Proto-Sinaitic: the alphabet born in the turquoise mines

In the south-western Sinai desert, at Serabit el-Khadim, the Egyptians of the Middle Kingdom mined turquoise and raised a temple dedicated to Hathor, the «lady of turquoise». Between 1904 and 1905 the British archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie found there, alongside hieroglyphic inscriptions, a small group of texts in unknown signs. They looked like simplified hieroglyphs, but there were too few of them to be so. Today they are counted among the oldest evidence of alphabetic writing.

The sphinx and the word Baalat

The key came in 1916 from the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner. Studying a small sandstone sphinx from the site, now in the British Museum, he noticed that one sequence of signs recurred several times. He suggested that it represented the consonants b, ayin, l and t and read it as Baalat, «the Lady», a Semitic title that could correspond to Hathor. On the same sphinx a hieroglyphic inscription names the goddess herself, which made the proposal very convincing.

Gardiner's reading did not make it possible to translate all the texts, which remain largely obscure, but it revealed the principle on which they rested. Their authors, probably Semitic-speaking workers or officials employed on Egyptian expeditions, had taken some Egyptian signs and used them not for their meaning but for the first sound of the corresponding word in their own language.

The acrophonic principle

This procedure is called acrophony. The ox head, alp in Semitic, represented the initial glottal stop; the plan of a house, bayt, the sound b; the waves of water, maym, the sound m; the eye, ayin, a guttural consonant; the head, rash, the sound r. With about twenty signs any word could be written, with no need to know the hundreds of signs of the Egyptian system.

This is where the names of the letters still in use have their roots. Aleph and alpha, bet and beta, mem and mu preserve the memory of those original images. Even the shape of some Latin letters, after many transformations, descends from these drawings: our letter A, turned upside down, still recalls the horns of an ox.

A disputed date

The chronology of the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions is still debated. Some scholars place them in the nineteenth or eighteenth century BC, during the Middle Kingdom, while others move them later, towards the sixteenth or fifteenth century BC. In the 1990s two short inscriptions discovered in the Wadi el-Hol, in Egypt's western desert, strengthened the idea of an early origin, linked to the Semitic-speaking communities present in Egypt.

Alongside Proto-Sinaitic writing stand other texts called Proto-Canaanite, found in Palestine and datable to various moments of the second millennium BC. Short and fragmentary, they show how the new principle spread slowly across the Levant, until it settled into a system of twenty-two letters which, around 1000 BC, we call the Phoenician alphabet.

It is striking that so decisive an invention was probably born on the margins of the great Egyptian civilisation, in a place of hard labour far from the capitals. From the temple of a desert goddess, through the hands of anonymous men, began the series of scripts that today allows billions of people to read and write.