Proto-Sinaitic (also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite when found in

Canaan Canaan (; Phoenician: 𐤊𐤍𐤏𐤍 – ; he, כְּנַעַן – , in pausa – ; grc-bib, Χανααν – ;The current scholarly edition of the Greek Old Testament spells the word without any accents, cf. Septuaginta : id est Vetus T ...

, the North Semitic alphabet, or Early Alphabetic) is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the

Ancient South Arabian script The Ancient South Arabian script (Old South Arabian 𐩣𐩯𐩬𐩵 ''ms3nd''; modern ar, الْمُسْنَد ''musnad'') branched from the Proto-Sinaitic script in about the late 2nd millennium BCE. It was used for writing the Old Sout ...

and the

Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet (more specifically, an abjad) known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region. The name comes from the Phoenician civilization. The Phoenician al ...

, which led to many modern alphabets including the

Greek alphabet The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as ...

. According to common theory,

ites or

Hyksos Hyksos (; Egyptian '' ḥqꜣ(w)- ḫꜣswt'', Egyptological pronunciation: ''hekau khasut'', "ruler(s) of foreign lands") is a term which, in modern Egyptology, designates the kings of the Fifteenth Dynasty of Egypt (fl. c. 1650–1550 BC). T ...

who spoke a

Semitic language The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

repurposed Egyptian

hieroglyph A hieroglyph ( Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatoni ...

s to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at

Serabit el-Khadim Serabit el-Khadim ( ar, سرابيط الخادم ; also transliterated Serabit al-Khadim, Serabit el-Khadem) is a locality in the southwest Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, where turquoise was mined extensively in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egypt ...

in the

Sinai Peninsula The Sinai Peninsula, or simply Sinai (now usually ) (, , cop, Ⲥⲓⲛⲁ), is a peninsula in Egypt, and the only part of the country located in Asia. It is between the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Red Sea to the south, and is a ...

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a List of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country spanning the North Africa, northeast corner of Africa and Western Asia, southwest corner of Asia via a land bridg ...

, dating to the

Middle Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pr ...

(2100–1500 BC). The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. However, the discovery of the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River indicates that the script originated in Egypt. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the various Proto-Canaanite scripts during the Bronze Age is based on rather scant

epigraphic Epigraphy () is the study of inscriptions, or epigraphs, as writing; it is the science of identifying graphemes, clarifying their meanings, classifying their uses according to dates and cultural contexts, and drawing conclusions about the wr ...

evidence; it is only with the

Bronze Age collapse The Late Bronze Age collapse was a time of widespread societal collapse during the 12th century BC, between c. 1200 and 1150. The collapse affected a large area of the Eastern Mediterranean (North Africa and Southeast Europe) and the Near ...

and the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the Levant that Proto-Canaanite is clearly attested ( Byblos inscriptions 10th–8th century BC, Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription c. 10th century BC). The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by

Hilda Hilda is one of several female given names derived from the name ''Hild'', formed from Old Norse , meaning 'battle'. Hild, a Nordic-German Bellona, was a Valkyrie who conveyed fallen warriors to Valhalla. Warfare was often called Hild's Game. ...

and

Flinders Petrie Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie ( – ), commonly known as simply Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egyp ...

. To this may be added a number of short Proto-Canaanite inscriptions found in

and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, and more recently, the discovery in 1999 of the

Wadi el-Hol Wadi el-Hol is a valley on the Farshut Road, north-west of Luxor on the Qena Bend, situated on the west bank of the river Nile in Egypt. Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered ...

inscriptions, found in

Middle Egypt Middle Egypt () is the section of land between Lower Egypt (the Nile Delta) and Upper Egypt, stretching upstream from Asyut in the south to Memphis in the north. At the time, Ancient Egypt was divided into Lower and Upper Egypt, though Middle ...

