Two similar but undeciphered scripts believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabets are attested from the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1500 BCE): the Proto-Sinaitic script discovered in the winter of 1904-1905 by William Flinders Petrie, and dated to 1500 BCE, and the Wadi el-Hol (wadi el-ħôl) script discovered in 1999 by John and Deborah Darnell and dated to 1800 BCE.
The Proto-Sinaitic script
This script is known from carved graffiti in Canaan (Palestine) and the Sinai peninsula, most famously from a turquoise-mining area of the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim (serābîţ el-xâdem). These mines were worked by prisoners of war from southwest Asia who presumably spoke a West Semitic language, such as the Canaanite that was ancestral to Phoenician and Hebrew. The Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions were found in a temple of Hathor (ħatħor), and appear to be votive texts.
A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing the phrase to Baalat. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l bclt. (Photo here)
Despite a century of study, researchers can agree on the decipherment of only a single phrase, cracked in 1916 by Alan Gardiner: לבעלת l bclt (to the Lady) [bacalat (Lady) being a title of Hathor and the feminine of the title Bacal (Lord) given to the Semitic god], although the word m’hb (loved) is frequently cited as a second word.
The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs. In the 1950s and 60s it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright's interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key. It was generally accepted that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic, that the script had a hieratic prototype and was ancestral to the Semitic alphabets, and that the script was itself acrophonic and alphabetic (more specifically, a consonantal alphabet or abjad). The word bacalat (Lady) lends credence to the identification of the language as Semitic. However, the lack of further progress in decipherment casts doubt over the other suppositions, and the identification of the hieratic prototypes remains speculative.
The Wadi el-Hol script
The Wadi el-Hol (wadi el-ħôl) inscriptions were also carved in stone, along an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos. Two inscriptions are known. The script is graphically very similar to the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, but is older and further south, in the heart of literate Egypt. The shapes and angles of the glyphs best match hieratic graffiti from 2000 BCE, during the First Interdynastic Period. Frank M. Cross of Harvard University believes the inscriptions are "clearly the oldest of alphabetic writing", and are similar enough to later Semitic writing to conclude that "this belongs to a single evolution of the alphabet."
Brian Colless believes that the Wadi el-Hol script is a proto-alphabet that retains some of the logographic nature of its hieratic provenance. For instance, he believes (following Albright) that one glyph, ancestral to our נ N, derives from an Egyptian glyph for snake (actually, that it had variant forms derived from several snake hieroglyphs). The name of the letter was therefore the Canaanite word for snake, naħaš. It could be used acrophonically for the phoneme /n/, but also logographically as the word naħaš (snake). It could also be used as a poly-consonantal rebus, for example placed with the letter ת T taw, as נת NT, to represent nħšt (copper).
There may have been more than one glyph for some of the consonants, either because they could represent the same letter name (as snake, viper, or other snake glyphs for N snake), or because they were homonyms or near homonyms in Canaanite (as fish and spine/support, both samk in Canaanite, for S). There appear to have been letters that were lost by the time of the earliest readable Levantine alphabets.
Traces of the 16 and 12 characters of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions. (Photos here and here.
Stefan and Samaher Wimmer's readings of the two inscriptions, with alternate readings by Colless in brackets, are, with disagreements in bold,
r ħ m cʔ h2 m p w h1 w m w q b r ← [read right to left]
[r x m pʔ h2θ g n h1n m n w b r]
l ʔ š p t w c h2 r t š m ← [read top-right to bottom-left]
[l ʔ š g t nc h2 r t š m]
H1 is a figure of celebration [Gardiner A28], whereas h2 is either that of a child [Gardiner A17] or of dancing [Gardiner A32]. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants.
Hieroglyphs representing celebration, a child, and dancing respectively.
Several scholars agree that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe (chief; cognate with rabbi); and that the אל ’l at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ’el "god".
Origin of the alphabet?
The Egyptian hieratic script was basically logographic, but used rebus and acrophony extensively. There was a complete set of uniliteral glyphs from at least 2700 BCE — that is, the hieroglyphic script contained an alphabetic subsystem within it. But while logographic systems such as Egyptian and Chinese are extremely time-consuming to learn, they are sometimes considered superior to alphabets when it comes to reading. For literate Egyptians, there was little advantage to whittling their script down to a pure alphabet. Purely uniliteral (alphabetic) writing was used mainly to transcribe foreign names.
However, from the 22nd to 20th centuries BCE, central rule broke down. The Darnells found contemporary references to an Egyptian named Bebi, General of the Asiatics. They speculate that,
In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these "Asiatics". Inventive scribes apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information.
In other words, it was a utilitarian invention for soldiers and merchants. The assumption is that they developed a Semitic script based on acrophony, where the first sound of the Semitic word for an Egyptian glyph became associated with that glyph. Just as the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc. changed names but retained their graphic forms as they passed from the Indians to the Arabs to the Europeans, so the names of the letters were translated as they passed from the Egyptians to the Semites. The name of the hieratic glyph for house changed from Egyptian pr to Canaanite bayt, and therefore the glyph came to stand for /b/ rather than /pr/. House and most of the other letters were not uniliteral glyphs in Egyptian: the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs. In fact, some of the letters, such as ה H, may have been ideographic determiners (taxograms) only, and thus had no sound value in Egyptian.
Egyptian prototypes
Only the Colless reconstruction is shown here. For the Albright identification of the Egyptian prototypes, see the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. A third interpretation can be found at the Phoenician alphabet article.
The alphabetical order of these scripts is unknown. They are conventionally presented in the ancient Levantine order because this corresponds to our own alphabet. However, the South Semitic order, h l ħ m q w š r t s k n x b ..., is also attested from the Late Bronze Age and may be just as old as the Levantine. (See the Ugaritic alphabet.) It is not known if the Egyptians had an alphabetic order, but at least one Egyptian dictionary started with h as the South Semitic order does. This is because the first word was ibis (the tutelary animal of Thoth (dħwty), the patron of writing), which started with an h in Egyptian, as reflected in its Greek form hībis.
Some of the distinctions listed here are lost or conflated in later Levantine alphabets. For instance, while Η continues the shape of the letter ħasir, its Greek name eta appears to derive from the closely related fricative xayt. Evidently the two letters had been confounded by the time of the Levantine alphabets. Similarly, šimš seems to have replaced θad, taking its place in the alphabet. Colless also reconstructs more than one letter for some phonemes, such as samek Ξ: The fish and the support/spine are alternative glyphs; they never appear together in the same inscription. In other cases there are significant graphic variants, as with šimš (sun), which is represented by a uræus that may not even have a sun disk; or naħaš (snake), which may be represented by several snake hieroglyphs in addition to the one shown here.
Note that all proposals for Egyptian prototypes of the alphabet remain controversial. For example, a Proto-Sinaitic glyph that resembles the hieroglyph djet (snake) is identified with the letter נ Ν here, and has been ever since Gardiner, because the name of the corresponding Ethiopic letter is naħaš (snake). However, Peter T. Daniels states, it seems very likely that the modern Ethiopic letter names date no further back than the sixteenth century C.E., and so are irrelevant to the investigation of Proto-Sinaitic.
