"I am disposed to see in this one of the many alphabets which were in use in the Mediterranean lands long before the fixed alphabet selected by the Phoenicians. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC. To this were added a number of short Proto-Canaanite inscriptions found in Canaan and dated to between the 17th and 15th centuries BC, and more recently, the discovery in 1999 of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, found in Middle Egypt by John and Deborah Darnell. These ten inscriptions, plus an eleventh published by Raymond Weill in 1904 from the 1868 notes of Edward Henry Palmer, were reviewed in detail, and numbered (as 345β355), by Alan Gardiner in 1916. The first published group of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904β1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the small number of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions from the Bronze Age is based on rather scant epigraphic evidence it is only with the Bronze Age collapse and the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the Levant that Proto-Canaanite is clearly attested ( Byblos inscriptions 10thβ8th century BC, Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription c. However, the discovery of the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions near the Nile River suggests that the script originated in Egypt. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, and by extension locates the invention of the alphabet in Egypt or Canaan respectively. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a late date, around 1550 BC. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are mostly dated to between the mid-19th (early date) and the mid-16th (late date) century BC. According to common theory, Canaanites or Hyksos who spoke a Canaanite language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. Together with about 20 known Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, it is also known as Early Alphabetic, i.e. The Proto-Sinaitic script is a Middle Bronze Age writing system known from a small corpus of about 30-40 inscriptions and fragments from Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, as well as two inscriptions from Wadi el-Hol in Middle Egypt. Caucasian Albanian (origin uncertain) c.Cherokee (syllabary letter forms only) c.Graphical descent from Egyptian hieroglyphs
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