example of this icon, matching the Sh-sign of our inscription (V2 and V11) occurs on an Egyptian stela from the turquoise mines (Sinai 84), dating from Year 4 of Amenemhet III, mentioning 10 Asiatics among the personnel of the expedition, and "the brother of the Prince of Retjenu, Khebded" (a candidate for the position of inventor of the alphabet). A better-preserved instance of this icon is on a stela (Sinai 87) from the following year of the same monarch (5); Khebded reappears, and is even depicted. There is no doubt in my mind that this version of the sun was the model for the unique Shimsh-consonantogram in the Hol inscription; and yet it is not found in the Sinai proto-consonantal texts, where the double-serpent icon without the sun-disc prevails. However, the suspicion is growing stronger that the proto-alphabet was a product of the time of Amenemhet III, in the 19th Century BCE, and the nobleman Khebded is a Western Semite with Egyptian cultural connections who could have been a promoter (and even the inventor) of the new West Semitic consonantal script. Orly Goldwasser is probably correct in surmising that Egyptian hieroglyphic writing inspired Western Semites in Egyptian territory to devise a new acrophonic consonantary; but they would not have been illiterate; they were conversant with their own writing system, an acrophonic syllabary, using borrowed Egyptian characters for its syllabograms, and they knew how the Egyptians manipulated their own hieroglyphic consonantary.

A summary of my interpretaion is published here:
COLLESS, Brian E., "Proto-alphabetic inscriptions from the Wadi Arabah", Antiguo Oriente 8 (2010), pp. 75-96, particularly 91-92.
COLLESS, Brian E. "The Mediterranean Diet in Ancient West Semitic Inscriptions", Damqatum 12 (2016) pp. 3-20 (esp. 5-6)

Both accessible here: https://massey.academia.edu/BrianColless

COLLESS, Brian E., "Recent Discoveries Illuminating the Origin of the Alphabet", Abr-Nahrain, 26 (1988), pp. 30-67. A preliminary attempt to construct a table of signs and values for the proto-alphabet, and to make sense of some of the inscriptions from Sinai and Canaan.
COLLESS, B.E., "The Proto-alphabetic Inscriptions of Sinai", Abr-Nahrain, 28 (1990), pp. 1-52. An interpretation of 44 inscriptions from the turquoise-mining region of Sinai.
COLLESS, B.E., "The Proto-alphabetic Inscriptions of Canaan", Abr-Nahrain, 29 (1991), pp. 18-66. An interpretation of 30 brief inscriptions from Late-Bronze-Age Palestine.
COLLESS, B.E., 1996, "The Egyptian and Mesopotamian Contributions to the Origins of the Alphabet", in Cultural Interaction in the Ancient Near East, ed. Guy Bunnens, Abr-Nahrain Supplement Series 5 (Louvain) 67-76.
COLLESS, B.E., 1992, "The Byblos Syllabary and the Proto-alphabet", Abr-Nahrain 30 (1992), 15-62.

And my other articles on the Canaanite syllabary ("Byblos pseudo-hieroglyphic script") in Abr-Nahrain (now Ancient Near Eastern Studies) from 1993 to 1998, culminating in:
COLLESS, Brian E., "The Canaanite Syllabary", Abr-Nahrain 35 (1998) 28-46.

All except 1988 are available at the Peeters website.

CROSS, F.M., Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook (2003). Collected articles

DARNELL, J. C., Theban Desert Road Survey in the Egyptian Western Desert, Vol 1 (Chicago 2002)

DARNELL, John et al, "Two early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-H.ôl", The Annual of the ASOR 59 (2005) 63-124.

HAMILTON, Gordon J., The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts (Washington 2006) XVI +433 pages (Appendix 1, 323-330, Wadi el-Hol Texts 1-2)

SASS, B., The Genesis of the Alphabet (Wiesbaden 1988)

ZUCKERMAN, Sharon (1965-2014), "'.. Slaying  Oxen and Killing Sheep, Eating Flesh and Drinking Wine..'; Feasting in Late Bronze Age Hazor", Palestine Exploration Quarterly 139, 3 (2007) 186-204. (provides bibliography on feasting and festivals)

" Behold, joy (sswn) and gladness (simha), slaying (hrg) cattle (bqr) and slaughtering (sht.) sheep (ç'n), eating flesh and drinking wine (yyn). Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (Isaiah 22:13)

This is my chart showing the development
of the proto-alphabet. Wadi el-Hol letters

are on the far right of the Sinai-Egypt section.

Click on it to see the enlarged picture.

JERUSALEM WALL INSCRIPTION

MARKS ON A STONE WALL ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Charles Warren (1840-1927) discovered this on a wall on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem: "The third stone north on the second course ... and on it are found, in red paint, ... the 'marks of King Solomon'. " (Recovery of Jerusalem, p. 112).

The seven characters are hard to fit into the Iron Age.

They are all different, but not sufficient for us to see the whole system and to distinguish the various letters.

I could make a case for the Bronze Age, but would this wall (or at least this stone) fit into that era?

The basis for my case is at ALPHABET AND HIEROGLYPHS

And the alphabet table at the end of that article.

Starting from the top line, reading from right to left:

Y : arm with hand (side view) >- here; yad, hence Y/y/. (See [11] Y)

O : circle representing the sun ($m$, shimshu). It usually has a snake with it. (See [22] Sh)

Second line (right to left).

? : possibly a tied bag, and so S. /Ss (Sadey). (See [16] Ss)

0 : apparently an eye (`ayin). (See [3] `ayin)

P : reversed, a human head (Rosh) (See [2] R); but it has two protruding lines at the top, and this is a feature of Q in the Bronze Age; both disappear in the Iron Age.

D : reversed, a human mouth (on its side) (Pe). (See [14] P)

+ : the cross is T at all stages of the alphabet (See [24] T)

RESULTS:

(1) Y Sh (2) Ss ` R P T

YSh: is
Ss`r : small
PT : corner, edge, side (pi`at; Hbr pe'ah)

However, in the Bronze Age the word Ss`R has ghayin (Ugaritic, also Arabic).

Reading the bottom cluster from left to right:
PR `S. ('fruit of tree')

Ss`Q means 'cry out'.
Putting the circle and the cross together:
Sh T (Hebrew shiyt, 'pit', used for pits under the Temple! M. Jastrow, Dictionary, p. 1570)

Warren (p 112) says: "This stone has no draft at the top, but one of 13 inches at the bottom".

George Grena reports, concerning one of the characters: "Warren described one of the locals removing its red-paint tail". However, this line would presumably not be missing from the drawing. If it was the proposed `ayin, it would produce a snake (N), like the one on the vertical section of the Wadi el-Hol inscription. This would give:
SsN "Sion" (Zion), with the semi-vowel y not represented (a characteristic of Bronze-Age inscriptions);
SsNR the mysterious s.innor of 2 Samuel 5:8; waterpipe?

Is this one of those warnings for diggers?
"There is (YSh) a waterpipe (SsNR) here (P)"
The + (like x) marks the spot.

There are similar mason marks at Megiddo and Samaria, described in G. R. Driver's SEMITIC WRiTING (1954) (the chapter on "The origin of the alphabet", and all his photographs, drawings, and tables, started me off on my own quest, which has now arrived at a culminating point, I like to think).

