Newly deciphered Egyptian symbols on a 3,400-year-old limestone ostracon from Luxor’s Tomb of Senneferi appears to be the first written evidence of the ABC letter order of the early Semitic alphabet, according to a University of British Columbia Egyptologist.
In his article, “A Double Abecedary? Halaham and ‘Abgad on the TT99 Ostracon,” Prof. Thomas Schneider concludes that a small (approximately 10 x 10 centimeters, or about 4 x 4 inches) double-sided limestone flake was used by Egyptian scribes as a mnemonic device to remember the letter orders of not one, but two forms of early Semitic alphabets.
On one side of the flake is Schneider’s recent discovery: the transliteration into cursive Egyptian writing of the sounds that signify the beginnings of today’s Hebrew alphabet (Aleph, Bet, Gimel). On the other, a contemporary, though now lesser-known letter order, called “Halaḥam,” which was deciphered in 2015, on the same limestone flake, by Leiden University’s Dr. Ben Haring.
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SHHHHHHHHHH some people can't handle the idea of OOA in Egypt. I mean c'moon, There were certainly no significant number Asiatics or "Hyksos." And surely, there wasn't a significant number of Egyptians descended from them. So how did the Asiatic DNA and now a lol..a Semetic alphabet get into Egypt? I'm sure it just came from the sky. It was... LOL.... planted there I'm sure. Prepare for another derailed thread crying about conspiracies.
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I am not sure what your point is. The article is claiming that Canaanites laborers in Egypt and Canaanites miners in Saudia Arabia developed this script from their interactions with Egyptians and Egyptian glyphs. Personally, I think the idea is ridiculous and improbable. It is just not the simplest explanation.
Who has time while they are working themselves to the bone to create scripts? The simplest answer is that "semetic" script was created by egyptians for common use among laborers and on worksites.
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The Egyptians were just fine with glyphs. It's more than likely that the alphabet was something both Egyptians and semites created interacting with one another. The Egyptians had been navigating without needing an alphabet. The semites were the ones in a foreign land and lacking in literacy.
Levanites were also ascending to power during this time period. They weren't just there as miners. As a matter of fact, Asiatics and their mixed offspring were reaching a variety of positions centuries before--including the Egyptian (Delta) nobility. While people would like to remove this as a Semetic achievement (or even a partial one) I don't see how it's likely that the illiterate Asiatic peoples who had the most to gain from developing the alphabet had nothing to do with it's creation.
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Tukuler
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Last I heard the Canaanitic aleph bet script was invented in the Sinai. Semitic slaves adapted Egyptian writing for use in the mines. Egyptians were not limited to glyphs. Hieratic characters were used more commonly afaik.
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From Zarahan:
MORE DATA FROM THE BOOK "LANGUAGE VISIBLE" - INSPIRATION FOR MODERN ALPHABET FLOWED FROM EGYPT
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"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took their cur from the Canaanite evidence. Your local library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around 1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors were looking at imported Egyptian scrolls and artwork...
By 1998, Darnell and others had reached a couple of dramatic conclusions. First, the two inscriptions are probably the oldest alphabetic writing yet discovered, certainly the oldest that can be dated confidently: They were carved in about 1800 B.C., give or take a century. More important, the inscriptions can be viewed as signposts that point directly back to the alphabet's invention. On the basis of the Wadi el-Hol evidence, that invention is now assigned to around 2000 B.C. in Egypt - about three centuries earlier (and in a different country) than previously thought. "Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era.: announced the front-page New York Times headline of a November 1999 piece reporting on the work.
The evidence is in the letter shapes, Darnell explains. Study has confirmed that every letter of the two inscriptions is copied from some preexisting symbol in Egyptian rock-writing and/or hieroglyphics. This is where the inventors and early users of the alphabet found their letter shapes.
