page_title: Proto-Sinaitic script
section_title: Serabit inscriptions
hierarchical_section_title: Proto-Sinaitic script / Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions / Serabit inscriptions
caption_attribution_description: English: A rendition of The Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon by Michael Netzer for illustration purposes, based on photographs of the potsherd by the Khirbet Qeiyafa project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, imaging illuminations of text and interpretations of faded script areas.
context_page_description: Proto-Sinaitic, also referred to as Sinaitic, and Proto-Canaanite, or Early Alphabetic, is a Middle Bronze Age script attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing, and the common ancestor of the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet. According to common theory, it was developed by Canaanites, who spoke a Semitic language, by repurposing Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  Computational linguistics has been used to show potential degrees of similarity of symbols used in several scripts used in the Mediterranean basin and beyond, including Cretan scripts. According to the method used, Phoenician, the Ancient Greek alphabet, and the South Arabic script were shown to be closely related, while the other scripts examined were more similar to the Cretan scripts. The proto-Sinaitic script was not examined, however.
  The earliest proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC.
  The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a late date, around 1550 BC.
context_section_description: The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor (ḥwt-ḥr). The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years. Many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites (i.e. speakers of an early form of Northwest Semitic ancestral to the Canaanite languages of the Late Bronze Age) who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta.
  Most of the forty or so inscriptions have been found among much more numerous hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions, scratched on rocks near and in the turquoise mines and along the roads leading to the temple.
  The date of the inscriptions is mostly placed in the 17th or 16th century BC.
  Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script.
  In 1916, Alan Gardiner, using sound values derived from the alphabet hypothesis, translated a collection of signs as לבעלת lbʿlt (to the Lady)
caption: Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon (Iron Age I–II transition)[17]
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