Middle Bronze Age alphabets

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Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age (2000

20th century BC

The 20th century BC is a century which lasted from the year 2000 BC to 1901 BC....
-1500 BCE), and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
s:

Proto-Sinaitic script is known from carved graffiti

Graffiti

Graffiti is the name for images or lettering scratched, scrawled, painted or marked in any manner on property. Graffiti is sometimes regarded as a form of art and other times regarded as unsightly damage or unwanted....
in Canaan

Canaan

Canaan is an ancient term for a region encompassing modern-day Israel and Lebanon, the Palestinian Territories, plus adjoining coastal lands and parts of Jordan, Syria and northeastern Egypt....
(Palestine

Palestine

Palestine is a name which has been widely used since Roman times to refer to the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is derived from a name used already much earlier for a narrower geographical region, mainly along the coastal region....
) and the Sinai peninsula

Sinai Peninsula

The Sinai Peninsula or Sinai is a triangular peninsula in Egypt. It lies between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, forming a land bridge between Africa and Southwest Asia....
, most famously from a turquoise

Turquoise

Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrate phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula copperaluminium648?4water....
-mining area of the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim

Serabit el-Khadim

Serabit el-Khadim is a locality in the south-west Sinai Peninsula where turquoise was mined extensively in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egyptians....
. 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

Hebrew language

Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
.

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Encyclopedia

The Middle Bronze Age alphabets are two similar undeciphered scripts, dated to be from the Middle Bronze Age (2000

20th century BC

The 20th century BC is a century which lasted from the year 2000 BC to 1901 BC....
-1500 BCE), and believed to be ancestral to nearly all modern alphabet

Alphabet

An alphabet is a standardized set of letter basic written symbols each of which roughly represents a phoneme, a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past....
s:

the Proto-Sinaitic script, discovered in Palestine
Palestine

Palestine is a name which has been widely used since Roman times to refer to the region between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. It is derived from a name used already much earlier for a narrower geographical region, mainly along the coastal region....
and Sinai in the winter of 1904-1905 by William Flinders Petrie, and dated to 1500 BCE, and
the Wadi el-Hol script, discovered in Middle Egypt
Middle Egypt

Middle Egypt is the section of land between lower Egypt and Upper Egypt, stretching from El-Aiyat in the north to Asyut in the south....
in 1999 by John and Deborah Darnell and dated to 1800 BCE.

The Proto-Sinaitic script

The Proto-Sinaitic script is known from carved graffiti

Graffiti

Canaan

Palestine

Sinai Peninsula

Turquoise

Serabit el-Khadim

Hebrew language

Hathor

In Egyptian mythology, Hathor was originally a personification of the Milky Way, which was seen as the milk that flowed from the udders of a heavenly cow....
, and appear to be votive texts.

Despite a century of study, researchers can agree on the decipherment of only a single phrase, cracked in 1916 by Alan Gardiner

Alan Gardiner

Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner was one of the premier United Kingdom Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century. Some of his most important publications include a 1959 book on his study of "The Royal Canon of Turin" and his seminal 1961 work Egypt of the Pharaohs, which covered all aspects of Egyptian chronology and history at the time...
: ????? (to the Lady) [ (Lady) being a title of Hathor and the feminine of the title Baal

Ba'al is a Northwest Semitic title and honorific meaning "master" or "lord" that is used for various gods who were patrons of cities in the Levant, cognate to East Semitic Bel ....
(Lord) given to the Semitic god], although the word (loved) is frequently cited as a second word.

The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic

Hieratic

Hieratic is a cursive writing system used in Pharaoh Ancient Egypt that developed alongside the Egyptian hieroglyphs system, to which it is intimately related....
script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyph

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Egyptian hieroglyphs was a formal writing system used by the ancient Egyptians that contained a combination of logographic and alphabetic elements....
s. In the 1950s and 60s it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright

William F. Albright

William Foxwell Albright was an United States archaeology, Bible, linguistics and expert on ceramics . From the early twentieth century until his death, he was the dean of biblical archaeologists and the universally acknowledged founder of the Biblical archaeology movement....
'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

Abjad

An abjad is a type of writing system in which each symbol stands for a consonant; the reader must supply the appropriate vowel. It is a term suggested by Peter T....
). The word (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 al-?awl) inscriptions were also carved in stone, along an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes

Thebes, Egypt

Thebes was a city in Ancient Egypt located about 800 km south of the Mediterranean, on the east bank of the river Nile . It was the capital of Waset, the fourth Upper Egyptian Nome ....
and Abydos

Abydos, Egypt

Abydos , one of the most ancient cities of Upper and Lower Egypt, is about 11 km west of the Nile at latitude 26? 10' N. The Egyptian name of both the eighth Nome of Upper Egypt and its capital city was Abdju, technically, 3bdw as in the hieroglyphs shown to the right, the hill of the symbol or reliquary, in which...
, in a wadi

Wadi

Wadi is the Arabic term traditionally referring to a valley; in some cases it may refer to a dry Stream bed that contains water only during times of heavy rain....
in the Qena bend of the Nile, at approx. . 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