Certain Wadi el-Hol letter shapes suggest a particular moment in time when that copying occurred. We know enough about Egyptian rock writing to track the evolution of its symbols, and several Wadi el-Hol letters clearly reflect Egyptian symbol forms of the early, Middle Kingdom, around 2000 B.C. Yet the Wadi el-Hol writing preserves letter shapes bequeathed from the alphabet's invention, around 2000 B.C."
"Who were the inventors? Darnell believes they may have been in the Egyptian army: Semitic mercenaries or similar, whom the Egyptians would have called Amu (Asiatics). These peoples were illiterate originally. But the army that they joined happened to have a vigorous writing method for themselves. Perhaps the inventors were junior officers among the Amu, individuals who had learned some standard Egyptian rock-writing and were able to work from there. Perhaps, Darnell theorizes, they got help from Egyptian army scribes, who sought to improve the foreigner’s organization with the gift of literacy.
As to who might have carved the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, same answer as above. Not the inventors themselves, of course, but their great-great-great-grandnephews, serving in Egypt’s camel corps. It was the army that did most of the writing along desert roads."
ENDQUOTE- from:
--David Sacks (2003). Language visible: unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z. Random House. pp. 34-37
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BAR article submitted by Zarahan [broke into a digestable series of posts]:
Biblical Archaeology Review- BAR 36:02, Mar/Apr 2010 How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs By Orly Goldwasser
To the Asiatics, as they were called, the lush Nile Delta, with its open marshlands rich with fish and fowl, was a veritable Garden of Eden. From earliest times, Canaanites and other Asiatics would come and settle here. Indeed, this is the background of the Biblical story of the famine in Canaan that led to Jacob’s descent into Egypt (Genesis 46:1–7).
By the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (a few years after 2000 B.C.E.), the pressure of immigrants on the eastern Delta was so strong that the Egyptian authorities built a series of forts at strategic points to “repel the Asiatics,” as the story of Sinuhe tells us.1
More than a century later, however, Egyptian policy toward the Asiatics changed. Instead of trying to prevent them from coming in, the Egyptians cultivated close relations with strong Canaanite city-states on the Mediterranean coast and allowed select Asiatic populations to settle in the eastern Delta. The last of the great pharaohs of the XIIth Dynasty, Amenemhet III (c. 1853–1808 B.C.E.) and Amenemhet IV (c. 1808–1799 B.C.E.), even established a new town for them.
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The XIIth Dynasty was followed by the much weaker XIIIth Dynasty. Thousands of immigrants from Syria, Lebanon and Canaan then flooded into the eastern Delta, creating the large Canaanite settlement that would become Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba), the capital of the famous Hyksos. The Hyksos were Canaanites who seized power from the Egyptian pharaohs and ruled all Egypt for more than a hundred years (c. 1638–1530 B.C.E.).
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But before this, at the end of the XIIth Dynasty during the reigns of Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV, Egypt was at the height of its power. A lively trade was conducted with Nubia to the south. Imports from the Levant entered Egypt by land and sea. Gold and precious stones were quarried in the eastern desert. And a large- scale enterprise was regularly conducted to search for turquoise in the high mountains of southern Sinai, at a site today called Serabit el-Khadem.
On this mountain deep in the Sinai desert, prey to merciless winds and scorching heat, are the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple to the goddess Hathor, “The Mistress of Turquoise.” Founded by Sesostris I, the second king of the XIIth Dynasty (c. 1953–1908 B.C.E.), the temple continued in existence, with some interruptions, until the end of the New Kingdom—for about 800 years.
Building on the work of Sesostris I, pharaohs Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV exploited Serabit’s rich turquoise mines. The precious blue stone was a much-sought-after luxury item in royal circles. No fewer than 28 expeditions to the Serabit turquoise mines are recorded during the reign of Amenemhet III alone.
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To ensure the blessing of the gods, the earlier temple was dramatically enlarged by Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV. Shrines and numerous commemorative stelae with hieroglyphic inscriptions were erected on the path leading to the temple, especially honoring Hathor, the goddess of turquoise.
