Category Archives: Ancient Writing

Flying machines in ancient Egypt?

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Writing, Combating the Fringe

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Many people are convinced that the ancient Egyptians were an extremely advanced civilization possessing all sorts of technology that would not be seen again until modern times. Imagined technologies range from remarkably sophisticated machinery to nuclear capabilities. I have no problem whatsoever conceding that the ancient Egyptians were an advanced civilization, but the proper context must be observed. What exactly is meant by “advanced”? To be sure the Egyptians were masterful builders, engineers, and artisans, but all this means is that they were advanced for a mostly Bronze Age people. Facts need to be separated from whimsical fiction.

The image above is notorious for just this thing. You’ll see it all over the internet on half-baked websites; very few authors of websites have bothered to analyze it properly. You can’t help notice that at the right end of the image is a collection of what seems to be flying machines: a helicopter, jet, flying saucer. I concede the unusual coincidence is there, but that’s all it is: a coincidence. Here’s a closer look:

What’s actually going on here? First, when encountering such a thing, one must approach the analysis of it with logic and reason. Where does it appear? What’s its context? What other explanations are there? A common failing of the fringe is to rush to judgement, accept coincidences at face value, and abandon any further attempt at evaluation. “Yes, that thing looks like a helicopter, so it has to be a helicopter!” Well, no, of course it doesn’t. Let’s dig deeper. Below is a wider shot of the actual context for the image:

The image is part of the decoration plan of an architrave, an architectural beam resting atop columns. It can be found in the temple built by Seti I in honor of the god Osiris, ruler of the underworld. This temple is wonderfully preserved and stands in Abydos, one of the most ancient necropoli of pharaonic Egypt and the primary cult center for the veneration of Osiris. Here is the facade of the temple as it stands today:

A true architectural masterpiece. The plan of the temple shows that it is quite large, and is indeed one of the largest temples in the Abydos necropolis. It was commissioned by Seti I (1296-1279 BCE), second king of Dynasty 19 and one of the most powerful monarchs of the New Kingdom, the Egyptian period of empire. He died before the Abydos temple was finished, so it was completed by his son and successor, Ramesses II (1279-1212 BCE). That Ramesses II stepped in to finish his father’s temple is significant to the nature of the odd image which is the subject of this article, so we shall return to that in a while.

A king’s most important monument was his tomb. Seti I was buried in the Valley of the Kings in the tomb designated KV17 (also known as “Belzoni’s tomb” in honor of its discover, the charismatic Giovanni Belzoni). Of next importance, one might argue, was the king’s mortuary temple. This is where his soul would be venerated and serviced in perpetuity. As with almost all of the other many New Kingdom pharaohs interred in the Valley of the Kings, the mortuary temple of Seti I was located to the east of the valley, on the other side of the ridge and near the cultivation bordering the River Nile. Beyond that, a king might commission any number of monuments, depending on his longevity, the stability and wealth of the kingdom when he happened to be on the throne, and his overall status. The Abydos temple was one of these ancillary temples of Seti I, and a very important one for his own ideology and status.

The Abydos temple honored numerous deities, including Isis, Horus, Set, Amun-Re, Re-Horakhty, and Ptah. But the deity who received the focus of veneration was the great god Osiris, for while in life the king was regarded as a deity like Horus or Amun-Re, in death he was recognized as none other than Osiris. The formal name for the temple was “Menmaatre Happy in Abydos” (Menmaatre was Seti’s throne name), although it was also called “The conclave of deities which resides in Seti’s temple” in honor of the above-named deities (O’Connor 2009: 45).

The beautiful decoration plan of the Abydos temple makes its overriding purpose quite clear: it was meant to present Seti I in the guise of Seti-as-Osiris. The temple complemented Seti’s tomb and mortuary temple at Thebes in the further assurance that he would not only reach the afterlife but would become one with Osiris, forever (ibid: 43).

So that’s the background for the temple of Seti I at Abydos, as well as the proper context for the odd image that seems to show flying machines. As I mentioned earlier, Seti’s son and successor, Ramesses II, finished the temple where Seti I himself had been unable to. The sections completed by Ramesses were in particular the outer pylons and courts as well as the first hypostyle hall. By all appearances, Ramesses II was in a hurry to finish the temple; in fact, numerous doorways were filled in and closed off, indicating an abbreviation of the original temple plan. And significantly, the portions finished by Ramesses II were only hurriedly decorated (Wilkinson 2000: 146). The architrave in question belongs in one of the areas finished off by Ramesses II.

