Credited to Egypt. The date and place are debated. Some scholars date the Sinai inscriptions to about 1850 BCE and others to about 1500 BCE; on the later dating, a few inscriptions from Canaan would be older. The two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile support an origin in Egypt in the 19th to 18th century BCE.
How it began
The script is known from about 30 to 40 inscriptions and fragments at Serabit el-Khadim, an ancient Egyptian turquoise mining site in west-central Sinai, and from two inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol in the desert of Middle Egypt. Egyptians moved their mining to Serabit during the 12th Dynasty. The frequent word "to Baalat", naming a Semitic goddess, indicates that Semitic speakers were present, probably as skilled workmen. One scholar, Orly Goldwasser, placed the invention at Serabit in the mid-19th century BCE, probably in the reign of Amenemhet III.
Before it existed
Writing in Egypt at the time used hieroglyphs, a system with hundreds of signs that mixed word signs, sound signs and classifiers and took scribes years to learn. The workers at Serabit were surrounded by Egyptian inscriptions at the temple of Hathor, the "Lady of the Turquoise", and the alphabetic signs borrow the look of objects familiar from that setting.
How it works
The script works on the acrophonic principle: a picture stands for the first sound of the word for the thing shown. An ox head gave the sign that became the letter aleph and later A. A sign for water became mem and M, a snake became nun and N, and a human head became resh and R. One Serabit inscription has 26 letters in which several of these objects are easy to recognize. Because each sign marks a single consonant, a few dozen signs were enough to write a language.
How it spread
Short inscriptions in the related Proto-Canaanite script, dated between the 17th and 15th centuries BCE, have been found in Canaan. According to the Biblical Archaeology Society, the script found at Serabit is the earliest known alphabetic script and the one from which all other alphabets derive, through later Canaanite and Phoenician forms.
What lasted
Flinders and Hilda Petrie found the first inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim in 1904 and 1905, and John and Deborah Darnell found the Wadi el-Hol pair in the 1990s. Scholars agree on the identity of most letters but not on how the texts should be read. The corpus remains the main evidence for the earliest stage of the alphabet.