Where did all the people who engraved these inscriptions come from? Most were probably from the Delta. The turquoise expeditions to Serabit brought together high officials, scribes, priests, architects, physicians, magicians, scorpion charmers, interpreters, caravan leaders, donkey drivers, miners, builders, soldiers and sailors.
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And many members of the expeditions left inscriptions in the temple precinct. Some contain only a name or a drawing. All sought the blessing of the gods for success in their dangerous enterprise—as well as for a safe journey home. These records also tell us of the hundreds of miners and stone workers active during the mining seasons, as well as those who were engaged in the building projects at the temple.
Were these miners and workmen Egyptian? Canaanite? Both?
The expedition lists at Serabit also contain the names of many “interpreters.” The presence of these dragomans is strong evidence that some language barrier must have existed. The hundreds of recorded donkeys that served as pack animals were probably driven by Asiatic caravan experts, who would be able to direct turquoise shipments back to Egypt. And no doubt Asiatic soldiers in Egyptian service escorted these caravans. The bottom line: There were surely many more Canaanites at Serabit than are listed as such in the hieroglyphic inscriptions at the site. One final note: Nowhere in the many inscriptions at the site is there a mention of slaves. Canaanites, yes; slaves, no.
It was here at Serabit, I believe, that the alphabet was invented—by Canaanites!
The invention of the alphabet ushered in what was probably the most profound media revolution in history. Earlier writing systems, like Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform with its curious wedge-shaped characters, each required a knowledge of hundreds of signs. To write or even to read a hieroglyphic or cuneiform text required familiarity with these signs and the complex rules that governed their use.
By contrast, an alphabetic writing system uses fewer than 30 signs, and people need only a few relatively simple reading rules that associate these signs with sounds.
This great invention had far-reaching social and cultural implications. With the alphabet, writing broke out of the “golden cage” of the professional scribal world. Writing was no longer their monopoly. When many more members of society could learn to read (and write), access to information and knowledge was no longer as limited as it had been. Alphabetic writing eventually gave many more people control over their lives and enabled larger segments of the population to take a more active role in the cultural and administrative affairs of their respective societies. But how was it done?
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Petrie studied these crude inscriptions and observed that they appeared to be a kind of imitation of hieroglyphic signs. Yet the repertoire of signs was very small. Petrie ingeniously identified these awkward signs as an alphabetic script, different from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system with its hundreds of signs. Yet Petrie was unable to read these strange inscriptions.
In 1916, some ten years later, Sir Alan Gardiner, the famous English Egyptologist, noticed a group of four signs that was frequently repeated in these unusual inscriptions. Gardiner correctly identified the repetitive group of signs as a series of four letters in an alphabetic script that represented a word in a Canaanite language: b-‘-l-t, vocalized as Baalat, “the Mistress.” Gardiner suggested that Baalat was the Canaanite appellation for Hathor, the goddess of the turquoise mines. Were these inscriptions carved by Canaanite workmen?
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An important key to the decipherment was a unique bilingual inscription. It is inscribed on a small sphinx from the temple and features a short inscription in what appears to be parallel texts in Egyptian and in the new script.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription on the sphinx reads:
“The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise.”
The text in the strange script, now identified as a Canaanite text, reads:
m-’-h-(b) B-‘-l-[t], “The beloved of Baalat.”
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Each of the critical letters in the word Baalat is a picture—a house, an eye, an ox goad and a cross.
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Gardiner correctly saw that each pictograph has a single acrophonic value: The picture stands not for the depicted word but only for its initial sound. Thus the pictograph bêt, “house,” drawn as the four walls of a dwelling represents only the initial consonant b. Baalat is written as shown in the drawing, in the blue highlighted areas (although the final tav is not legible in line A).
This ingenious principle is at the root of all of our alphabetic systems. Each sign in this script stands for one consonant in the language. (Vowels were not represented. The representation of vowels came later, and in different ways in different alphabetic systems.)
The alphabet was invented in this way by Canaanites at Serabit in the Middle Bronze Age, in the middle of the 19th century B.C.E., probably during the reign of Amenemhet III of the XIIth Dynasty.
