666 TRANSACTIONS OP SECTION H. 



The following Papers were then read : — 



1. Fresh Light tipon the Origin of the Semitic- Alphabet. 

 By Alan H. Gardiner, D.Litt.^ 



Among the monuments discovered by Professor Petrie in Sinai (1905) were ten 

 inscriptions in an entirely unknown writing. These appear to have a very important 

 bearing upon the origin of the Semitic and kindred scripts. 



That the date of these monuments is Pharaonic is beyond dispute. Professor 

 Petrie is inclined to attribute them to the Eighteenth Dynasty, but there are in- 

 dications, particularly the image of the god Ptah on one stele, that they may go back 

 as far as the Twelfth Dynasty. 



In character they are non-Egyptian, though closely imitating Egyptian work. 

 There are two rough statues of the usual squatting type, and a sphinx which bears 

 the Egyptian hieroglyphs for ' beloved of Hathor, lady of the Turquoise ' besides 

 the foreign characters. These three were found in the temple of Hathor at Serabit 

 el-Khadim, but the seven round-topped stelae come from a mine about a mile and 

 a half distant. 



It is wholly impossible to interpret the inscriptions as any form of Egyptian 

 writing, though many of the signs are identical with, and obviously modelled upon, 

 the Egyptian hieroglyphs, e.g., the ox's head, the human head, the human eye, the 

 fish and the rope. 



Only about one hundred and fifty signs can be distinguished, as the inscriptions 

 are very much weathered, and among these it is impossible to make out more than 

 thirty-two varieties at most. There is, in consequence, a very strong presumption 

 that the new script is alphabetic. 



Thus the newly-discovered inscriptions reveal to us a form of writing in all proba- 

 bility alphabetic, and certainly modelled upon the Egyptian hieroglyphic, existent 

 on Semitic soil at a date not later than 1500 b.c. Without any closer investigation 

 one might conjecture a priori that such a script must be related to the common parent 

 of the Phoenician, Greek, and Sabaean alphabets. Does a more detailed analysis 

 bear out this conjecture ? 



A careful study of the available evidence bearing upon the nature of this common 

 proto-Semitic parent shows (1) that very little confidence can be placed in the 

 surviving forms of the Phoenician, Greek, and Sabaean letters, all of which have 

 obviously been linearised in very different and highly individual ways ; (2) on the 

 other hand, the letter-names common to Greek and Phoenician show every appear- 

 ance of a high antiquity ; and (3) since in a few cases resemblances can be detected 

 between the meanings of the names and the actual signs (cf. Phoenician iC = 'alif, 

 &\<pa, an ox[-head], Phoenician O = 'ain, an eye) it is reasonable to suppose that 

 all the proto-Semitic letters were hieroglyphic, and represented the things signified 

 by the letter-names, the values of the letters being taken from the i ames on what 

 is known as the ar.rophonic principle. 



But if the proto-Semitic alphabet was hieroglyphic, it must clearly have been 

 borrowed from, or modelled upon, some other hieroglyphic system of writing. A 

 derivation from the Cretan hieroglyphs or from the signs of the Phaestos disk has 

 been advocated, but the old theory of Lenormant possessed an inherent plausibility 

 greater than that of the more modern views: this French savant had made out a, 

 whole list of Egyptian hieroglyphs, to which, as he supposed, the Semites attached 

 new values in order to create an alphabet of their own. 



The new Sinai inscriptions go far to confirm Lenormant's hypothesis. There 

 are three signs which are actually identical with those in his list, and there are a 

 number of other signs which correspond ideally to the signification of the Semitic 

 letter-names. Moreover, there is one group of four letters which recurs on five (or 

 six) different monuments, and which can be interpreted without any difficulty as 

 the word Ba'alat (house-sign = beth, eye = 'ain, crook resembling the ordinary 

 Graeco-Semitic form of lamed and a cross = tau ' mark '). Now, almost every Egyptian 

 inscription from Serabit el-Khadim names the goddess Hathor, and there could not 

 possibly be a better Semitic equivalent for the name of this goddess than Ba'alat. 

 Indirect confirmation may be gathered from the fact that the group of signs in ques- 

 tion does not occur on the stele where Ptah is depicted. 



' Published in full in J. /■Ji/i/ptimi .Ucluroliu/i/, vol. ill. pt. 1, 1916. 