The architrave itself is a good example of a palimpsest, which is a piece of writing material on which later writing has been superimposed. This was commonly done in pharaonic times for reasons of cost or expediency, the latter of which was more the case for Ramesses II. This king reigned for 67 years and was an enthusiastic builder, but archaeologists like to call Ramesses “the Chiseler” due to his penchant for helping himself to other, older monuments. The fact that the Abydos temple belonged to his father is immaterial: as long as Ramesses II was taking the time to finish it, he was going to leave his presence there.

Below is a color-coded image showing how glyphs were superimposed on the architrave when Ramesses II commissioned its reinscription (credit):

Also at play is erosion, which has obliterated portions of the original inscription, so together with the over-writing, that part commissioned by Seti I is very difficult to read and is not fully translatable. But along with the rest of the architrave the portion over-written by Ramesses is simple enough to translate, and it’s a fairly ordinary royal titulary. It begins Nbty mk kmt waf xAswt…, meaning “The two mistress, he who protects Egypt and repels the foreign lands…” To the left of that are the standard epithets “He of the Sedge and  Bee, Lord of the Two Lands,” followed by the cartouche containing the throne name of Ramesses II, Usermaatre Setepen-re, which over-writes the original name of Seti I (see the image at the top of the article).

This is actual explanation for the “flying machines” of the Abydos temple. There are no flying machines, of course. They are merely the eroded glyphs of a palimpsest. Anyone familiar with the workings of hieroglyphs understands that they represent a fully developed written script guided by grammar and syntax, just like any written language, so it would be illogical in the first place to suppose that the Egyptians were tossing random images of flying machines onto this architrave. The context would not make sense. Nor would such images have anything to do with the purpose of the temple itself, in its intent to unite the deceased Seti I with the great god Osiris.

That is, unless Seti-as-Osiris was hoping to bop around the afterlife in helicopters, jets, and flying saucers. I think not.

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O’Connor, David. Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs the the Cult of Osiris. 2009.

Wilkinson, Richard H. The Complete Temples of Ancient Egypt. 2000.

An excursus on the Egyptian word nTr

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Writing, Combating the Fringe

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As someone who studies and researches ancient Egypt from a very conservative and traditional perspective, I’ve witnessed a lot of misrepresentation and speculation attributed to this long-ago culture. A great many people have an innate affection for the civilization of ancient Egypt: the scholars and academics who research it professionally, enthusiasts and amateur historians such as I, and those who are drawn to it for mystical and New Age reasons. Along the way the civilization of ancient Egypt is frequently misrepresented among the general public, whether this be from a simple lack of familiarity with the civilization or from alternative historians or fringe adherents striving to serve a personal agenda.

One such example is the ancient Egyptian word “netjer,” sometimes also spelled “netcher” and, somewhat astray, “neter.” It is transliterated as nTr, where the “T” represents a prepalatal stop usually rendered in Western speech as a “ch” sound. In their hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic scripts the Egyptians did not employ symbols representing vowels, so the most we can reconstruct from this ancient word are the consonants transliterated nTr. That is, as with so many words from the ancient Egyptian vocabulary, absent the vowels we cannot know for sure how nTr sounded as spoken in pharaonic times; hence “netjer.”

There is essentially no reason to doubt our understanding of nTr, however. The use of this word is amply attested in the historical record all the way back into the late-prehistory of the Nile Valley. But before we break down what this word meant to the ancient Egyptians, let’s eliminate a couple of examples of what nTr did not mean. It is not the origin of our word “nature,” for instance. Our word “nature” and its meaning of the collective world of plants, landscapes, animal, and people ultimately derives through Old French from the Latin nasci (link). In point of fact the Egyptians do not appear to have had a word that would equate to our word “nature.” My own feeling on this is–as with the absence of a name for their religion in the way we use terms like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism today–the natural world was an innate and intimate part of every-day life and was not viewed as something separate.