We are reasonably confident about the place of the invention because almost all of the examples of the new script—which we may now identify by the name scholars call it, Proto-Sinaitic—come from this one site.2
We are also confident about the time of the invention because there are some very specific connections between the Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyphs in Sinai and the new script.3 There is one hieroglyph that appears to have a special use, with very few exceptions, only in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in the Sinai during the Middle Kingdom. We might call this the “Sinai Hieroglyph.” The sign looks like a striding man with bent, upraised arms. In the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in Sinai, this sign is a logogram; that is, it stands for an entire word, not just part of a word. It probably means something like “foreman.” This hieroglyph appears dozens of times in Egyptian Middle Kingdom inscriptions at Serabit. (Its phonetic reading in Egyptian in this specific use in Sinai, however, is unknown.) This hieroglyph is rare even in later New Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions at Serabit. And it hardly ever appears anywhere else in Egypt.4
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A letter in the new Proto-Sinaitic alphabet looks very much like this Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyph. The Proto-Sinaitic sign almost certainly stems directly from the Egyptian hieroglyph.
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The Canaanites at Serabit probably connected this pictogram, which they saw everywhere at the site, with a loud call or order emitted by an official when he raised his hands to assemble the people, a typical shout such as Hoy! (also known in Biblical Hebrew),5 which may be the origin of the letter h in the Proto-Sinaitic script.
If I am correct that the first alphabetic script was invented at Serabit el-Khadem in the reign of Amenemhet III (mid-19th century B.C.E.), I believe I can plausibly explain the process by which it was invented—not by sophisticated scribes, but by comparatively unlettered Asiatic workers.
The inventors at Serabit clearly used models of hieroglyphs taken from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom inscriptions around them. The Proto-Sinaitic pictograms were adapted from the hieroglyphic pictograms and appear mostly in the area of the turquoise mines and the roads leading to the mines.
It may seem strange, but I believe the inventors of the alphabet were illiterate—that is, they could not read Egyptian with its hundreds of hieroglyphic signs. Why do I think so? The letters in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very crude. They are not the same size. They are not written in a single direction: Some are written left to right, others right to left and some from top to bottom. This suggests that the writers had mastered neither Egyptian hieroglyphic nor any other complex, rule-governed script.
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For these illiterate Canaanites the pictorial meanings of the new letters were paramount. The iconic meaning of the hieroglyphs (what they actually pictured) served as an important mnemonic tool for the Canaanite adopters. The iconic meaning of the hieroglyphs was so important that even today, when the Hebrew letters have lost all iconic connection to the old pictorial models (we can’t recognize what the letters are supposed to picture), most letters are still named after the old pictures!
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Confirming their ignorance of the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Canaanite inventors of the alphabet would sometimes conflate two different hieroglyphic pictograms. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphic distinguishes two different kinds of snakes. One sign pictures a cobra generally; the other depicts a horned viper. These different pictograms are signs for different sounds in Egyptian, the first for the sound “DG” and for the second, “F.” These two snakes are never confused in Egyptian writing. The Canaanite inventors of the alphabet, however, failed to note the distinction and simply conflated the two snakes into a single Proto-Sinaitic sign that they used for the letter “N,” from their word for “snake,” probably naḥash.
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For a few letters, the Canaanites took as models not hieroglyphs, but important objects from their own world.6 For example, a drawing of the palm of the hand represents “K,” kaf in Canaanite; there is no pictogram of a palm of the hand in Egyptian hieroglyphic. Similarly with the Proto-Sinaitic sign depicting a composite bow; there is no comparable sign in Egyptian. In Proto-Sinaitic it stands for “SH”; the word for a composite bow in Canaanite was ŝa-na-nu-ma or the like.7 These examples represent independent creativity on the part of the Canaanite inventors of the alphabet and tend to confirm that they took the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs idiosyncratically and without regard to their function or value in Egyptian.