In his chapter on Alphabetic Writing, GRD includes (115-116) "masons' marks on stone" from those 3 places, and considers the  Megiddo and Samaria marks to be Iron Age Israelite, and to be letters of the Hebrew and Phoenician alphabet, and the Jerusalem marks to be the earliest;  18 examples, besides Warren's drawing (with the omission of the character I was taking to be N (snake) not `ayin (eye) after  I was told by George Grena that a tail had been rubbed out by a visitor, but Driver's drawing omits it entirely!). The two lines of other letters on his figure 67 look proto-alphabetic to me.

Still trying possibilities, the large Y Sh T (arm, sun, signature-mark) could be from the root ShT (Hebrew, Ugaritic) 'set, place'.

If this were saying the "the pipe (s.nr) should be put here", this would be an amazing discovery. I wonder whether the great Biblical Archaeologist William Foxwell Albright (1891-1971) would "buy" it.

Is there anyone out there who could falsify this in this way: we know where the s.innor was located, and it was not near that inscription?

However,  Warren would surely have made his drawing before the visitor disfigured it, especially as he saw this "renegade Greek from Crete" do it: "putting up his finger, [he] rubbed off the tail of a Q, and it became O".  The only mark fitting this description is the central one, with a tail, which could indeed be a Q, as noted above, or it is R.

Solomon (Shelomo) is nowhere in sight, since L and M are lacking; but at a pinch we could take the three central signs as DWD, and thus discover David!

We are left with my fundamental principle of epigraphy: Only the person who wrote a particular inscription knew its intended meaning, and now God alone knows the truth.

TEN SEARCHING QUESTIONS ON THE ORIGINS OF THE ALPHABET

Roylon Mortensen in conversation with Brian Colless

Your site is one of the most informative and illustrative I have come across.
I try to make it intelligible to intelligent people, and to supply the illustrations at every point where they are needed, repetitiously so.

I also like Proel.org. Although it is in Spanish, it has one of the most complete libraries of inscriptions.
Thanks for reminding me. I went to have another peep at it, and its table of the development of the alphabet is impressive; I hope they will eventually take my views into account.

Wikipedia has been helpful as a general introduction.
The Middle Bronze Age Alphabets section had included my table of signs, and my transcription of the Wadi el-Hol graffiti. Very gratifying (but it has now been removed to the underworld of the site, under discussion; and its dictatorial supervising computer will not allow references to my cryptcracker site! But there are not 'alphabets' in the MBA (Egypt's Middle Kingdom period), only a single protoype of the alphabet, the proto-alphabet, which pops up in various places: Canaan, Sinai, Egypt. There was certainly a West Semitic syllabary invented in the MBA (before 2300 BCE), but the proto-alphabet may not actually appear till the Late Bronze Age (the New Kingdom period in Egypt).

I have another one in mind, but can't think of its url off the top of my head. And I don't go along with most of the author's ideas, but he has collected a library of images of more recent inscriptions that is useful.
Please lead me to it.

If you can point me to any others, I would love to look at them.
Lawrence Lo, a very bright amateur, has one, but he follows the Albright table of signs.
http://www.ancientscripts.com

I found yours one day and was really impressed with your presentation. I appreciate in particular the way that you lay out the inscriptions from Serabit El Khadim, and talk about them. I was always confused about them or lacked information until I came upon your site.
Well, without a correct inventory of the signs, W.F. Albright and Frank Moore Cross, and those who follow them (Gordon Hamilton, for example) have muddied the waters as they stumble about in the gloom. Confusion has certainly reigned, but nevertheless Cross and Hamilton are correct in their general view of the situation that the West Semitic (Canaanite) proto-alphabet was invented for writing Canaanite language, using Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the acrophonic principle.

I respect the fact that you have many years of experience and tools that I do not have at my disposal when it comes to identifying what the alphabetic characters represent. If I don't seem altogether impertinent, I would like to pass along a few of my questions on the development of the alphabet.

[1] First, though Frank Cross makes an argument of a bridging development between the earlier Middle-age Bronze script and the later Phoenician script, I don't see any. Basically, I see a connection between numerous of the symbols, but a very instantaneous change between the earlier and later scripts. The first script is more organic, more varied (not stable), and has twenty-seven characters. The second script is more geometrical in form, more standardized, and has twenty-two symbols.

This is a reasonable observation of the situation. But Cross is right in principle, although his details are flawed by some incorrect identifications between the original pictorial signs and the letters of the Phoenician consonantal script (an 'alphabet' with no vowels).

At the start we see pictorial representations of things (an ox-head, the plan of a house, a door, a person jumping for joy >-E) ; in the middle stage stylization occurs, making it harder to recognize the things, and they may lie down on their side or become inverted (both in the case of the ox; the head of the jubilater loses its roundness and his legs fall off); finally we have A and >| for the ox, and E for the jubilater.

The changes are so large, drastic even, that the origin of the letters can not be guessed, and matching them with their originals is tricky; but it can be done, as shown on my table of signs.

[2] Second, though there has been a strong push for an Egyptian origin of the script, I again don't see convincing evidence of such. Certainly, some of the symbols are similar, but there are not consistent one to one correspondences of glyphs throughout the entirety of the script. So, why are some scholars acting like there are? Or am I wrong?

Undeniably, the Canaanite scripts (first the syllabary, then the consonantary) used Egyptian hieroglyphs as their characters, wherever possible. One clear indication of this is the sign that became Greek Theta. In the syllabary, the nefer hieroglyph, which represented beauty and goodness symbolically, not pictorially (o-+), became the sign for T.A in the syllabary, and T. (Tet) in the consonantary, on the basis of the Semitic word t.ab "good, beautiful". The Canaanite Tet (T.) is a cross inside a circle [(+)], presumably an abbreviation of o-+ . The sign W (waw "hook" --o) did not have an Egyptian counterpart, but it was a good choice, given the paucity of words with initial W.

Gordon Hamilton tries to find a pattern, whereby the Proto-Canaanite signs keep in step with the Egyptian hieroglyphs, and this does happen. 


[3] Third, why maintain the idea that the Hebrew script (alphabet) descends from the Phoenician script when there is much earlier evidence of the script in Canaan, Sinai, and Egypt? Phoenicia is a big civilization, so it stands to reason that that is where we are going to find a mass of evidence of the script. Hebrew is spoken by a mostly nomadic people few in number that could have taught their alphabetic system to the Phoenicians.

We have too few examples to trace the evolution exactly, but the Timna inscriptions,  the Beth-Shemesh ostracon, the Izbet Sartah ostracon, and now the Qeiyafa ostracon show us what was going on, to some extent. It seems that the syllabary was used in preference to the consonantary in Byblos throughout the Bronze Age, while both are found together around the southern regions (southern Canaan, Sinai, and Egypt). So it may be close to the truth  saying that the south taught the Phoenicians in the Iron Age. However, 

[4] Fourth, is there any certainty behind the significance of the objects of the letters heh, zayin, het, tet, lamed, nun, and qof? In particular, how is Heh assigned the meaning of HLL, "praise", is it simply from the form of the earlier symbol with uplifted arms? And how do you then differentiate between the symbol with two arms uplifted or one up and one down? Is it about finding a term in an ancient Semitic language that means something that could be suggested by the form of the glyph?