John John is a common English name and surname: * John (given name) * John (surname) John may also refer to: New Testament Works * Gospel of John, a title often shortened to John * First Epistle of John, often shortened to 1 John * Secon ...

and

Deborah Darnell The Theban Desert Road Survey is an archaeological research project operated in conjunction with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture's Supreme Council for Antiquities that is being conducted in the Western Desert in Egypt that focuses on the ancien ...

. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC.

Discovery

In the winter of 1905,

Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie ( – ), commonly known as simply Flinders Petrie, was a British Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology and the preservation of artefacts. He held the first chair of Egypt ...

and his wife

Hilda Petrie Hilda Mary Isabel, Lady Petrie (née Urlin; 1871–1957), was an Irish-born British Egyptologist and wife of Sir Flinders Petrie,Margaret S. Drower, 'Petrie' Sir (William Matthew) Flinders (1853–1942)', Oxford Dictionary of national Biograph ...

(née Urlin) were conducting a series of archaeological excavations in the

. During a dig at

, an extremely lucrative

turquoise Turquoise is an opaque, blue-to-green mineral that is a hydrated phosphate of copper and aluminium, with the chemical formula . It is rare and valuable in finer grades and has been prized as a gemstone and ornamental stone for thousands of year ...

mine used between the Twelfth and

Thirteenth Dynasty In music or music theory, a thirteenth is the Musical note, note thirteen scale degrees from the root (chord), root of a chord (music), chord and also the interval (music), interval between the root and the thirteenth. The interval can be ...

and again between the Eighteenth and mid-

Twentieth Dynasty The Twentieth Dynasty of Egypt (notated Dynasty XX, alternatively 20th Dynasty or Dynasty 20) is the third and last dynasty of the Ancient Egyptian New Kingdom period, lasting from 1189 BC to 1077 BC. The 19th and 20th Dynasties furthermore togeth ...

, Petrie discovered a series of inscriptions at the site's massive invocative temple to

Hathor Hathor ( egy, ḥwt-ḥr, lit=House of Horus, grc, Ἁθώρ , cop, ϩⲁⲑⲱⲣ, Meroitic: ) was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion who played a wide variety of roles. As a sky deity, she was the mother or consort of the sky ...

, as well as some fragmentary inscriptions in the mines themselves. Petrie immediately recognized hieroglyphic characters in the inscriptions, but upon closer inspection realized the script was wholly

alphabetic An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

and not the combination of

logograms In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...

and syllabics as in Egyptian script proper. He thus assumed that the script showed a script that the turquoise miners had devised themselves, using linear signs that they had borrowed from hieroglyphics. He published his findings in London the following year. Ten years later, in 1916,

Alan Gardiner Sir Alan Henderson Gardiner, (29 March 1879 – 19 December 1963) was an English Egyptologist, linguist, philologist, and independent scholar. He is regarded as one of the premier Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century. Personal life G ...

, one of the premier

Egyptologists This is a partial list of Egyptologists. An Egyptologist is any archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specializes in Egyptology, the scientific study of Ancient Egypt and its antiquities. Demotists are Egyptologists who special ...

of the early and mid-20th century, published his own interpretation of Petrie's findings, arguing that the

glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...

s appeared to be early versions of the signs used for later

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

such as Phoenician, and was able to assign sound values and reconstructed names to some of the letters by assuming they represented what would later become the common Semitic

abjad An abjad (, ar, أبجد; also abgad) is a writing system in which only consonants are represented, leaving vowel sounds to be inferred by the reader. This contrasts with other alphabets, which provide graphemes for both consonants and vow ...