We might be even more specific about who the inventors of the alphabet were: We may even know their names. They apparently emerged from among the circle of one Khebeded. He is mentioned in several Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions at the site and is referred to as the “Brother of the Ruler of Retenu.” Retenu was the area between Gaza and the Baqaa in Lebanon. “Ruler of Retenu” was the title carried by rulers in this area of the Levant. When Asiatic rulers migrated to the eastern Delta, it seems that they kept the title “Ruler of Retenu.” It is clear that this “Khebeded, brother of the Ruler of Retenu” is a Canaanite. In one stela at Serabit (Stela 112), Khebeded pictures himself proudly riding on a donkey with an attendant both fore and aft. No Egyptian would picture himself riding on a donkey. On another stela at the site, Khebeded is pictured with the typical Canaanite “mushroom” hair dress. From the references in these stelae, it appears that Khebeded was involved with Egyptian expeditions to Serabit for more than a decade. He is clearly the highest-ranking Canaanite who left a hieroglyphic inscription in the Serabit temple. He was probably a leader of the Canaanite workforce.
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The quality of the hieroglyphs in an inscription that Khebeded added on a stela (he only added his inscription to an existing stela with much better hieroglyphs) in the temple is very poor. His inscription on Stela 92 would have been an embarrassment for an educated Egyptian scribe (see images later in the article).8 Hieroglyphic signs of different sizes are crammed next to each other, and vacant spaces appear at the end of the line. But the hieroglyphic pictograms in Stela 92 bear a remarkable resemblance to the signs in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Perhaps most striking is the pictogram for “house,” in the Egyptian hieroglyphic text of Stela 92. The resemblance to the house in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions representing bêt is unmistakable and is very different from the original Egyptian hieroglyph.
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The only Egyptian inscriptions where the square house is consistently used come from this area of Sinai and from the Middle Kingdom. And it appears unequivocally several times in Stela 92, which is probably a hieroglyphic Egyptian text made by Canaanites who were familiar with the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. They confused the picture of their own “house”-letter with the correct Egyptian hieroglyph!
The Proto-Sinaitic alphabet may well have been invented in the circle of the Canaanite Khebeded and his followers, many of whose names appear in his stela.
John Darnell, who discovered a two-line inscription in the Wadi el-Hôl (near Thebes) similar to the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions from Serabit (see sidebar “The Wadi el-Hôl Inscription: Earlier than Serabit?“), has suggested that the alphabet must have been invented in Egypt in a location with “a plurality of cultural contexts.”9 But isn’t “a plurality of contexts” an exact description of Serabit in the Middle Kingdom?
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It was indeed a world unto itself. The workers in the mines spent long days and nights in the isolated desert, secluded in their camps. The difficult, dangerous work and the long expeditions no doubt cost lives. The Canaanites watched the Egyptians praying, worshiping and writing to the gods. When a name was written, it remained with the god forever. When a blessing was sought, it remained with the god long after the moment of prayer.
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The isolation, fear, pressure and the sudden appreciation of “eternalizing the name” would naturally lead the Canaanites to try to write their own calls to their own gods (Baalat and El) in their own language.10
Was it the cognitively seductive nature of the hieroglyphic script, with its hundreds of little pictures, that made some Canaanite workers at Serabit feel that they could “almost read” and that gave them the feeling of “Yes, we can”?
As already noted, the vast majority of the inscriptions in this alphabet come from the Serabit area—more than 30 of them. Only one has come from elsewhere in Egypt (the two-line Wadi el-Hôl inscription). Some few, very short inscriptions (most only a couple of letters) have been found in Canaan dating to the end of the Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age (c. 1750–1200 B.C.E).
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The alphabet was not an instant success—at least based on the existing examples. One thing is certain: It did not travel fast. Only rarely did a Canaanite caravaneer or soldier bring the alphabet elsewhere. For a half millennium after its invention, this alphabet was rarely used—at least as far as it is reflected in the archaeological record.