Also sometimes suggested is that the word “natron” comes from nTr. This has been argued for ages in academic circles but no convincing linguistic evidence has ever been posited to corroborate the argument (Hornung 1971: 41). There is an Egyptian word ntryt that exists in one fragmentary source that has been posited as “natron,” but even here the evidence is not compelling (Faulkner 1962: 143).

The word nTr is usually translated as “god” or, as an adjective, “divine.” Based on how the Egyptians themselves used the word, this translation is sound. In Greek the equivalent word is theos, and in late bilingual inscriptions where nTr and theos appear more or less side by side, it is clear that “god” is the meaning (Dunard & Zivie-Coche 2004: 8). Going in the other direction, all the way back to the dawn of state formation in Egypt (c. 3100 BCE), the meaning seems to have started in the same way. The ancient word nTr survived through pharaonic history and in the worship of Coptic Christianity became the word noute for God (ibid).

There are numerous ways the word was written in hieroglyphs when pertaining to gods, goddesses, or other divine concepts, and a number of different semantic determinatives developed through pharaonic history to help to clarify meanings; the most common determinative was, however, the pole and banner, which resembles a flag:

From their own iconography, the Egyptians showed us that such a standard was typically presented in pairs outside the entrances to temples. This was the case as well in prehistory (Wilkinson 2003: 27), such as at important ritual sites like Hierokonpolis (ancient Nekhen). From the start the symbol was intimately associated with the divine and with ritual. Drawing from the above diagram, the most common form of the pole and banner through pharaonic history was the example at left (a); the middle example ( b ) appears in iconography in the earliest dynasties, and early scholars originally mistook it for an axe (Hornung 1971: 34); the example at far right ( c ) is how the symbol appears in iconography in late prehistory.

That this symbol came to represent the word “god” or “divine” must have been a natural progression for the Egyptians; examine the ritual slate palettes of late prehistory and the Early Dynastic Period, and you will see how standards and banners stood as important iconography from the beginning. The term nTr in the singular generally meant “god,” as in a singular male deity; it was abundantly used in this sense and often without reference to a specific god. This should not be taken to mean the Egyptians believed in the One God as in the Judeo-Christian sense, a misconception under which many early scholars labored (given their classical training in biblical studies). In his important book Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (1971) the eminent Egyptologist Erik Hornung laid this idea to rest definitively. Polytheism is the general consensus today, and it has been noted how the flag could be used to denote “deity” in a generic sense (Wilkinson 2003: 27). The feminine marker was used to indicate a goddess (nTrt), and the plural (nTrw) could be indicated in a number of ways: three flags; a single flag with three vertical strokes; and, in late examples, three flags interspersed with three cobras (Wilson 1993: 85-87), the cobra itself representing divinity and/or divine kingship.

Facets of nTr are evident in the mortal world of the ancient Egyptians. It is an exaggeration to suggest that all Egyptian kings were regarded as gods, but these kings were certainly viewed as someone much closer to the gods than ordinary people were. The king’s status as semi-divine is reflected in one of his titles, nTr nfr, meaning “Perfect God” or “Beautiful God.” The dead were seen as somewhat divine themselves, having gone on to live forever in the land of the gods. The Egyptian word for “incense” was snTr, which literally means “to make deified, divine” (Dunard & Zivie-Coche 2004: 12).

The Egyptian nTr seems also to have been intimately associated with the dead, as I intimated above. Until recent times flagpoles were commonly set up outside tombs in North Africa and Sudan, reflecting a tradition seen in pharaonic Egypt going back into prehistory; some have argued that nTr may have originally referred to the dead (Hornung 1971: 37, 42). The etymology and origin of the word nTr remains unknown, despite decades of attempts by linguists to try to identify cognates and other connections to Afro-Semitic languages, but its meaning is not a mystery. The Egyptians themselves left us an ample record of the word to examine.

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Dunard, Francoise & Christine Zivie-Coche. Gods and Men in Egypt: 3000 BCE to 395 CE. 2004.

Faulkner, Raymond O. A Concise Dictionary of Middle Egyptian. 1962.

Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: the One and the Many. 1971.

Wilkinson, Richard. Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt. 2003.

Wilson, Hilary. Understanding Hieroglyphs: A Complete Introductory Guide. 1993.