First Intermediate Period of Egypt

The First Intermediate Period, often described as a ?dark period? in ancient Egyptian history, spanned approximately three hundred years after the end of the Old Kingdom from ca....
. 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 the Latin N, derives from Egyptian glyphs 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, na?aš. It could be used acrophonically

Acrophony

Acrophony is the naming of graphemes of an alphabetic writing system so that a letter's name begins with the letter itself. For example, Greek letter names are acrophonic: the names of the letters a, ?, ?, d, are spelled with the respective letters: ....
for the phoneme /n/, but also logographically

Logogram

A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonogram , which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantics....
as the word na?aš (snake). It could also be used as a poly-consonantal rebus

Rebus

A rebus is a kind of word play that uses pictures to represent words or parts of words. For example:The term rebus also refers to the use of a pictogram to represent a syllabic sound....
, for example placed with the letter ? T taw, as ?? (N?Š)T, to represent n?št (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 several letters that were lost by the time of the earliest readable Levantine alphabets.

Stefan and Samaher Wimmer's readings of the two inscriptions, with alternate readings by Colless in brackets, are, with disagreements in bold,

r ? m ^c h₂ m p w h₁ w m w q b r ? [read right to left]

[r x m p h₂ ? g n h₁ n m n w b r]

l š p t w ^c h₂ r t š m ? [read top-right to bottom-left]

[l š g t n ^c 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 (such as two hieroglyphs both used to write the Canaanite word hillul "jubilation") rather than different consonants.

Several scholars agree that the ?? rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe (chief; cognate with rabbi
Rabbi

Rabbi , in Judaism, means a religious ?teacher?, or more literally, ?my great one?, when addressing any master. The word rabbi derives from the Hebrew root word , rav, which in biblical Hebrew means ?great?, used in many senses, including the sense of a ?master? and apprentice, whence someone who is a distinguished ?teacher?....
); and that the ?? ’l at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ’el
El (god)

is the Northwest Semitic languages word for "deity" , cognate to Arabic and Akkadian .In the Canaanite religion, or Levantine religion as a whole, El or Il was the supreme god, the father of humankind and all creatures and the husband of the Goddess Asherah as attested in the tablets of Ugarit....
"god".

Origin of alphabetic writing

The Egyptian hieroglyphic script was logosyllabic, that is, consisted of signs that stand for words, sounds, or place a word in a category. There was a complete set of uniliteral glyphs from at least 2700 BCE — that is, the hieroglyphic script contained an alphabetic subsystem (not including vowels) within it. While logographic systems such as Egyptian and Old Sumerian are extremely time-consuming to learn, they are sometimes considered superior to alphabets when it comes to reading. For literate Egyptians

Egyptians

Egyptians is the name of the nationality and Mediterranean North African ethnic group native to Egypt.Egyptian identity is closely tied to the Geography of Egypt, dominated by the lower Nile Valley, the small strip of cultivable land stretching from the Cataracts of the Nile to the Mediterranean Sea and enclosed by desert both to the Easte...
, whose livelihoods depended on their mastery of writing, there was little advantage to whittling the script down to a simple alphabet. Purely uniliteral (alphabetic) writing was used mainly to transcribe foreign names.

However, from the 22^nd to 20^th centuries BCE, central rule broke down. John and Debby Darnell found contemporary hieratic references to an Egyptian named "Bebi, General of the Asiatics". They speculate that,

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 name of an Egyptian glyph came to be the value of that glyph. Just as the numerals 1, 2, 3, etc. changed names but retained their graphic forms as they passed from India to Arabia to Europe, so the names of the letters were translated as they passed from the Egyptians to the Semites. For example, the name of the hieratic glyph for house changed from Egyptian pr to Canaanite bayt, and thus the glyph came to stand for /b/. House and most of the other letters were not uniliteral glyphs in Egyptian: the Semitic alphabet is not derived from the existing Egyptian alphabet, but rather from the full set of hieratic hieroglyphs. In fact, some of the letters, such as ? H, may have been determinative

Determinative

A determinative, also known as a taxogram or semagram, is an ideogram used to mark semantics categories of words in logographic scripts....
s (semantic complements), and thus had no sound value in Egyptian.

However, the Semitic names are not attested until c. 200 BCE, and some scholars doubt that acrophony

Acrophony

Ignace Gelb

Ignace Jay Gelb was a Poland - United States ancient history and Assyriology who pioneered the scientific study of writing systems. Born in Tarnow, Austria-Hungary , he earned his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Rome La Sapienza in 1929, then went to the University of Chicago where he was a professor of Assyriology until his dea...
. Although Gelb only had access to Proto-Sinaitic, and the Wadi el-Hol record further supports the acrophonic model, the evidence either way is sparse.