As the Semitist Seth Sanders has observed: “In this earliest phase, the alphabet is a quick and dirty tool of foreign workers, scrawled in desolate places: the mines, the gush of terror. There is no high culture there ... The alphabet’s first documented use boils down to the most basic and touching form of communication—‘I was here.’”11
The Middle Kingdom in Egypt was followed by what is known as the Hyksos period (the XVth–XVIIth dynasties: 17th–16th centuries B.C.E.). In the Hyksos period, Canaanites ruled Egypt. (This period is sometimes cited as a model for Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, as described in Genesis 37–47.) As noted earlier, the Hyksos capital at Tell el-Daba has been intensively excavated for almost 40 years by Viennese archaeologist Manfred Bietak and his team. Not a single Proto-Sinaitic inscription has been found there. The Canaanite rulers of Avaris would never adopt such an undeveloped, “primitive,” low-class script for their own records. When they presented themselves in inscriptions (which are scarce in Avaris), it was naturally in prestigious Egyptian hieroglyphs.
As the alphabetic script wandered with Canaanite caravans, it piously retained its pictorial forms for hundreds of years. People learned the letters from one another orally. For this kind of use, the pictorial nature of the signs was very important. It was easy to learn the alphabet simply by memorizing the pictures. The first sound of the picture was the letter. To remember the alphabet, all one had to do was memorize the pictures. The rest followed from that: The “name” of the letter leads one to a picture, which helps to recreate the form of the letter: In the margin at right you can see the ox-shaped head of the letter aleph, the box-shaped house (bêt) for “B,” the hand-like kaf for “K,” wavy lines representing mayim (“water”) or “M,” the snake-like naḥash for “N,” the eye for ‘ayin and the head (rosh) for “R.”
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Picture Picture Picture During this early period (until the 13th–12th centuries) the script continued to be used in a very restricted way, mainly to record personal and divine names. No administration, institution or scribal school was involved. No official power-holders would have an interest in sustaining or developing this subversive fringe invention of the nomads. That is probably why individual re-creations of the signs differ so widely, even though they always preserved their fundamental iconicity.
During the 12th century B.C.E., the dominant civilizations that had cultivated the complex hieroglyphic and cuneiform scripts in Egypt and Mesopotamia fell out of power. New peoples—Israelites, Phoenicians, Moabites and Arameans—appeared in Canaan and the Levant. For these new people, emerging on the periphery of the old great cultures, it was only natural to write in the fringe-born system of writing that traveled in their own milieu. It suited their languages, their social needs and their newly established identities.
Sometime during this period of change, the new script must have become institutionalized, maybe even promulgated in schools. As a result, the script quickly underwent a process of linearization and abstraction.12 More experienced writers could relinquish the pictorial link between the letter and its name. At this stage, the “script of the caravans” lost one of its greater assets: its mnemonic power. From this moment on (12th–11th centuries B.C.E.), the user of the script would have to learn a list of arbitrary signs. It would be difficult if not impossible to find the pictures of a bull, a head or a snake in the script.
During the ninth century B.C.E., the alphabet became the official script of the entire Near East. With its adoption—first for Greek, and later for Latin—the alphabetic script, invented in the milieu of Canaanite miners in the remote Sinai desert, became the script of Western civilization.
The alphabet was invented only once. All alphabetic scripts derive from this original one, which we may call the Serabit alphabetic script.
The invention of the alphabet altered, in the long run, the lives of millions of people for millennia. It was not invented by learned scribes in schools, however. It was the child of a few great minds—perhaps one—who lived among the Canaanites working in the turquoise mines of Sinai. Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, made this invention possible. Through the invention of the alphabet, the long-lost ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs secretively live within our own script to this day.
I would like to thank Professors Joseph Naveh and Benjamin Sass, both of whom contributed greatly to my understanding of various aspects of ancient epigraphy treated in this article. Thanks also to Dan Elharrar of the Hebrew University for his invaluable technical assistance in preparing images for this article.