Myth of the Egyptian “Anu People”

10 Friday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Writing, Combating the Fringe

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Over the years on the internet I’ve encountered the subject of an ancient Egyptian glazed plaque supposedly mentioning the “Anu People.” You will see this plaque featured on some web pages, including this one, and usually in historically revisionist form. It is particularly popular among the afrocentric set of historical revisionists. These folks are of proud African descent and in their zeal they try to present ancient Egypt as a homogeneous, unwavering race of black Africans. In the other extreme are eurocentrists who try to paint the founders of the great civilization of ancient Egypt as European in origin.

Both are wrong. Professional research and scientific inquiry have demonstrated to us that, not surprisingly, the original population of the Nile Valley was a lot more complex than that. It is extremely rare in the analysis of ancient history for us to find a topic so black and white, so to speak. Ancient history was not produced by a cookie-cutter pattern. It is our own failing that many of us bring modern racial baggage to historical debates, which is something that would be certain to confuse an ancient person. Taking ancient Egypt as an example, there is really nothing in the historical record of the ancient Nile Valley that would lead us to suspect the Egyptians thought in rigid racial terms. Indeed, ancient Egyptians were like so many other neighboring civilizations: as long as you belonged to the group, you were fine; if you belonged to another group, you were inherently inferior. Xenophobia was the rule, not racism. Skin color was not necessarily a factor.

More on that at the end of this article, but suffice it to say the ancient Egyptian glazed plaque in question has entered this sphere of racial debate. It appears in Flinders Petrie’s 1939 publication The Making of Egypt, wherein Petrie produced a badly mangled translation of the few glyphs appearing on the plaque. Here is how it is typically presented on the internet:

Recently there was an exhibition called “Visible Language” at the Oriental Institute Museum, in Chicago. This plaque is in the collection of the O.I. (OIM E7911) and was one of the artifacts on display in the exhibition. As a docent, when I gaze at this relic what I appreciate is its great antiquity–coming as it does from the very dawn of the Egyptian kingdom. Unfortunately I am also reminded of how it’s treated on the internet. A person’s skin color is irrelevant to me, but what rankles me is when a bit of history, even this small and unassuming glazed plaque, is twisted to suit a modern socio-political agenda.

Now, here is a color-coded photo of the plaque with its glyphs offset at right. The hieroglyphs are faint to see on the plaque itself, so I thought representing them in line-art would be more helpful for my purpose:

The above translation from the web page is wrong on all counts, although the name of the individual in the figure standing at left comes close. His name (shaded in red) is transliterated as tri-nTr. It can be rendered as Terinetjer (as one example) and can be translated as “One who worships the gods.” This is his name, not a title. The translation of the glyphs I’ve shaded green are still the subject of dispute but the current transliteration is nxn.w (MacArthur 2010: 136), which can be rendered as Nekhenw. It is believed that this is the name of an estate of which Terinetjer may have been in charge (ibid); more on that presently.

The translation from the web page breaks the next set of glyphs into two lines: “of the god Seth / Net Annu-u: ‘of the Cities of the Annu People’s.'” This is incorrect. In my own image this is the area I’ve color-coded blue, and it’s simply a cadrat or square of glyphs all of which belong together when read. The correct translation is Menhet (transliterated mnH[.t]), and is the name of a town. It’s location is not known today but it was probably the nearest settlement of size to the estate called nxn.w (Nekhenw).

The word “Anu” or “Aunu” or other variations does not appear anywhere on this plaque. The web page to which I’ve been referring (see link in opening paragraph) quotes Petrie from his The Making of Egypt:

The Aunu People. Besides these types, belonging to the north and east, There [sic] is the aboriginal race of the Anu, or Aunu, people (written with three pillars), who became a part of the historic inhabitants. The subject ramifies too doubtfully if we include all single-pillar names, but looking for the Aunu, written with the three pillars, we find that they occupied Southern Egypt and Nubia, and the name is also applied in Sinai and Libya (Petrie 1939: 68).

This information about the Anu and the pillars is incorrect and is not linguistically supported in the hieroglyphic script in this instance. It must be understood that in this early time the understanding of hieroglyphs was leaps and bound behind what we know today; moreover, Petrie himself was the first to admit his own acumen with hieroglyphs was quite limited. He never delved into comprehending the script as he did with other things historical, and his achievements as the “founder of Egyptology” lay in other matters altogether, particularly in stratigraphy and other dating methods and archaeological techniques.