I myself feel fairly confident about my identifications of the objects and symbols for each of the letters; my table is based on more evidence than anyone else has used, notably two invaluable copies of the proto-alphabet from southern Egypt (Thebes), which have not been exploited previously, although they were published by Flinders Petrie a century ago. All the letters you cite (except lamed, probably) are not bearing their original name in each case. If we can take H as an example (actually the original of Greco-Roman E) going with hillul (in the sense of "celebration, jubilation"rather than "praise"); there are three "graphic variants"; (1) the normal one has the person raising both forearms (hieroglyph A28); (2) a person dancing, with only one arm raised (A32); (3) a person standing on hands (A29).

[5] Fifth, I have heard no translations of the Wadi El Hol inscriptions. Why is this? Do they just make no sense at all? I think I tried a while ago and came up with something, but it didn't seem meaningful in any way.

As I see it, the main problem everybody has with interpreting this text (the two parts add up to one inscription) is that they are using the faulty Albright table of signs and sound-values; also they do not allow the possibility that the signs could be used like Egyptian hieroglyphs, as logograms and rebuses: thus the snake sign is N, from nah.ash "snake", but it can also stand for "snake" as a word-sign (logogram), and also for any word or part of a word with the consonants n-h.-sh in that sequence (rebus, or "rebogram" is my term). I think I have found some examples of the snake representing "copper" (nh.sh and nh.sht); you will find them lurking in various spots on Cryptcracker.


My reading of it is found here. It fits into the surrounding Egyptian pattern of holiday celebrations for the goddess Hat-hor, with the Canaanites having a banquet for their goddess `Anat:

[V] "First-class (Ra'sh) feast (MShT) of the celebration (Hillul) of `Anat (`NT). 'El ('L) will provide (YGSh) [H] plenty (RB) of wine (WN) and victuals (MN) for the celebration (Hillul). We will sacrifice (NGTh) for her (H) an ox ('alp) and (P) a prime (Ra'sh) fatling (MKh)."

2021: MShT could mean "drinking place", and the inscription marks the spot where Semite soldiers celebrated the goddess `Anat.masey123

[6] Sixth, rather than consider the second form of the script (post middle-age bronze) an abstraction of the earlier script when there is no evidence of abstraction, why not consider it some new development of the script? In other words, when we don't have any evidence of the actual letters changing, migrating from one form to the other, and instead just the appearance of the second form that then goes through some conservative modifications, how can the script be considered an abstraction of the earlier script?

[7] Seven, if the scholarly community assigns such certainties to the alphabetic script, why is it so difficult for scholars to agree upon how the text is to be read? I mean, the scholarly community comes out like this is what the script represents, but then there is little consensus on the meaning of extant inscriptions. I'm sounding harsh, but I just want to know if this is sort of like if we say it stronger it will actually be stronger. Please forgive my seeming impudence.

[8] Eight, can anyone give any credible reason for why the Hebrews or ancestors of the Hebrews would adopt a twenty-two letter alphabet (abjad) when we know that some of the letters had to do double duty? What was the purpose of settling upon twenty-two letters?

[9] Nine, why insist that the letters have no numerical equivalence, something that shows up later in the imported Greek alphabet and used as well later in Hebrew, when from 1500 B.C.E. (Ugaritic) and later alphabetic scripts (Isbet Sartah, Tel Zayit) there is a definite order that hints to a numerical origin. In fact, this may be why the early script employs twenty-seven letters, because such fits into a nine digit, three place value, counting system.

[10] Ten, have you considered how difficult it would be to count in an ancient form of Hebrew where most of the numbers are two syllable and a majority begin with the letter Shin? Only seven is two syllable in English and English numbers are quite varied in their sounds. Perhaps the alphabet developed from a counting system that followed the pattern of mostly single syllable, some dual syllable, where each sound was distinct.

I would really appreciate some help here. I am in the dark on how scholarship answers these questions. If you could please shed some light I would greatly appreciate it.

Regards,

Roylon

I have discovered an elegant design underlying the alphabetic script. It is numerically significant and linguistically sophisticated in nature, a reason why it was so successful. The middle-age bronze script represents an early stage in the development of a script that had not yet reached maturity in a purely logistical design.  However, that design was forgotten by the time of the Hebrew national script (1,000 B.C.E.). Specifically, the letter Nun when loosing its unique shape and beginning to mimic the letter Mem signals the loss of the underlying structure of the script. The letter Lamed similarly indicates the demise of the script in its later crook shape. Its earlier coiled design is more definitively accurate. And the different designs used for the letter Het are illustrative of its descent, the two bar diagonal design being the more principal.

The later look of the script is not due to abstraction of the earlier symbols, but rather to a better understanding of the logical system underlying the script's design. In other words the changes are deliberate. The later symbol of the ox, for example, is not an abstraction of its earlier symbol, but a re rendering of the symbol to represent an advanced understanding of the system. Substitution of symbols in the second script all represent improvements to the system. Some samples of substitution are more explicit. Some versions of the letter alef, for example, represent the principle behind the letter, rather than the original significance of the symbol. The new Bet is not an abstraction but a redesigned version to work in a complementary aspect of the script, and so it is with many of the symbols. The new symbols interrelate. They are organized into patterns. This is the most obvious reason for reducing the script from twenty-seven to twenty-two letters. Five are superfluous symbols in the new logistics of the system. And the order of the alphabet adhered to from the beginning, though with some minor alterations due to scribal error, derives directly from the logical order of the script. The alphabetic script is an example of an ingenious development not only in writing but also in the sophistication of an ancient ideological system. Thus is the alphabet, the greatest invention of all time!

 roylon@opendoor.com

SINAI TURQUOISE MINING

SINAI PROTO-ALPHABETIC INSCRIPTION 375a (383)

(Note that I numbered this inscription 383 in 1990; but Sass and Hamilton designate it as 375a.)

This is another interesting stone from the Sinai turquoise mines. It was found during excavations in Mine M, close to the obituary inscription of Asa (358), together with the rations plaque (375) and other inscribed objects (Starr and Butin 1936, 20-26). Starr described it as made of local sandstone (22, innocently followed by Colless 1990, 43), but Gordon Hamilton (2006, 375) says that it is hard stone, probably limestone. It was in a dump in Bay 1 of the mine, "not over 30 cm. below the top of the fill" (Starr, 22); so Sass (Table 1), "Dump in Mine M"; but Hamilton has the dump outside. In attempting to read the text on it I am struck by the occurrence (in Starr's account) of such terms as "debris", "refuse", "mine chips", "bits of turquoise". I think I can perhaps detect a word for "gravel" (h.s.) at the top, and "scrapings" (sh.) at the bottom.

The photograph reproduced above is the one provided by Starr and Butin in 1936; it is unsatisfactory, as the writing on the lower left section is not visible, and the rest is barely discernible; it led me into deep error, and my 1990 published attempt at reading it is worthless.

Defective drawing by BEC (1990)

Now with two new photographs, released by Gordon Hamilton (with Marcel Marée, Marilyn Lundberg, and Bruce Zuckerman; 2007, MAARAV, 14.1, p 126-127, pl VI and VII) and a better description of the object, I can try again.

