Was the Alphabet Invented in the Sinai?

Fascinating article by Orly Goldwasser at Biblical Archaeology Review on the site of Serabit in the Sinai desert. Serabit was a collecting point for turquoise mined in the surrounding mountains, and during the New Kingdom the Egyptian pharaohs maintained a large post there, focused on an immense temple of Hathor. Around the temple are numerous inscriptions recording the presence of various priests, scribes, and other officials. Most are in hieroglyphs. From these inscriptions we learn, among other things, that most of the workers in the mines were Canaanites.

Some of the inscriptions are not in hieroglyphs. As long ago as 1905 , Hilda Petrie, the wife of famous archaeologist Sir Flinders Petrie, speculated that these other inscriptions were a primitive alphabet.

Goldwasser:

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 (A) reads:

“The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise.”

The text in the strange scrip (B), now identified as a Canaanite text, reads:

m-’-h-(b) B-‘-l-[t], “The beloved of Baalat.”

Each of the critical letters in the word Baalat is a picture—a house, an eye, an ox goad and a cross. . . . 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).

If Goldwasser is right, the alphabet was invented by Canaanite turquoise miners working for Egyptians, and taken home by them to Canaan, where the idea was adopted by the neighbors the Phoenicians. It is great article, well worth reading the whole thing. I especially liked this insight:

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.