Perhaps some of you are wondering where I’m going with this. I opened with a caution against revisionist tendencies like afrocentrism and eurocentrism, and Terinetjer’s plaque has fallen into this sphere. For one thing, afrocentric websites point at the negroid appearance of Terinetjer, and they turn to Petrie’s own descriptions in The Making of Egypt (in which Petrie notes physical characteristics of Terinetjer together with human remains he had excavated at Tarkhan [ibid]). Terinetjer may or may not appear as what we might think of as a black African. As any well-trained student of ancient Egyptian art history can tell you, deducing racial types from pharaonic art is often fruitless (albeit not always). The way Terinetjer appears on the plaque may be nothing more than a stylistic preference or a lack of skill, for that matter.

The point is, when one understands an artifact such as Terinetjer’s, one knows that depicting the race of the individual was irrelevant. Preserving that individual’s name and titles is what mattered to the ancient mind. This is why Terinetjer is presented with the probable name of an estate he served, nearest the town where it was located. The plaque was found in a funerary context in Abydos, one of the most ancient cemeteries of Egypt and the first royal cemetery. It was recovered in one of Petrie’s excavations there. The web page mentions that the glazed plaque is predynastic, but it is not. It is dated to Dynasty 1 (MacArthur 2010: 136). Egypt had become a kingdom, and Terinetjer served a king of Dynasty 1. A myriad of estates grew produce and prepared other goods for the funerals of kings, and the names of these estates are preserved on many tags and plaques from this period. Plaques like Terinetjer’s reflect the prestige of belonging to the central administration and contributing to the funerary economy (Stauder 2010: 144-45). This is what Terinetjer’s plaque is about.

It is well understood that the kingdom of Egypt grew from tribal societies scattered throughout the Nile Valley. Something of this tribal origin is preserved in the complex and varied religion of pharaonic Egypt, but identifiable socio-political traits of the original tribes quickly disappeared once state formation was achieved. Henceforth, the king and nobles and other elites presented themselves not as members of this or that tribe but as the ruling class of the kingdom. This is to stress the fact that no group of Egyptians, to my knowledge, ever called themselves the “Anu People.” Such a claim is a fallacy based around a bungled translation.

There is a sad irony in the afrocentric promotion of Terinetjer’s plaque. The web page quotes a number of statements from Petrie’s 1939 publication, probably due to the assumption that as the founder of Egyptology Flinders Petrie is a solid source to use. In most ways he is, but the fact is, Flinders Petrie was one of numerous scholars in the early days of Egyptology who believed the kingdom of Egypt was founded not by the population of the Nile Valley but by a “dynastic race” that came in from the outside (Drower 1995: 181, 213, 217). Bearing colonial attitudes, Europeans of the day had a hard time fathoming that Africans could have created such a remarkable, powerful, and long-lasting kingdom.

This notion is no longer credible (Wilkinson 2003: 187). It might be easy for us to condemn such a bias attitude, but it’s also true that in Petrie’s day very little was known of the origins of pharaonic Egypt. In fact, in Petrie’s day, many thought the Old Kingdom was the beginning of pharaonic Egypt. We know today that the kingdom stretched much farther back than that. And another irony is that Petrie himself was one of the archaeologists most responsible for opening this reality to us. Petrie excavated sites that helped us to begin to understand the prehistory of Egypt and the origins of the peoples who had lived there. Nevertheless, Petrie went to his grave rigidly holding to the outdated notion of the “dynastic race.”

More current archaeology and research has settled this issue. Dynastic Egypt was founded by the Egyptians themselves. Peoples moved from the south into the Nile Valley, from the western deserts, from the eastern deserts, and from the northeast. From the beginning, the population of the Nile Valley was racially and ethnically mixed. To me, personally, this had to have been one of the strengths of the kingdom of Egypt. In the words of Toby Wilkinson, one of the leading researchers of prehistoric and Early Dynastic Egypt: “…at its most fundamental, pharaonic civilization is an Egyptian, indeed an African phenomenon” (ibid).