Lundberg and Zuckerman have put eight clear photographs of the object on the internet: four coloured, four monochrome. To gain access to these and photographs of other ancient texts, we go to the wonderful database of their West Semitic Research Project, and request Sinai 375a:
INSCRIPTIFACT (http://www.inscriptifact.com/)

Each photograph helps to identify the details of particular characters in the text, such as the cross in the middle of the stone, which does not always appear with all its four pieces standing out clearly. With the aid of these pictures, I can see most of the letters on the old photograph, but the lower left corner was blank.

Nevertheless, everyone admits it is not easy to determine exactly what the faintly incised letters might be. Hamilton's drawing (2006, 374; 2007, 33) is instructive but not perfect. My own sketch adds and subtracts a few speculative details in the obscure areas.

An interesting feature of the stone is the animal depicted on the other side. Hamilton (2006, 375) describes it as a jackal, or the Seth animal (2007, 33). (I have pondered over the origin of that mythical beast myself; its snout reminds me of an aardvark, or an anteater; or its destructive nature suggests a connection with the locust.) I think the letters in the column on the left side of the inscription refer to this creature (the word for 'jackal' can be found there).


Many of these Sinai texts have the basic form of labels, with Dh "this" introducing the object (345.4, 346.1, 351, 353, 360, 361, 382). The sign Dh is found in that column, below what appears to be an upright hand (K), and above the horns of the ox. Taking this as the starting point, the sequence runs:

Dh ( two parallel horizontal lines: = )
' ('alep, ox-head)
` (`ayin, eye)
S (fish; Hamilton follows the erroneous line that the fish is D)
Hh (H., a house with two rooms and a yard, representing h.az.ir 'court, mansion'; there is another instance at the top of the stone; the courtyard can be rounded, and the one in the corner seems to have a bent line at the top; the two rooms can be adjacent with the yard section covering both; here the rooms and yard are all in parallel, in both cases).

Note that Hamilton wants to turn the 'western' end of the long line in the middle into a snake, hence N (I do not show it extended so far but it does apparently pass right between the ox-head and the eye.

My reading would be (with the words separated):

Dh ' ` SHh
"This (dh) is the jackal (') of the heap (`) of sweepings (sh.)"

Hebrew 'i is "jackal", `iy is "heap (of ruins)", sh.iy (root: scrape or sweep away) is "scrapings".

The jackal (deified as Anubis in Egypt) was the guardian of tombs and bodies; he had a leading role in the mummification process. The irony is that he is assigned a protective status, because he frequented tombs, but his reason for being there was different and not nice. I will suppose that the jackal here guards the turquoise that has been mined, and also the tailings, which may include pieces of the precious mineral.

The stone would thus have a magical purpose; the image of the jackal would protect the mined turquoise from looters (or else they had a real-live domesticated jackal there!). Elsewhere in the inscriptions, the equipment of the expedition is put under the aegis of the goddess, as being "loved by Ba`alat" (351, 352, 353, 374). In adjacent Mine L a stone bears two letters, apparently 'Alep (ox) and Yod (arm), and this may have marked a spot where a jackal ('y) (imaged or tamed?!) stood (Colless 1990, 45-6, No 43) but I do not make this suggestion there.

The top line of writing could be seen as (reading from the right):
Hh (H., made up of three sections, like the Hh in the bottom corner)
Ss (S., a tied bag), not certain
Dh (two horizontal strokes)
H (apparently a stick figure of a person rejoicing)
N (a faint snake)
K (an upright hand)

However, there is a stroke to the right of the Hh, and Hamilton has constructed a Tt around it (a cross within a circle, as in the Phoenician alphabet). I have doubts about seeing this sign here or anywhere else in proto-alphabetic writing in the Bronze Age (before 1200 BCE), and this is the only example Hamilton can point to. The original form was a cross outside a circle: +-o (see the section on Tt here).

As I intimated at the outset, the combination HhSs could be the word for gravel or pebbles (root h.s.s. 'cut up, divide'), or a word for 'exterior', or 'partition" (dividing wall).

The sequence HNK might be a demonstrative adverb (cp Arabic hunaka 'there'), or an interjection calling for attention to what follows: 'Behold' (or 'Beware!'), pointing to the guardian jackal (Look out! This is the jackal guarding the heap of scrapings).

With regard to our quest for the various letters of the alphabet, an important feature of this text is the presence of Dh (here) and Z (immediately opposite, on the far right of the stone). In the Phoenician alphabet dh (d) will coalesce with z. Z is a pair of triangles (|><|), which I take to be manacles or fetters, for which the word is ziqqu, hence Z. This is the only occurrence of Z in the Sinai inscriptions, and I had not noticed it till Gordon Hamilton pointed it out (though he understands it as an ax with a handle). If you look at our Roman Z you can see that one of its diagonal lines has been omitted along the way; actually it did not happen like that; it became |-| (turn it round horizontally) and the middle line became diagonal to allow the character to be written in one movement: |\| > Z .

Another instance of this Z is found on an inscription from Thebes in southern Egypt: it has Dh and Z, and the term zqq ('refine') with reference to refining gold (where the Q is --o-, a cord or 'line' wound on a stick, qaw, not the monkey that the Hebrew name Qop suggests, and Gordon Hamilton accepts, and I have reasons to suspect that it may be an alternative sign for Q). Notice the two dots indicating 'double Q'. Also significant is the P, a human mouth (in the word pd, 'pure gold'). We must reject Hamilton's unhelpful remarks (2006: 187-191) about 'false derivation' of Pê from 'mouth', invoking what he thinks are 'some forms of `ayin without pupils'; here on the Sinai document the mouth and the eye are clearly distinguished by a pupil in the eye. Hamilton is supporting the discredited derivation of P from 'corner of a wall', erroneously using boomerangs  for this purpose, instead of for G (gamlu, 'throwstick').


The Z on the Sinai stone has a hand (K) below it, and a cross (T). This could be zaku, meaning 'pure', a word that can be applied to minerals (one problem is that while Hebrew and Akkadian have Z  in this root, Old South Arabic has Dh, and Aramaic has D, but Arabic has both Z and Dh, so we can accept Z here); in this instance zk has the feminine marker -t, and if it is an adjective there should be a noun to go with it. Could it be describing a word for 'turquoise', which has not been discovered in these inscriptions, yet?


To my eyes a central column is present, between the columns on the left and right sides, and below the top line. It is not constituted by the two characters that Hamilton conjectures. He joins the two signs that I see as a mouth above a hand, to make a unit (as I did in 1990, to produce a hand, K), which he understands as a fish, and reads it (erroneously) as D, though it is nothing like the fish in the left column, which has two fins and a tail; he takes the long horizontal line below that as significant (as I did in 1990, combining it with the parallel stroke below it to make a door, hence D, and this remains a possibility), and taking it with one of the angles of the X (actually the letter T) to make a long snake (N).

Notice that the P ("mouth") is clearly distinguished from the `ayin by the pupil in the eye.

The Egyptian word for turquoise (mfk3.t ) is found (damaged) on the bilingual sphinx (S351). The simpler form is mfkt, and I see it here as a borrowed word in the sequence mpkt, followed by zkt, "pure", hence "pure turquoise".

Accordingly, the writing on the left side of the stone is a warning: Beware of the jackal guarding the scrapings. Further to the right is the label: Pure turquoise. The top line remains obscure to me, but it might be the general identification of the place where the material from the mine was deposited (the 'dump' mentioned by the archaeologists).

