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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 03 Jul 2021

Taken: 02 Jul 2021

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The Earliest 'Alphabetic' Inscriptions

The Earliest 'Alphabetic' Inscriptions

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
In Jerusalem, the poet William Blake wrote of

‘God. . .in mysterious Sinai’s awful cave
To Man the wond’rous art of writing gave.”

A small sphinx in the British Museum once seemed to show that Blake was right, at least about the origin of the alphabet. The sphinx was found in 1905 at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, a desolate place remote from civilization, by the archaeologist Sir Flinders Petire. He was excavating some old turquoise mines that were active in ancient Egyptian times. Petrie dated the sphinx to the middle of 18th dynasty; nowadays its date is thought to be about 1500 BC. On one side of it is a strange inscription. On the other, and between the paws, there are further inscriptions of the same kind, plus some Egyptian hieroglyphs which read: ‘beloved to Hathor, mistress of turquoise.’

Petrie guessed that the script was probably an alphabet, because it consists of less than 30 signs; and he thought that its language was probably Semitic, since he knew that Semites from Canaan -- modern Israel and Lebanon -- had worked these mines for the pharaohs, in many cases as slaves. Ten years later, the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner studied the ‘Proto-Sinatic’ signs and noted resemblances between some of them and certain pictographic Egyptian hieroglyphs. Gardiner now named each sign with the Semitic word equivalent to the sign’s meaning in Egyptian . . . Page 161
3 years ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
THE STORY OF WRITING
3 years ago.

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