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The Wadi el-Hôl Inscription: Earlier than Serabit? Sidebar to: How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
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In 1993 Egyptologist John Darnell discovered in the Wadi el-Hôl near Luxor, Egypt, an alphabetic inscription similar to those at Serabit el-Khadem discussed in the accompanying article. Initially, it was thought that this inscription might be earlier than the Serabit inscriptions. If so, was the alphabet invented earlier than the Serabit inscriptions and somewhere other than Serabit, perhaps near the Wadi el-Hôl?
Although there was some early scholarly speculation that this indeed might be the case, this view has now been largely abandoned. The el-Hôl inscription is faintly carved into a limestone wall on the ancient road between Thebes and Abydos. The inscription could be read “(The) besieger עותי, ‘El’s Trickle.’”1 On the same rock face as this alphabetic inscription are some Egyptian cursive hieroglyphic inscriptions that can be dated paleographically. If the alphabetic inscription can be dated by the date of the Egyptian inscriptions, perhaps we can determine whether Serabit or el-Hôl is earlier. However questionable this dating procedure might be, this is all we have to go on. But even if the hieroglyphic inscriptions are used as a basis for dating the alphabetic inscription at el-Hôl, the latter would be slightly later than alphabetic inscriptions from Serabit. Almost all scholars, including John Darnell, now agree that the adjacent hieroglyphic inscriptions at el-Hôl date to the late Middle Kingdom (18th century B.C.E.). This would place the el-Hôl alphabetic inscription slightly later than the alphabetic inscriptions from Serabit.
The alphabetic inscription from el-Hôl represents an early and slightly deviating version from its origins at Serabit. The el-Hôl inscription exhibits features of influence from the Egyptian writing system, as well as the inscription’s Canaanite communicators. Here is an example of each:
In the vertical portion of the el-Hôl text, the “seated man” sign is used as an unpronounced determinative or classifier; this sign is not a letter, but rather tells the reader that the following word belongs to a particular category or classification [MAN]. This is a typical hieroglyphic characteristic. It is not used in any alphabetic writing system. In this respect, the el-Hôl inscription is not as “purely” alphabetic as the Serabit inscriptions.
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The pictorial style of the el-Hôl letters, however, indicates that the Serabit system was communicated (probably by a Canaanite) to the Wadi el-Hôl scribe.
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The letter resh, for example, (fourth letter from the top) was carved in the shape of a head with the typical Canaanite “mushroom” headdress and does not follow the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic head. Most probably the el-Hôl alphabetic inscription was brought here by some Canaanites who used the typical Canaanite head. After all, it is “their” script.—O.G.
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Cuneiform Alphabet at Ugarit Sidebar to: How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
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During the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.E., many of the royal scribes in the Canaanite coastal city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra in Syria) were trained in a unique form of the wedge-shaped cuneiform script. Unlike the normal cuneiform script, which includes hundreds of signs, the new Ugaritic script is made up of only a couple dozen.
After studying the script, scholars realized that Ugaritic is, in fact, an “alphabetic” cuneiform script that adapted the techniques of cuneiform writing (i.e., clay tablets, stylus and wedge-shaped signs) to an alphabetic system. Thirty cuneiform characters were used to write all sorts of documents, from letters to literary texts.
Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, the Ugaritic alphabet spread to Canaan. Single tablets in this special cuneiform script have been found at Canaanite Beth Shemesh, Taanach, Nahal Tabor and other locations.
In Canaan, during the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.E., two alphabetic writing systems lived side by side: the cuneiform Ugaritic alphabet, practiced by educated scribes in the urban centers, and the “script of the caravaneers” born in the mines of Serabit el-Khadem and practiced occasionally and in a limited form (mostly for writing names) by the non-urban Canaanite populations who inhabited the hill country and the urban fringes.
Does this mean that the alphabet was invented again, independently, by the learned scribes in Ugarit, several hundred years after the Canaanite miners of Serabit had already come up with the same idea?