16/12/2016
The top line may contain another missing term, namely a word for "miner" or "stonecutter". The Middle Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions from Sinai speak of "stonecutters" alongside "coppersmiths".
By recognizing a square house to the left of the Sadey, we have a sequence H. S. B, and that root means "hew". One reference in the Bible (Deuteronomy 8:9) speaks of mining copper out of hills, and this corresponds to the manner of mining turquoise. 
   If this removes the HNK as the warning exclamation, even the K could serve this purpose (Hebrew ko) as saying "Here is the jackal".

28/4/2017
 In his book on the origin of the alphabet, Douglas Petrovich (2016) includes this among his ten New Kingdom inscriptions from Sinai (alongside five from the Middle Kingdom); he claims that these are all written  in the Hebrew language, rather than simply West Semitic. If he wants these texts to conform to Biblical Hebrew, with only twenty-two letters, he is in difficulty here, because in my reading (supported by Gordon Hamilton) we have Dh on the left side and Z on the right side of the plaque (but neither appear on DP's drawing). Furthermore, the "pure turquoise" (mpkt zkt) is disconcerting because of the final feminine marker, -t, which only appears in the construct state and in the plural form in classical Hebrew.
    However, one salient point in his interpretation is worth taking up: the right-angle figure at the top (to which Hamilton and I have desperately added a tiny pair of legs to make it H) is understood by DP as Hieroglyph F20, a logogram or ideogram for "tongue" and for "overseer" (imy-r, "the one who is in the mouth" [of his subordinates]); Alan Gardiner (who sees it as an ox-tongue) describes this usage as "sportive", a graphic pun. To add to the merriment, in the present instance the "overseer" would be the jackal! If the Egyptian word for "turquoise" is present, then an Egyptian hieroglyph is not out of place. But how does this word relate to what follows it on the top line, reading from left to right? Three letters are possibly discernible: S.H.T, perhaps meaning "shiny things" or "gleaming things" (s.ah., "dazzling", "glowing", feminine plural), hence "The overseer of the shiny stuff, pure turquoise".

On reflection, I dare to say that my interpretation fits the context adequately.

23/5/2017 29/11/2021
Anubis is the guardian of the turquoise in this setting.  I think I have found a word for turquoise here: MPKT. But if the reading on the little sphinx (S 345)  is fk3t, without the owl, and thus not mfk3t, then PKT might do, to go with ZKT ('pure'). But nopek is supposed to be the Hebrew word for "turquoise", and perhaps also puk; both of these seem to be masculine, but the adjective zkt is feminine, so mpkt would be a better choice.  The owl might have been on the broken-off piece (together with the -T of B`LT); or the scribe has used Hieroglyph Z5, a stroke replacing characters that are difficult to write (A. van den Branden).

Brian E. Colless, The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai, Abr-Nahrain (Ancient Near Eastern Studies) 28 (1990) 1-52.
Gordon J. Hamilton, The origins of the West Semitic alphabet in Egyptian scripts (2006).
Gordon J. Hamilton et al, Three recently located early West Semitic alphabetic texts, Maarav, 14, 1 (2007) 27-37, 121-128.
Douglas Petrovich, The World's Oldest Alphabet: Hebrew as the Language of the Proto-Consonantal Script (Carta: Jerusalem. 2016)
 
Benjamin Sass, The Genesis of the Alphabet (1988).
Richard F. S. Starr, Romain F. Butin, Excavations and Protosinaitic inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadem (1936)
West Semitic Research Project, InscriptiFact (additional colour photographs of the stone are available in their archives)

ALPHABET EVOLUTION

EARLY EVOLUTION OF THE ALPHABET

The search for the origins of the alphabet is a perennial quest. In the fifth century before the current era (B.C.E.), the Greek historian Herodotos inquired into this matter and heard that at some time in the past a certain Kadmos had come to Boeotia, in Greece, with a group of Phoenicians (that is to say, Semites or Canaanites). Among other things, Kadmos had introduced the art of writing, which had previously been unknown to the Greeks, or so Herodotos thought. The characters of this new writing system were therefore called Kadmean letters or Phoenician letters. Herodotos was not able to say who had originally invented them, but others after him echoed the plausible claim that the Grecian alphabet had its source in the orient. The name Kadmos is reminiscent of Hebrew qedem, meaning "the east", as in "the wisdom of all the sons of qedem (easterners)", which was judged to be inferior to that of King Solomon (1 Kings 4:30). Somewhere in the Levant (the region of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) the starting point for the alphabet is to be sought. But where precisely, and when?

In the sixth century of the current era (C.E.) an answer was proposed by a Christian writer named Kosmas of Alexandria, who was dubbed Indikopleustes, "Indic seafarer", because he had travelled to India (and even though he had sailed beyond the horizon he rejected Ptolemy's spherical view of the world in favour of the flat earth theory!). Kosmas confidently declared that in Sinai there were inscriptions written in the earliest forms of the letters of the alphabet; these had been taught by God to the Hebrews on their wanderings in the wilderness; subsequently Kadmos of Tyre, a Phoenician, learned these letters from the Israelites and carried them to the Greeks, who in turn passed them on to the whole world. The opinion of Kosmas was that the alphabet was divinely revealed to Moses for the purpose of writing down the laws of Yahweh, the God of Israel. This was also the view of Eupolemos, a second-century Jewish historian.

Kosmas was perhaps referring to the picture-writing to be seen in and around the ancient Egyptian turquoise mines of Sinai. These mines are situated north of Jebel Musa, the mountain traditionally identified as the place where Moses received the Torah on tablets of stone, inscribed by the finger of God (Exodus 31:18). This mining area has an abundance of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, glorifying the pharaohs who had sent expeditions to Sinai, to obtain copper and turquoise. There are also some pictographic texts, which are not decipherable as Egyptian, as the British archaeologist W.M. Flinders Petrie noted when he discovered them in 1905.

Actually these pictographic inscriptions had never really been lost, as pilgrims to the Holy Land had long been visiting the mountain of Moses and the mines of Sinai. However, no visitor who saw the inscriptions would have been able to read them, and that includes the peregrinating scholar Kosmas and the polymathic professor Petrie. These chiseled messages have been there for at least three and a half millennia, apparently dating from around 1500 B.C.E.

Nevertheless, in his book Researches in Sinai (1906), Flinders Petrie made some significant points about this mysterious form of picture-writing. Firstly, many of the signs clearly corresponded to Egyptian hieroglyphs (so they may have been borrowed from the Egyptian hieroglyphic inventory). Secondly, the limited number of characters in the script probably indicated that it was alphabetic (one sound per sign), not syllabic or logographic (one syllable or one word per sign, and thus requiring many more characters than an alphabet, as is the case with Babylonian cuneiform and Chinese writing). Thirdly, it was presumably representing the Semitic language of the Asiatic workers who are mentioned in the hieroglyphic inscriptions as having participated in the turquoise expeditions.

Petrie was right on all three counts, it now appears, but he was not willing to find the original alphabet in this script. He had his own views on the genesis of the alphabet, as deriving from a widespread collection of "geometric marks", abstract signs that had been used from time immemorial. In his opinion, the Sinai pictographic script was simply a "local barbarism".