When it comes to studying ancient Egypt or any other ancient civilization, it behooves us to dispense with our modern racial baggage. We must approach the ancient civilization on its own terms: how its own people thought and felt, not how we think and feel. As difficult as this can be for many modern people to do, it is essential to do so. With ancient Egypt in particular, what most matters is what this great civilization accomplished in the course of more than 3,000 years. What color their skin was is irrelevant. I’m quite certain Terinetjer would agree.

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Drower, Margaret S. Flinders Petrie: A Life in Archaeology. 1995

Petrie, Flinders W. M. The Making of Egypt. 1939

Wilkinson, Toby. Genesis of the Pharaohs. 2003

Woods, Christopher, ed. Visible Language. 2010

Was Proto-Sinaitic the origin of the alphabet?

04 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Ancient Writing

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The earliest scripts in the world are Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both date to the late fourth millennium BCE. Which came first is still the subject of heated debate, especially since Günter Dreyer’s discovery in 1988 of inscribed ivory tags and vessels in Tomb Uj at Abydos, which has significantly pushed back the oldest-known writing in Egypt. The Egyptians themselves employed different scripts through time, but as with the cuneiform used in Mesopotamia through the millennia, a true alphabet never emerged from either form of writing. The potential was there all along but never realized, and most likely for deliberate reasons.

The Phoenicians were the first to come closest to developing a true alphabet, to represent their northern Semitic tongue. The oldest inscription dates to around 1000 BCE (Robinson 1995: 164). Exactly how the Phoenicians developed their script is not clear, but it represents only the sound values of their consonants. The first true alphabet, representing both consonants and vowels, was developed by the Greeks. Scholars agree that the Greeks adapted and developed their alphabet based on that of the Phoenicians’, but the mechanics of how this happened are not well understood. The oldest inscription written in the Greek alphabet, representing their Indo-European tongue, dates to 730 BCE (ibid: 167).

So where did the idea of the alphabet come from? To be sure it was a remarkable development in the history of writing, and it would forever influence the Western world. Widely used scripts such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and especially Mesopotamian cuneiform were based largely on logographic and rebus principles, although at the same time they contained ample examples of monoliteral signs in which one symbol represented one sound: the very structure of an alphabet. Still, hieroglyphs relied much more on symbols that could represent two or three consonants or, in the case of cuneiform, syllables.

In the spring 2010 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, professor of Near Eastern languages and culture Orly Goldwasser (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) makes a case in her article “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs” that the script known as Proto-Sinaitic was the genesis of the alphabet. Goldwasser’s article is fascinating and engaging, if not a tad ambitious: she makes a good case for her argument, but it should be noted that her argument is not accepted by all scholars.

The Proto-Sinaitic script might ring a bell for some of you. It was partly the subject of a 2006 History Channel special called The Exodus Decoded, produced by Simcha Jacobovici. It must be remembered that Jacobovici is neither an historian nor researcher but a filmmaker. The Exodus Decoded was a flashy special and very professionally produced from an entertainment point of view, but it was riddled with errors and was based largely on uncorroborated speculation. It must not be regarded as a professional, academic examination of the biblical Exodus (readers might benefit from this web page, which debunks the show fairly well). In the special Jacobovici turns to the Proto-Sinaitic script as “proof” that Hebrews were working as slaves for the Egyptians in the turquoise mines of the Sinai, and during the course of their slavery they developed a script to represent their language.

This is wrong for a number of obvious reasons, so to point out the errors in Jacobovici’s revisionist program as well as to look further into Goldwasser’s interesting argument about Proto-Sinaitic, it is useful to explore the realities behind the situation.

No one doubts that Canaanites were working in the turquoise mines. This is well attested in inscriptional material recovered in and around Serabit el-Khadim, a site in the southwest Sinai where the Egyptians extensively mined for turquoise as well as other ores and minerals. Proto-Sinaitic takes us back to the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, and specifically to the reigns of two Dynasty 12 kings named Amenemhat III (1842-1794 BCE) and Amenemhat IV (1798-1785 BCE). Both of these kings sent numerous expeditions to Serabit el-Khadim. It’s known that at this time Egypt was maintaining steady ties with well-established Canaanite city-states along the coastal Levant, and many Asiatics from these city-states were migrating into Egypt and settling into the eastern Delta (Goldwasser 2010: 38). Many of these Asiatics worked in the Sinai expeditions as parts of the mining teams, and they formed regular parts of the workforce at Serabit el-Khadim. They lived with and worked among Egyptians. In other words, these Canaanites were paid workers, not slaves.