The answer is no. The sophisticated scribes of Ugarit only domesticated the brilliant traveling innovation of the miners and caravaneers of Serabit that they somehow learned. The scribes of Ugarit “translated” what probably looked to them like weird iconic (pictorial) signs into their own “civilized” wedge-shaped script.
The proof that we are not dealing with an independent alphabetic invention is twofold. First, the order of the cuneiform alphabetic signs is essentially the same as the order of the iconic Proto-Canaanite alphabetic signs. Second, the names of the alphabetic cuneiform signs go back to the iconic meanings of the signs of the Proto-Canaanite script.1 In other words, the names of these wedge-shaped signs are very similar to the names of the Proto-Canaanite pictorial letters, although the Ugaritic cuneiform is not pictorial at all. All this is evidenced in abecedaries like this one found in Ugarit.
During the “translation” process, the wedge characters of the Ugaritic script renounced the iconic relationship between the name of the letter and its appearance. In this way, the mnemonic power of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet was completely lost to the Ugaritic scribes.
Ultimately, the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit disappeared from the historical stage, probably during the 12th century B.C.E. It ceased to exist a few decades after the city-based schools, scribes and institutions that promoted it vanished with the fall of the great Late Bronze Age civilizations.
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Canaanites are also called Phoenicians in later eras. Canaan has a long history with ancient Dynastic Egypt. It was a source of key raw materials such as timber in the Old Kingdom, a key ally with various Dynasties during the Old, Middle and New Kingdom and had in many ways become thoroughly Egyptianized by the late period. In the late Period, Phoenician/Canaanite navies were a key part of the late Dynastic eras defenses. And so of course there would have been a back and forth flow between AE and Canaanite populations. Note Canaan is just one of many states that the AE dealt with in the Levant.
Also note, the confusion about the Hyksos comes from identifying where they originated as there is no kingdom, culture or society in the ancient Levant known as "Hyksos". Canaanites, Ancient Syrians and so forth are totally well defined cultures and populations but are not considered the source of the "Hyskos" in AE.
The same issue exists as it relates to "Asiatics". The areas around Canaan proper and in the Levant were a mixture of different groups and over time various empires and cultures entered the area to achieve dominance. Generally they were identified as "Asiatics" but there were many different groups within that umbrella. So it becomes really hard to disentangle all these different layers of cultures and peoples to identify exactly which group is being referred to at any specific time in the past. For example, even those looking at connection to early Israel from Dynastic Egypt consider the early Hebrews to be lumped together with "Asiatics".
And of course the evolution of Canaanite scripts into Phoenician writing is nothing new. The issue however is that the Phoenician culture itself is largely derived from its long history with the Dynastic state of Egypt. That is why so many Phoenician artifacts are heavily influence by AE art and culture.
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Archaeological attestation of the name Canaan in Ancient Near Eastern sources relates almost exclusively to the period in which the region operated as a colony of the New Kingdom of Egypt (16th–11th centuries BC), with usage of the name almost disappearing following the Late Bronze Age collapse (c. 1206–1150 BC).[27] The references suggest that during this period the term was familiar to the region's neighbors on all sides, although scholars have disputed to what extent such references provide a coherent description of its location and boundaries, and regarding whether the inhabitants used the term to describe themselves.[28]
16 references are known in Egyptian sources, from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt onwards.[21]
Amenhotep II inscriptions: Canaanites are included in a list of prisoners of war Three topographical lists Papyrus Anastasi I 27,1" refers to the route from Sile to Gaza "the [foreign countries] of the end of the land of Canaan" Merneptah Stele Papyrus Anastasi IIIA 5–6 and Papyrus Anastasi IV 16,4 refer to "Canaanite slaves from Hurru" Papyrus Harris[29] After the collapse of the Levant under the so-called "Peoples of the Sea" Ramesses III (c. 1194 BC) is said to have built a temple to the god Amen to receive tribute from the southern Levant. This was described as being built in Pa-Canaan, a geographical reference whose meaning is disputed, with suggestions that it may refer to the city of Gaza or to the entire Egyptian-occupied territory in the south west corner of the Near East
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