Petrie's compatriot and fellow-Egyptologist Alan Gardiner took a different approach. While working with T.E. Peet on an edition of the Egyptian hieroglyphic texts from Sinai, Gardiner was obliged to consider the anomalous pictographic inscriptions from the same region. Working on the hypothesis that this was a Semitic alphabet, and with the Hebrew-Phoenician names of the letters in mind (aleph "ox", bayt "house", and so on), he was immediately struck by the presence of an ox-head. He boldly suggested to Peet that this was surely an aleph, the sign that represents a glottal stop. The ox-head was also an Egyptian hieroglyph, and when Gardiner subsequently found the "house" hieroglyph (pr) he assumed it was B (bayt).

Continuing his search, and applying the acrophonic principle (whereby the initial consonant of the Semitic word associated with each pictograph supplied the sound of the particular sign), Gardiner recognized the "water" hieroglyph (a horizontal wavy line) as M (mayim "water"), the human head as R (rosh), the human eye as the guttural consonant `ayin ("eye"), the cross as T (taw "mark, signature"), the cobra as N (nakhash "snake").

Gardiner then looked for "some recurrent group of signs which might spell some word", and one series of four letters "stood out with great prominence", occurring in six out of the inscriptions he was examining. This turned out to be B`LT, "Baalat" or "Lady" (feminine of Baal, "Lord"), the Semitic appellation by which the Egyptian goddess Hat-hor was known in Byblos and other Canaanite kingdoms. Significantly, hundreds of the Egyptian inscriptions mention "Hat-hor, Lady of the Turquoise", as the divine patroness of the expeditions. This discovery stands as the foundation stone of proto-alphabetic research (but when Gardiner presented his results to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1915, Flinders Petrie politely demurred).

Notice that Gardiner was here practising the technique of "sequencing", a method also employed by geneticists: the investigator scans a chain of "letters" (whether DNA or ABC) and picks out recognizable "sequences". Another feature for comparison is the standard three-letter codon (three nucleotides constituting a genetic code unit determining amino-acid sequence): in Semitic languages (such as Arabic, Phoenician, Hebrew, Babylonian, and Ethiopic) words are built on tri-consonantal "roots".

The proto-alphabet came to birth in a world which already had a number of sophisticated writing systems. The oldest of these was the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq), the land of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This began, naturally enough, as picture writing (pictographs representing words or ideas) some five thousand years ago, towards the end of the fourth millennium B.C.E. The pictographs, usually inscribed on clay, soon moved beyond this stage in two ways: they became stylized clusters of wedge-shaped marks (cuneiform characters), and, by the rebus principle, they became syllable signs, so that dug "pot" was also used for the syllable dug, and so on. This system was complicated, having hundreds of signs, but its virtue was that vowels were represented in its syllabic characters.

In Egypt also, a pictographic script appeared sometime before 3000 B.C.E. The earliest-known "hieroglyphs" were pictures representing words, but they then advanced to a phonetic stage. However, unlike the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, vowels were not indicated, only consonants: the sign for pr "house" (the ultimate source of our letter B) could also say pr "go" and be an element in prt "winter".

At Gubla (later called Byblos by the Greeks), on the coast of ancient Lebanon (Phoenicia), before 2000 B.C.E., someone produced a new Semitic script, which combined features of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems, and needed far fewer signs. It was a syllabary (like cuneiform) and it employed Egyptian hieroglyphs, as far as possible. Its new feature was the principle of acrophony, whereby the first syllable of the West Semitic (Canaanite) word for the depicted object was what the hieroglyph said: thus the pr ("house") sign became ba, the first syllable of Semitic bayt "house". Some examples of the seventy or so characters from Byblos are given on the left side of the PHOENICIA column on the table of signs. Not many documents have survived in this script, and it is widely asserted that it has not not been deciphered yet. I beg to differ. See CANAANITE SYLLABARY and WEST SEMITIC LOGO-SYLLABARY.

Subsequently, perhaps at Byblos, but presumably somewhere in the West Semitic area (Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine), the acrophonic principle was applied further, so as to reduce the number of signs to about two dozen: only the initial consonant of bayt was represented by the sign for "house", and this became proto-alphabetic B. The earliest known instances of this new script date from the Middle Bronze Age, before 1600 B.C.E.

Actually there is a consonantal alphabet hiding in the Egyptian system: its hieroglyphs can represent three consonants at once (nfr "good"), two consonants (pr "house"), or simply one (r "mouth"). (Incidentally, these three characters are also found in the proto-alphabet, as T., B, and P.) The uniconsonantal hieroglyphs could have been used in combinations to write any ancient Egyptian word, but the Egyptian scribes did not take the step of using only the single-consonant signs and discarding all the others, though modern-day "scribes" in the streets of Cairo will now write people's names with this "pseudo-alphabet", as a tourist gimmick. Whether the inventor of the Semitic alphabet noticed this fact or not, the proto-alphabet was certainly designed as a simplification of all the systems that came before it.

Around the fourteenth century B.C.E., a cuneiform alphabet was devised for writing West Semitic language on clay, but after a few hundred years this was ousted by the Phoenician linear alphabet (the stylized version of the proto-alphabet, in which the original pictures are no longer discernible).

Out in the Mediterranean sea, on Crete and Cyprus, there were syllabic scripts (notably Linear A, which developed into Linear B in Crete and Greece, and into Linear C on Cyprus, both used for writing Greek language), apparently based on the model of the West Semitic acrophonic logo-syllabary; but these eventually gave way to the Greek alphabet, that is, the consonantal Phoenician alphabet with the added bonus of vowels.

Here is my table of the development of the alphabet, starting in column 1 with Egyptian hieroglyphs that were borrowed for the letters of the proto-alphabet (not in all cases, notice, as W and T have no clear counterparts in the Egyptian system).

The second and third columns show examples of the original letters, as attested in Bronze Age inscriptions from Egypt, Sinai, and Canaan (Syria-Palestine). The narrow column (BS = Byblos syllabary) has the syllabic signs corresponding to the subsequent letters of the alphabet. The Canaan column also has examples from the Iron Age (after 1200 BCE), on the right side of each box; and the signs of the Canaanite cuneiform alphabet (with wedge-clusters representing the original pictorial characters) are also displayed in the Canaan panels.

The Phoenicia and Greece sections display the names and forms of the letters in the Phoenician alphabet and their counterparts in the Grecian alphabet; the standard Greek and Roman forms appear on the right.

The last column displays examples of Arabian letters from the Iron Age, obviously based on the pictorial characters of the Bronze Age, and not derived from the Phoenician alphabet.

Click on this chart to see it enlarged.

For a detailed study of each letter, go to ALPHABET AND HIEROGLYPHS.
See also:  The Evolution of the Alphabet,
https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/alphabetevolution

ANCIENT METAL MELTING

SINAI INSCRIPTION 351

This is a very interesting and important inscription from the entrance to turquoise mine L at Serabit el-Khadim. It has a drawing of the Egyptian god Ptah., the patron of craftsmen; he is depicted standing in a shrine, and holding a sceptre. We may surmise that the text will have some reference to craftsmanship.

The photograph provided shows a break, though the stone was not in that state when it was first discovered, and a photograph taken by Petrie is also available (Sass, fig. 38). Remember that there was a whole series of such stelas found on the ground, but they were originally on the rock-face. The drawing I have offered here is not entirely accurate, but indicates the characters I think are there.