. One example was the character Proto-semiticB-01

, to which Gardiner assigned the ⟨b⟩ sound, on the grounds that it derived from the Egyptian glyph for 'house' EgyptianB-01

, and was very similar to the similarly-shaped Phoenician character, Phoenician beth

, which is called ''bet''. The name ''bet'' itself was commonly thought to derive from the Semitic word for ''house'', ''bayt'', providing another layer of support to his thesis. Using his hypothesis, Gardiner was able to affirm Petrie's hypothesis that the mystery inscriptions were of a religious nature, as his model allowed an often recurring word to be reconstructed as '' l bʿl t'', meaning "to Ba'alat" or more accurately, "to (the) Lady" – that is, the "lady"

. Likewise, this allowed another recurring word '' m ʿ hbʿlt'' to be translated as "Beloved of (the) Lady", a reading which became very acceptable after the

lemma Lemma may refer to: Language and linguistics * Lemma (morphology), the canonical, dictionary or citation form of a word * Lemma (psycholinguistics), a mental abstraction of a word about to be uttered Science and mathematics * Lemma (botany), ...

was found carved underneath a hieroglyphic inscription which read "Beloved of Hathor, Lady of Turquoise". Gardiner's hypothesis allowed researchers to connect the letters of the inscriptions to modern Semitic alphabets, and resulted in the inscriptions becoming much more readable, leading to the immediate acceptance of his hypothesis.

Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions

Serabit inscriptions

The Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved

graffiti Graffiti (plural; singular ''graffiti'' or ''graffito'', the latter rarely used except in archeology) is art that is written, painted or drawn on a wall or other surface, usually without permission and within public view. Graffiti ranges from s ...

and

votive A votive offering or votive deposit is one or more objects displayed or deposited, without the intention of recovery or use, in a sacred place for religious purposes. Such items are a feature of modern and ancient societies and are generally ...

texts from a mountain in the Sinai called

and its temple to the Egyptian goddess

('). The mountain contained

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 Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze A ...

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 Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...

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. An alternative view dates most of the inscriptions to the reign of Amenemhat III or his successor circa 1800 BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small human statues and on either side of a small stone

sphinx A sphinx ( , grc, σφίγξ , Boeotian: , plural sphinxes or sphinges) is a mythical creature with the head of a human, the body of a lion, and the wings of a falcon. In Greek tradition, the sphinx has the head of a woman, the haunches of ...

. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script. Khirbet Qeiyafa Ostracon

Inscriptions in Canaan

Only a few inscriptions have been found in Canaan itself, dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC. They are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name "Proto-Canaanite", although the term "Proto-Canaanite" is also applied to early Phoenician or Ancient Hebrew writings.

Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The

inscriptions ( ar, وادي الهول ''Wādī al-Hawl'' 'Ravine of Terror') were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They have been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 BC. They are in a

wadi Wadi ( ar, وَادِي, wādī), alternatively ''wād'' ( ar, وَاد), North African Arabic Oued, is the Arabic term traditionally referring to a valley. In some instances, it may refer to a wet (ephemeral) riverbed that contains water ...

in the Qena bend of the Nile, at approx. , among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions.. Rock inscriptions in the valley appear to show the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date. The inscriptions are graphically very similar to the Serabit inscriptions, but show a greater hieroglyphic influence, such as a glyph for a man that was apparently not read alphabetically: The first of these (''h₁'') is a figure of celebration ardiner A28 whereas the second (''h₂'') is either that of a child ardiner A17or of dancing ardiner 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.

A28 A17 A32

Hieroglyph A hieroglyph ( Greek for "sacred carvings") was a character of the ancient Egyptian writing system. Logographic scripts that are pictographic in form in a way reminiscent of ancient Egyptian are also sometimes called "hieroglyphs". In Neoplatoni ...

s representing, reading left to right, celebration, a child, and dancing. The first appears to be the prototype for ''h₁,'' while the latter two have been suggested as the prototype for ''h₂.''

Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in which some of the signs are treated as logograms (representing a whole word, not just a single consonant) or rebuses: : ertical''mšt r h ʿnt ygš ʾl'' : erticalExcellent banquet (''mšt r'' 'ʾš'' of the celebration (''h'' 'illul'' of ʿAnat (''ʿnt''). twill provide (''ygš'') ʾEl (''ʾl'')
: orizontal''rb wn mn h ngṯ h ʾ p mẖ r'' : orizontalplenty (''rb'') of wine (''wn'') ndvictuals (''mn'') for the celebration (''h'' 'illul''. We will sacrifice (''ngṯ'') to her (''h'') an ox (''ʾ'' 'lp'' and (''p'') a prime fatling (''mẖ r'' 'ʾš''')." Here, '' aleph'', whose glyph depicts the head of an ox, is a logogram used to represent the word "ox" (''*ʾalp''), '' he'', whose glyph depicts a man in celebration, is a logogram for the words "celebration" (''*hillul'') and "she/her" (''hiʾ‎''), and ''

resh Resh is the twentieth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Rēsh , Hebrew Rēsh , Aramaic Rēsh , Syriac Rēsh ܪ, and Arabic . Its sound value is one of a number of rhotic consonants: usually or , but also or in Hebrew and No ...

'', whose glyph depicts a man's head, is a logogram for the word "utmost/greatest" (''*raʾš''). This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, with celebrations for the goddess Hathor involving inebriation.https://repositorio.uca.edu.ar/bitstream/123456789/6753/1/proto-alphabetic-inscriptions-wadi-arabah.pdf Antiguo Oriente vol. 8 (2010) p. 91 Note: The 'y' appears in the Colless article p. 95, but not in the Wikimedia Commons trace image inscr1.jpg

Proto-Canaanite

Synonym for Proto-Sinaitic

Proto-Canaanite, also referred to as Proto-Canaan, Old Canaanite, or Canaanite, is the name given to the Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 16th century BC), when found in Canaan.

Synonym for Paleo-Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script

''Proto-Canaanite'' is also used when referring to the ancestor of the Phoenician or Paleo-Hebrew script, respectively, before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BC, with an undefined affinity to Proto-Sinaitic. While no extant inscription in the Phoenician alphabet is older than c. 1050 BC, Proto-Canaanite is used for the early alphabets as used during the 13th and 12th centuries BC in

Phoenicia Phoenicia () was an ancient thalassocratic civilization originating in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenician city-states extended and shrank throughout their histor ...

.John F. Healey, ''The Early Alphabet'' University of California Press, 1990, , p. 18. However, the Phoenician,

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

, and other Canaanite dialects were largely indistinguishable before the 11th century BC, and the writing system is essentially identical.. A possible example of Proto-Canaanite, the inscription on the Ophel pithos, was found in 2012 on a pottery storage jar during the excavations of the south wall of the Temple Mount by Israeli archaeologist

Eilat Mazar Eilat Mazar ( he, אילת מזר; 10 September 195625 May 2021) was an Israeli archaeologist. She specialized in Jerusalem and Phoenician archaeology. She was also a key person in Biblical archaeology noted for her discovery of the Large Ston ...

in Jerusalem. Inscribed on the pot are some big letters about an inch high, of which only five are complete, and traces of perhaps three additional letters written in Proto-Canaanite script.

History

The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages have been shown to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from

Akkadian cuneiform Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-s ...

Cretan hieroglyphs Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. They predate Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. , the ...

, the

Cypriot syllabary The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...

, and Anatolian hieroglyphs. Then the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by

who identified the word ' "Lady" occurring several times in inscriptions, and also attempted to decipher other words. In the 1950s and 1960s, William Albright published interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic,William F. Albright, ''The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and their Decipherment'' (1966) leading to the commonly accepted belief that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype. The Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, along with the contemporary parallels found in Canaan and Wadi el-Hol, are thus hypothesized to show an intermediate step between Egyptian hieratic and the

. According to the "alphabet theory", the early Semitic proto-alphabet reflected in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions would have given rise to both the

and the

Proto-Canaanite alphabet Proto-Canaanite is the name given to :(a) the Proto-Sinaitic script when found in Canaan, dating to about the 17th century BC and later. :(b) a hypothetical ancestor of the Phoenician script before some cut-off date, typically 1050 BCE, with an u ...