Egyptian prototypes

Only the Colless reconstruction is shown here. For the Albright identification of the Egyptian prototypes, see the Proto-Canaanite alphabet

Proto-Canaanite alphabet

The Proto-Canaanite alphabet is a consonantal alphabet of twenty-two Acrophony glyphs, found in Levantine texts of the Late Bronze Age , by convention taken to last until a cut-off date of 1050 BC, after which it is called Phoenician alphabet....
. A third interpretation can be found at the Phoenician alphabet

Phoenician alphabet

The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....
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 ? 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

Ugaritic alphabet

The Ugaritic alphabet is a cuneiform abjad , used from around 1500 BCE for the Ugaritic language, an extinct Northwest Semitic languages discovered in Ugarit, Syria, in 1928....
.) 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
Ibis

The ibises are a group of long-legged wading birds in the family Threskiornithidae. They all have long down curved bills, and usually feed as a group, probing mud for food items, usually crustaceans....
(the tutelary animal of Thoth

Thoth

Thoth, , though variations are accepted , was considered one of the more important god of the Egyptian pantheon, often depicted with the head of an Sacred Ibis....
(d?wty), the patron of writing), which started with an h in Egyptian, as reflected in its Greek form hibis.

Some of the distinctions listed here are lost or conflated in later Levantine alphabets. For instance, while ? continues the shape of the letter ?asir, 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, šim seems to have replaced ?ad, taking its place in the alphabet. Colless also reconstructs more than one letter for some phonemes, such as samek ?: 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 have the sun disk shown here; or na?aš (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 ? ? here, and has been ever since Gardiner, because the name of the corresponding Ethiopic letter

Ge'ez alphabet

Ge'ez , also called Ethiopic, is an abugida script that was originally developed to write Ge'ez language, a Semitic languages. In communities that use it, such as the Amharic language and Tigrinya language, the script is called , which means "script" or "alphabet"....
is na?aš, which also happens to be Hebrew for "snake" (although in Ethiopic, it means "brass", not "snake"). However, Peter T. Daniels

Peter T. Daniels

Peter T. Daniels is a scholar of writing systems, specializing in Wikipedia:WikiProject_Writing_systems. He was co-editor of the book The World's Writing Systems , and he introduced the terms abjad and abugida as modern linguistic terms for categories of writing systemss....
claims it seems very likely that the modern Ethiopic letter names date no further back than the sixteenth century AD, and so are irrelevant to the investigation of Proto-Sinaitic.

Table

conventional name (meaning)	hieroglyph	Egyptian value	Semitic value	Phoenician Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is a continuation of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, by convention taken to originate around 1050 BC. It was used for the writing of Phoenician language, a Northern Semitic languages language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia....	Hebrew Hebrew alphabet The Hebrew alphabet consists of 22 letters used for writing the Hebrew language. Five of these letters have a different form when appearing as the last letter in a word....	Greek Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th century BC or early 8th century BCE....
’alp (ox)	F1				?	?
bayt (house)	O1		b		?	?
gaml (throw stick, boomerang)	T14		g		?	G
xayt (thread [skein])	V28		x	replaced by ?
dalt (door)	O31		d		?	?
hillul (jubilation)	A28		h		?	?
waw (hook)	–	–	w		?	?
ziqq (manacle)	–	–	z		?	?
?asir (court)	O6	–	h		?	?
tab (good)	F35		t		?	T
yad (arm/hand)	D36		y		?	?
kapp (palm [of hand]) kipp (palm branch)	D46 –	–	k		?	?
šimš (sun uræus Uraeus The Uraeus is the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian spitting Egyptian cobra , used as a symbol of sovereignty, Royal family, deity, and divine authority in ancient Egypt.... )	N6		š		?	S
lamd (crook/goad)	S39		l		?	?
mu (water)	N35		m		?	?
ðayp (eyebrow)	D13	–	ð	replaced by z
nahaš (snake)	I10		n		?	?
samk (support [vine tutor]) samk (fish)	R11 K1		s		?	?
^cayn (eye)	D4		c		?	?
pu (mouth)	D21		p		?	?
sirar (tied bag)	V33		s		?	?
qaw (cord [wound on stick])	V24		q		?	?
ra’iš (head)	D1		r		?	?
?ad (breast)	–	–	?	replaced by š
?inab? (grape?) (wine?)	–	–		–
taw (mark)	–	–	t		?	?

Literature

Albright, Wm. F. (1966) The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment
Colless, Brian E., "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Sinai", Abr-Nahrain 28 (1990).
Colless, Brian E., "The proto-alphabetic inscriptions of Canaan", Abr-Nahrain 29 (1991).
J. Darnell and C. Dobbs-Allsopp, et al., Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western Desert of Egypt, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2005.
Hamilton, Gordon J, The origins of the West Semitic alphabet in Egyptian scripts (2006)[follows Albright; critical review by Colless at Cryptcracker.blogspot.com]
Fellman, Bruce (2000) "The Birthplace of the ABCs." Yale Alumni Magazine, December 2000.

External links

[https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015436.html Ugaritic script] (Brian Colless - version 1)
[https://listhost.uchicago.edu/pipermail/ane/2004-November/015476.html Ugaritic script] (Brian Colless - version 2)

News articles

Middle Bronze Age alphabets

The Proto-Sinaitic script

The Wadi el-Hol script

Origin of alphabetic writing

Egyptian prototypes

Table

Literature

See also

External links