Jacobovici’s proposal in The Exodus Decoded is further reduced by the simple fact that the Hebrews did not even yet exist at this time. This was the eighteenth century BCE, the Egyptian Middle Kingdom. The earliest verifiable evidence for the existence of the Hebrews appears on the victory stela of a New Kingdom pharaoh called Merneptah; the stela dates to around 1207 BCE, some 600 years after the time of Amenemhat III and Amenemhat IV. Archaeology of the highlands of Judea further reinforces the fact that the Hebrews as a separate and identifiable culture were not emerging until the very end of the Late Bronze Age. That said, we can see that Jacobovici’s proposal about Proto-Sinaitic is untenable on all fronts and need not be considered further.

It is always better to turn to the work of a professional scholar who possesses the proper training and experience to evaluate and present evidence. This takes us back to Orly Goldwasser article in Biblical Archaeology Review. I should add before continuing that BAR sometimes has a “bad” reputation among historically adept folks who, in probably being unfamiliar with the magazine, view it as a tool of Bible-thumpers to promote biblical fables and stories. It’s been my experience that quite the opposite is true. I’ve been a subscriber to BAR for years because I find its articles to be well researched and properly balanced on academic grounds. Not quite every single time, mind you, but in the majority of cases.

Returning to the subject at hand, the Proto-Sinaitic script was first observed in a 1905 archaeological expedition conducted at Serabit el-Khadim by Flinders Petrie. His wife, Hilda, noticed odd and crudely formed inscriptions in numerous locations at the site (ibid: 41): on boulders and rocks, on the stone walls within the ancient mines, and on the occasional small monuments. Although Flinders Petrie himself was never terribly adept at translating hieroglyphic inscriptions, he believed this odd and crude form of hieroglyphs represented an alphabetic script. He was basically correct. Subsequently Sir Alan Gardiner, one of the giants in the early days of Egyptian linguistics, substantiated Petrie’s theory and performed further work and refinement on the study of the script.

For example, among the odd inscriptions Gardiner found frequent mention of b-‘-l-t (Baalat), the Canaanite word for “mistress.” He was able to demonstrate this on a small stone sphinx bearing a bilingual inscription.

The red arrow points to the Egyptian inscription: Ht-Hr mry Hmt n mfkAt, “The Beloved of Hathor, mistress of the turquoise.” The blue arrow points to the Canaanite inscription, which in translation is close to the Egyptian and of the same theme: m’h( b ) b’l(t), “Beloved of the Mistress.” Hathor was the principal deity venerated at Serabit el-Khadim, where a large temple was erected for her worship and significantly enlarged during the reigns of Amenemhat III and Amenemhat IV. It appears the Canaanites working side by side with the Egyptians were also venerating Hathor, which would not be unusual. It behooved one to venerate in proper form the deity of any important place, whether or not that deity was from your own culture.

It’s possible the Canaanites who developed the script we call Proto-Sinaitic were not even literate. Quite simply, most people were not. But working at Serabit el-Khadim, they were surrounded by temple walls, stelae, statues, and other monuments covered with Egyptian hieroglyphs. They would not have known how these glyphs worked as a written language, but they were able to adapt certain signs to represent the sounds of their own language. In doing so they used an individual Egyptian glyph for its acrophonic vlaue in their own language: this means a symbol stands not for a depicted word but for its initial sound (ibid: 42). See this chart.

Each of these is a Proto-Sinaitic character adapted from an Egyptian hieroglyph. The character was then used to represent a sound in the Semitic tongue spoken by the Canaanites:

1. Ox head: the sound value kA in Egyptian, aleph in Canaanite.
2. House plan: the sound value pr in Egyptian, bêt in Canaanite.
3. Hand: the sound value d in Egyptian, kaf in Canaanite.
4. Water ripple: the sound value n in Egyptian, mayim in Canaanite.
5. Rearing cobra: the sound value D in Egyptian, nahash in Canaanite.
6. Eye: the sound value ir in Egyptian, ‘ayin in Canaanite.
7. Head in profile: the sound value tp in Egyptian, rosh in Canaanite.