A good place to start would be the left column, because we can detect a familiar sequence there: 'beloved of Ba`alat'. At the bottom we can see `ayin-L-T. At the top we can find M, then the horns of an ox and the snout ('alep), then the arms and head of the jubilater, though the body and legs are not easy to trace (H). We may safely assume that the space below had two houses, representing BB (note the square B next to `LT in the right column). It all adds up to produce: M'HB B`LT, 'beloved of Ba`alat'.

So, who or what was under the guardianship of the goddess? We would expect to find the answer in the other line of writing. At the top we can detect Dh [=], 'this'. Identification of the next letter is crucial, and we should set it aside for a moment. Moving down the column we meet a very clear B (square); Sh (not obvious, but that is what we find in the corresponding sequence on 353, 360, 361); N (snake); M; Sh (fractured by the break, but clear on Petrie's photograph); N; Ss (tied bag); B; W (nail, hook); Tt [+o], a sign we have not encountered previously. Briefly, my interpretation of this is NSsB WTt, 'prefect of the expedition'. WTt would be a transcription of the Egyptian word for 'expedition', found in the Egyptian inscriptions at the mining site. NSsB corresponds to Hebrew nis.ab, meaning foreman or prefect; the term is also found in 350, and in the plural form with -n, in 346 and 349, RB NSsBN 'chief of the prefects'. Many scholars have taken this word to be NQBN 'miners' (root nqb, 'bore'), and this is a very seductive opinion, but I think the tied bag is Ss, not Q (qaw, 'line', a cord wound  on a stick).

Returning to the second character in column 1: the common choice for this is T, and the Sh is understood as Th (from *thann, 'a compositie bow', whereas I invoke shimsh, 'sun', sun-serpent hieroglyph, two serpents encompassing the sun, but here with the sun-disk omitted,  though sometimes it can be included). Ironically, the resulting sequence is interpreted as DhT BThN, 'the one of the serpent' ('the Serpent Lady'), the goddess depicted holding snakes. However, there is no T [+]. Those who see T construct a cross-bar for + from a section of the horizontal line that forms the backbone of K; if this glyph is viewed vertically it reveals itself as K, a rare but attested form (roughly |= instead of |<); for example, it appears in its upright stance on the Lakish lice-comb. Note that a third stroke on the left is not part of the K but is the third "wave" of the M in the adjacent column.

The resultant sequence KBShN coincides with a Hebrew word for 'furnace' or 'kiln' (kibshan). This would fit the context admirably, since metal-melting equipment (crucibles, bellows, casting moulds for tools) has been found in Mine L. Also, the following MSh could be related to Hebrew ms (mem sin) and mss, meaning 'melt' (Arabic massa, 'dissolve'), and so KBShN MSh would signify 'melt-furnace'. Presumably the 'melt' qualification distinguishes the kibshan as a furnace, not a kiln for pottery.

Unfortunately, every time I encounter this sequence, I have to argue (you have heard the expression 'special pleading', but I don't know what it means) that we are looking at K not T.

The meaning of the inscription emerges thus:

This is the metal-melting furnace of the prefect of the expedition, which is beloved of Ba`alat

SINAI INSCRIPTION 353

The photograph is not clear, and my old drawing from 1990 is not exact (lacking several letters), but looking now at Sinai 353 (which was reportedly joined to 351 on the same block of stone,  though it is said that they were upside down relative to each other): it has a similar sequence of signs in column 1), to be compared with the two columns on 351; but again the K is obscure; it may be similar to the one in the bottom left corner, in the word KNSh ('gather'); a third of the way down the middle line, again in the word KNSh, a somewhat different type of K stands out. In the column on the right, which says Dh KBShNMSh MHB`LT ('This melt-furnace is beloved of Ba'alat'), the K is not distinct, though it is not a cross like the T at the bottom.

 

The other two columns contain words for "garden" (GN, GNNT) and are therefore treated in the Sinai horticulture section.

SINAI INSCRIPTIONS 360 & 361

Turning now to a pair of related inscriptions, which apparently have the KBShN MSh sequence: 361 (on the right side of the photograph, left side of the drawing) was engraved on a rock face near the entrance to Mine N; 360 was on a stone slab near Mine K, and close to 367 (the stone marking the water reservoir). Inscription 361 is clearer, so we will examine it first. I know the picture is murky, but a magnifying glass helps with all the photographs I provide (most are from Butin's publications). On the left (not shown on the drawing) is a large letter that could be K (hand with fingers), followed by B (a square house), Sh (the sun-serpent symbol), and N (snake, below Sh). This gives us KBShN, and there is possibly M[Sh] down below K.


On the right hand side of the stela (360), focusing on the letters in the middle of the column of writing, we can find (with patience and persistence, on better reproductions than I have provided here) BShNMSh, preceded by a simple T [+], Dh [=], and a sign that is commonly transcribed as T, but we know it must be K! I suspect that the same scribe has engraved both inscriptions (360, 361), and I wish he had written more words, to help us to distinguish his T and K. My suggestion is that we are looking at a simplified hand with its middle digit and little finger pointing to the left, and the thumb pointing upward. So we have KBShN MSh, 'melt furnace', but the expected MHB B`LT is not obvious (there is a possible B to the left of MSh), but the stone has suffered severe weather-damage (and exposure to the water of the reservoir?).

At the top of the column (with comparative assistance from 361), we detect Dh, Sh, Hh, 'alep (ox-head, slightly indistinct), T, Z, and then KBShN MSh.

Regarding the Hh (H.), we have already encountered this letter in the bottom left corner of 353 (see the photograph above). There it was a square house with a round courtyard; here it is comprised of two squares, the upper one of these being divided into two; on 361 the corresponding letter (standing out clearly above a large square B) has the bisected square at the bottom. All three represent a stylish mansion, as distinct from a simple house, and the word hhassir (or h.z.r, court, mansion) provides the sound Hh. Another example is found on the rock at Mine G (see 380, below); it has the shape H), that is, two rooms and a semicircular courtyard. It is obviously the character that became Roman H, by the loss of some of its walls, but people will try to tell you that it is a form of B (house), even when there is a clear square B below it (as on all three of these inscriptions).

The combination ShHh produces a word known in Hebrew and Aramaic, meaning 'pit' or 'ditch', from the root sh-w-hh, 'sink down'. This presumably refers to the mine in each case: 361 was at the entrance of Mine N, and 360 would relate to Mine K (though it was found 150 metres from the mine). On the other hand, the 'pit' is more likely to be a cavity in the ground where the melting and moulding were done, and this was certainly the case with 360 and 361, which were both found in such a setting (thought to be a "sleeping shelter" by Butin, 1932, 186, 187)

The next word 't could be: 'you' ('thou'); 'a sign' (even meaning a letter of the alphabet); 'he came'; or 'together with'. If we can allow Dh (dhu) to function as a demonstrative adjective, giving 'this pit', rather than as a pronoun, saying 'this (is) a pit', then we get this result:

"This pit, together with this melt-furnace, is beloved of Ba`alat".
Or going further: "This pit and this melt-furnace are together beloved of Ba`alat".
However, if Ba`alat is not present, the inscription would simply be stating that this spot is reserved for melting metal in crucibles.