by the time of the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–1150 BC). Albright hypothesized that only the graphic form of the Proto-Sinaitic characters derive from Egyptian hieroglyphs, because they were given the sound value of the first consonant of the Semitic translation of the hieroglyph (many hieroglyphs had already been used acrophonically in Egyptian.) For example, the hieroglyph for ''pr'' "house" (a rectangle partially open along one side, "O1" in

Gardiner's sign list Gardiner's Sign List is a list of common Egyptian hieroglyphs compiled by Sir Alan Gardiner. It is considered a standard reference in the study of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Gardiner lists only the common forms of Egyptian hieroglyphs, but h ...

) was adopted to write Semitic , after the first consonant of ''baytu'', the Semitic word for "house". According to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. An alternative hypothesis was recently proposed by Brian Colless (2014), who believes that 18 of the 22 letters of the Phoenician alphabet have counterparts in the Byblos syllabary, and it seems that the proto-alphabet evolved as a simplification of the syllabary, moving from syllabic to consonantal writing, in the style of the Egyptian script (which did not normally indicate vowels); this goes against the Goldwasser hypothesis (2010) that the original alphabet was invented by miners in Sinai. A transitional stage between Proto-Canaanite and Old Phoenician (1000–800 BC) has been proposed by authors such as Werner Pichler as the origin of the Libyco-Berber script used among Ancient Libyans (i.e. Proto-Berbers) – citing common similarities to both Proto-Canaanite proper and its early North Arabian descendants.

Synopsis

Below is a table synoptically showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the proposed correspondences with Phoenician letters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Also shown are the sound values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters.Based on Simons (2011), * Figure Two: "Representative selection of proto-Sinaitic characters with comparison to Egyptian hieroglyphs" (p. 38), * Figure Three: "Chart of all early proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 39), * Figure Four: "Representative selection of later proto-Canaanite letters with comparison to early proto-Canaanite and proto-Sinaitic signs" (p. 40). See also: Goldwasser (2010), following Albright (1966), "Schematic Table of Proto-Sinaitic Characters"
fig. 1
. A comparison of glyphs from western ("Proto-Canaanite", Byblos) and southern scripts along with the reconstructed "Linear Ugaritic" (Lundin 1987) is found in Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz, ''Die Keilalphabete: die phönizisch-kanaanäischen und altarabischen Alphabete in Ugarit'', Ugarit-Verlag, 1988, p. 102, reprinted in Wilfred G. E. Watson, Nicolas Wyatt (eds.), ''Handbook of Ugaritic Studies'' (1999)
p. 86
See also Colless (2010)

For the Ancient South Arabian and Libyco-Berber scripts only the letters with Proto-Canaanite correspondences are shown. * The Other section shows the corresponding Greek alphabet, Modern Greek, Etruscan,

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

Glagolitic The Glagolitic script (, , ''glagolitsa'') is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed to have been created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica. He and his brother Saint Methodius were sent by the Byzan ...

Old Cyrillic The Early Cyrillic alphabet, also called classical Cyrillic or paleo-Cyrillic, is a writing system that was developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the late 9th century on the basis of the Greek alphabet for the Slavic people living ...

, and Cyrillic letters.

References

External links

Proto-Sinaitic - 18th-14th cent. B.C.
Mnamon Ancient writing systems in the Mediterranean
Escritura Proto-sinaítica (in Spanish)
Promotora Española de Lingüística (Proel). ;Wadi el-Hol
USC West Semitic Research Project site on Wadi el-Hol, with photos

BBC article on Wadi el-Hol from 1999 Nov
{{List of writing systems Proto-Sinaitic script, 19th-century BC establishments 1904 archaeological discoveries 2nd millennium BC in Egypt Abjad writing systems Bronze Age writing systems Canaanite languages Canaanite writing systems Middle Kingdom of Egypt Semitic writing systems Sinai Peninsula Undeciphered writing systems