The sound used by the Canaanites for their reading was the first sound appearing in the word. Thus, for the ox head, the sound was an ” ‘ ” (a weak consonant); for the house plan, a “B”; for the hand, a “K”: for the water ripple, an “M”; and so on.

These Canaanites’ ties with their homeland in the Levant is further emphasized at the site of Serabit el-Khadim by several monuments and inscriptions in which a man name Khebeded makes an appearance. He is described in Egyptian inscriptions as “Brother of the Ruler of Retenu,” the designation “Retenu” being the Egyptian word for the territory roughly between modern Gaza and the Baqaa in Lebanon (ibid: 45). This was Canaanite territoy. Here is one of the monuments in which Khebeded appears.

Khebeded is farthest left in the procession of men. All the others are Egyptians and Khebeded is identified by his “mushroom”-shaped headgear (circled above), a classic form of Canaanite apparel at this time. The inscription running vertically in front of him states: sn n HKA n rTnw, “Brother of the Ruler of the Retenu.” Khebeded was one of the Canaanites present at Serabit el-Khadim, where he retained his title of prominence. This is further evidence that the Canaanites in residence at the mines were certainly not slaves but valued members of the workforce. Slaves were not allowed titles.

Upon returning home, the Canaanites working at Serabit el-Khadim brought their script with them. How much influence the script had from there remains the subject of debate. Goldwasser is the latest scholar to argue that it eventually was adapted to serve as writing among the Phoenicians and others, but not all agree with this premise (cf Robbinson 1995: 160). To be sure, it is not exactly the same as the script used by the Phoenicians, nor should it be mistaken for the origin of the Hebrew script. People are too quick to turn a lot of events from ancient Egypt into the origin of everything Hebrew. This is a gross oversimplification.

A case in point. The Hebrew kingdom was starting to emerge in the Levant in the Early Iron Age, and literacy appears not to have been a fixed part of the culture until the end of the eighth century BCE (Finkelstein & Silberman 2006: 86). For instance, the Solomonic legends appear to have been first put to paper in the seventh century BCE (ibid: 175), and we have evidence for extrabiblical prayers from the site of Ketef Hinnom that would later appear as Numbers 6:24-26 and dating to about the same time (Barkay 2009: 124). But the earliest form of Hebrew script cannot be tied with any certainty to Proto-Sinaitic. The Canaanites had left Serabit el-Khadim long before the Hebrews existed, as I stressed earlier.

It’s believed the Hebrew script was adapted from the Phoenician script possibly as early as the ninth century BCE and was later heavily influenced by the Aramaic script (Robinson 1995: 172). Although Proto-Sinaitic appears to have been used to a limited extent in the Levant, it disappears entirely from the historical record at the end of the Bronze Age, when civilizations of the Near East experienced wide-spread collapse. Now, this was about the same time the Phoenicians were developing their script, so it remains possible that Proto-Sinaitic influenced the Phoenicians.

The situation is not clear but we can point to the occasional tidbit of evidence of how Proto-Sinaitic entered permanent usage. A well known example is the Egyptian water ripple which represented the sound value n, which was used in Proto-Sinaitic to represent the sound “M” (see the chart above), and which does appear to have been adapted into the Phoenician alphabet to represent the same sound. It remained that way in subsequent scripts, so we owe our Western letter “M” to the humble Egyptian water ripple.

The origin of the alphabet remains an interesting subject for debate and discussion, and perhaps this is so simply because there are still questions to answer. Flashy and superficial TV specials like The Exodus Decoded might muddy the waters of logic and common sense, as is the tendency of historical revisionism, but legitimate historical research continues in the hopes of filling in the blanks.

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Barkay, Gabriel. 2009. “The Riches of Ketef Hinnom.” Biblical Archaeology Review. 200th Issue, July/August.
Finkelstein, Israel and Neil Asher Silberman. David and Solomon. 2006.
Goldwasser, Orly. 2010. “How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs.” Biblical Archaeology Review. April.
Robbinson, Andrew. The Story of Writing. 1995.