We find much the same on the right hand side of 361. It commences with Dh ShHh, 'this pit', but the K is missing for the -BShN MSh, which is all quite clear on the photograph. Those who constantly seek 'the serpent lady' (DhT BThN, 'the one of the serpent') find the missing DhT to the left of HhB. But is it T or K?  Again I will plump for a stylized hand or palm branch (not a cross).

There is space above the Dh for ' T, as on 360, but it is not visible; there are possible horns of the ox, and also perhaps a P (mouth) above Dh, which could supply 'ap ('also') or pa, ('and'). Beneath the K we can see MH, the beginning of the familiar formula, but a piece of the text has been lost.

My reading would thus be:
"This pit (and) this melt-furnace are beloved of Ba`alat".

SINAI INSCRIPTION 380

Now, we turn to a new inscription, first published by Benjamin Sass as Sinai 380 (Sass 1988, 40; and Fig. 99, 100 [Mine G], 103-5 [inscription]). His two photgraphs, taken at different times of day, are not clear, except to clairvoyants. Émile Puech (2002, plates 2 and 3, reproduced below, numbering the inscription 387) offers a better photograph, and a copy of a squeeze (estampage). My drawing attempts to find the main details, but Puech says that I have overlooked a number of letters; his drawing (on his Fig. 1.2) has twice as many as mine. Considerable guesswork is required to recreate the whole text, but here is its context. This inscription is above the entrance to Mine G, and a collection of metallurgical equipment was found on the roof of the mine, near the writing. Thus it would not be surprising to find metal-melting mentioned in the text.

My view of the letters sees two lines: one runs from right to left, the other from top to bottom. If we start with the letters on the far right, we can see 'aleph (ox) and Hh. A word that would fit neatly into this setting is 'ah., 'brazier' (as in Jeremiah 36:22-23, "the fire of the brazier"); it is said to be a loanword from Egyptian, which also fits into the general scenario of West Asians working for the Pharaoh.

Below the 'brazier', running in the same direction, is the word B`LT, 'the Lady'. Putting these two sequences together we have "Brazier of Ba`alat". If there is a Dh ( = ) to the left of the Hh, then this would strengthen the connection between the two words, affirming that the brazier belongs to Ba`alat, and therefore it should not be touched. This would serve the same purpose as the cautionary expression "beloved of Ba`alat" found in the other inscriptions under consideration here. Émile Puech claims that M'HB`LT runs from left to right along the bottom. but this is hard to find (note that the estampage has 3 centimetres missing from that section of the rock).

From what we have seen in the previous four inscriptions, which mention a 'melt-furnace' (351, 353, 360, 361), my expectation is that the vertical column of signs will say KBShNMSh. Certainly, to the left of the T we can find the snake for N and and below it the wave-sign (with three peaks) for M. Above the N is the other snake-sign, Sh, representing the two serpents on the sun; another Sh is not really discernible below the M, but the stone may have been worn away by weather here. Above the Sh of -ShNM[Sh] the photograph seems to show a snake (N), not a house (B); but there are sufficient lines at this point to construct a box. Above this is a round character, which might be a fish (with no fins), hence Samek; but if it is K it would be a hand, and this one would be showing its palm.

SINAI INSCRIPTION 350 & 352

We now return to Mine L and confront two damaged and difficult inscriptions, 350 and 352.


The sequence NSsB can be seen at the bottom of 350, presumably referring to the prefect again. The 'N at the top could be the first person pronoun, saying 'I am' (a variation on 'This is ...", as in inscription 356), followed by KBShN ('furnace'), with ownership attributed to the prefect (or 'the house of the prefect', if the reading BT Sh can be sustained). The next column has 'HB near the top, and presumably the phrase 'beloved of Ba`alat' was there.

Regarding 352, I have inserted the fragment 366 into its left side, producing M'HB'LT. Gordon Hamilton (2006, 345, n. 7) is extremely dubious; but if that is not the right missing piece then there must be one just like it among the rock debris in front of Mine L. My guess is that there is a K (hand) obliterated in the worn section below the very clear M at the top of column 3; this would produce the word MK, meaning 'mine' (as in 354 and 379).

Here is a photograph of 352, issued by W.M.F. Petrie, with a drawing by Herbert Huffmon, published by W.F. Albright, modified by Benjamin Sass to include the large fish which Albright had excluded.


For the other two columns, I see 'ShT (top right), which could be 'fire', and its owners follow as BN KR 'sons of the furnace' (an expression we heard with reference to Asa 'the smith' on the sphinx statuette, 345). Incidentally, the R can look very rough at first glance (as a small head on a thick neck), but quite stylish if the top is seen as the hair and the rest as the face looking leftwards. Then comes the fish, two or three snakes, another K (with two lines below it, possibly a mouth, standing for P). My drawing tries to find a box in the bottom corner rather than a snake, and beneath the fish `LT (to produce Ba`alat, with the B above the fish); but it seems safer to follow the drawing above, with two or more cases of N. We already know that these inscriptions can meander, even though they have columns and lines to follow; examples: 365, back and front; 346, side, where the two snakes of NSsBN ('prefects') are put together under the other letters. Accordingly, if we arrange the letters in the order NSKN, we have 'pourers' (of molten metal), another word for smiths. If the two parallel lines were not P but Dh, they could define their role as 'pourers of copper', with the N functioning as a rebus: the sounds of NHhSh ('snake') standing for NHhSh 'copper' (which has a final T in Phoenician and Hebrew, but not in Arabic, but there could possibly be a T near the fish).

Similarly, the ' Sh and the MSh at the top of the stela might form a unit as 'the melt-fire' (the fire used in the furnace for melting the metal).

Below the break, column 2 has: L Sh T L B, and then the fish. LShT might mean 'for the the Lady' (or 'the pit')' LB could say 'for the house' (B as a logogram, standing for the word for 'house'), possibly meaning the temple on the site. Perhaps the writer intended the `LT to be used for B`LT in both columns, hence 'for the Lady, for Ba`alat'.

My basic assumption is that the Canaanite miners and metal-workers of successive expeditions, had put up their own particular signs on this mine (L). This would explain the repetition in the various stelas engraved on the rock.

SINAI INSCRIPTION 349

This is another inscription on the rock face at the entrance to Mine L. The text begins at the top, with a clear ox-head, followed by a snake and a cross, giving the word 'NT, 'unutu, 'equipment', as in the the garden equipment inscription on the wall inside Mine L (357).

[1] This (Dh) is the equipment ('NT) of (Sh) [2] the chief of the prefects (RB NSsBN) ... [3] apparatus (`RK) ....

Notice the K, which is an upraised hand, pictorial not a stick-figure. In the remaining lines, too many of the letters have been obscured. The apparatus would be for the mining and metalworking, presumably.


The new letter was Tt (Tet), and it is the Egyptian nfr sign, for 'goodness' and 'beauty', and with the Semitic word t.ab ('good') it yields the sound Tt (emphatic t).

For a discussion of all the proto-alphabetic letters and their relation to Egyptian hieroglyphs, go to Alphabet and Hieroglyphs.

For more details about the inscriptions examined here, refer to:
Brian E. Colless, The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai, Abr-Nahrain/Ancient Near Eastern Studies 28 (1990) 1-52 (available from Peeters website).