Talk:Proto-Sinaitic script

Proposal: Establish a Proto-Sinaitic Research Panel

For better finding, scrutinizing, and determining accurate information about the Proto-Sinaitic, I suggest we establish in Wikipedia a research panel dedicated to this. The Research Panel will:

- Research further into Proto-Sinaitic.

- Gather sources from published papers and related information.

- Build a consensus on the Proto-Sinaitic Script by comparing, scrutinizing, analyzing, and establishing theories.

- Publish any findings under the name of Wikimedia or independently in the Wiki Library. Cnscrptr (talk) 16:27, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Users it may concern: @Temerarius, @C.Fred, @Cnscrptr Cnscrptr (talk) 17:37, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Concur. Does @Cnscrptr have web space or have a venue in mind?

Temerarius (talk) 18:45, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I want to establish it in Wikipedia. I don't know how I will bring that to fruition given nobody has used Wikimedia as a publisher. Cnscrptr (talk) 21:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I've made an alt account to take part in the panel: this will create a hair's distance from my vibrantly expressed individualism, and give a more presentable look for the team's sake. I take responsibility for user Sinaitic, below.

Temerarius (talk) 04:29, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Signing in. Getting support from wikipedians or endorsement from the foundation would be a great boon, but I'm sure it'd take time. We have to start on our own. We could use my user page to post about the panel, and where to go next. Does that sound like a good start @Cnscrptr?

Sinaitic (talk) 04:43, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

𐩸 is in which Serabit el-Khadim inscription?

The symbol is shown under the Table of Symbol's "Serabit el-Khadim" column, but I don't know if that is accurate. I can see the symbol in the izbet sartah ostracon's abecedary, but I don't see it in any of the Serabit el-Khadim proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, unless there's a source I am missing? 72.216.186.113 (talk) 15:29, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware, you aren't missing anything. I have also been thinking about this matter. I have yet to see the "ziq" symbol in any of the inscriptions.

Therefore, the symbol will be removed from the article unless we find something else, like another inscription. Cnscrptr (talk) 03:35, 18 May 2024 (UTC)

wsr

Fig I / 777 here looks like that shape. This is from Petrie, Lahun II. Macalister also references such a shape in Gezer, and disagrees with a colleague who had a hypothesis about it, I can't remember exactly what. I think they called it "Cypriote script" so if you search for that you might see their opinions on it. Macalister thought it wasn't "Cypriote."

Temerarius (talk) 20:17, 15 July 2024 (UTC)

There's another instance of the shape in pottery marks on the last page of Petrie's Kahun Gurob and Hawara, just linked in my most recent post below. Temerarius (talk) 00:08, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

Hall of shame

As for this page itself, I think the most embarrassing errors are ginap grape, and the duck for tsade. Don't forget good sense for good sources. Temerarius (talk) 02:55, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

The ġinab grape's name was indicated by Colless while its sound value as ɣ comes from Albright. If this synthesis proves true, then likely a part of the glyph or an entirely different one is the origin of said glyph.

The duck for ṯ' was shown by another more recent source.

What are the flaws in these sources? Cnscrptr (talk) 18:05, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

What, seriously? Wilson-Wright's table 5 isn't risible to you? "A more definite conclusion, however, must await" the authors themselves admit. An admitted wild-ass guess isn't encyclopedic. These scholars are usually running the other way, to say "Certainly!"

Temerarius (talk) 00:16, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing that. I removed the glyph accordingly. Cnscrptr (talk) 02:36, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

https://www.academia.edu/40029675

In this one, Wimmer 2010, the authors' first impression (initial gut reaction being crucial according to fakebuster Thomas Hoving) was that the inscriptions were a hoax. And they don't go on to say they were wholly convinced, either. Sounds like they didn't have something better to write about. We probably shouldn't refer to this one either, unless somebody comes up with an interpretation that bolsters its verity.

Temerarius (talk) 19:09, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

As for the ġinab grape, like I said, it came from a synthesis of Colless and Albright's sources depicted in the following pdf already in the TOC section: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19299-revisiting-proto-sinaitic.pdf However, looking into it, the only thing supporting this assertion is Albright's interpretation as ɣ and Colless assigning a name to a Proto-Canaanite ayn glyph with a dot.

As for the acrophony, it does not match as the Proto-Semitic and Proto-Afroasiatic word for grape is ʿanbab, Arabic (which preserved most merged sounds) is 'inab, leaving Ugaritic as the only one with the ɣ phoneme, failing the acrophony test.

Hence, you were right that the ġinab grape, which I've thought about before, is most likely inaccurate and will therefore be removed from the article. Cnscrptr (talk) 02:33, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you!

Temerarius (talk) 16:09, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

Yet more inscriptions? Forgotten evidence from JRAS 1920

I'm not sure if everything mentioned in the intermittently-insightful and humorously triumphant 1920 Journal, Royal Asiatic Society by Rev A H Sayce is in our articles.

https://ia804707.us.archive.org/15/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.24465/2015.24465.Journal-Of-The-Royal-Asiatic-Society-1920.pdf

The "Kypriote" connection is probably a stretch, but the wooden instrument in Petrie's Kahun sounds promising. I've read that book (Weren't there more than one with Kahun in the title?) and don't remember what Sayce is talking about. I'm going to download it again. https://archive.org/details/cu31924028675399/page/n111/mode/2up?view=theater It's pretty funny how Sayce interprets "Kenites" like everyone does when there are better options.

I hesitate to link Sayce here since I worry any of his statements could be taken uncritically, like the comments on plene spelling which are confidence in nonknowledge. Anyway, since the pieces of evidence are so few I'd love if somebody tried to find the pieces mentioned.

And read at least the titles of the other articles in that publication, there's some great stuff.

Temerarius (talk) 00:03, 5 August 2024 (UTC)

h?

https://archive.org/details/Petrie1939/page/n54/mode/1up?view=theater

This one looks like many earlier Semitic script hs. I'm going to try to check on if Petrie's first dynasty dating, obviously early, is based on style or stratiography. Temerarius (talk) 02:49, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

A complete misrepresentation of the history of writing

I am sorry, but this whole story about the hieroglyphic ‘origin’ of the alphabet is misguided. None of our letters stems from a hieroglyph. The idea that these people took hieroglyphic writing and ‘improved’ it to form an alphabet is wrong. Joseph Naveh (The early history of the alphabet, 2nd edn., Jerusalem 1987, p. 26) writes clearly: “Nowadays [1987!] these romantic views are no longer accepted.”

One problem with the idea of a hieroglyphic ‘origin’ is that none of the hieroglyphs represents the sounds that the similar-looking Proto-Sinaitic letters represent. That is a detail (deliberately?) missing in the Table of Symbols. If you add a column for Egyptian sound values and put /kꜣ/ next to the ox-head, /pr/ next to the house, etc., the table will at once look much less convincing. Many of the hieroglyphs given here were never used as phonograms in Egyptian writing at all, they were exclusively logograms. How can you call that an ‘origin’ or a ‘derivation’? If anything, when drawing an ox or a house because this happened to be what they chose for their alphabet, the Proto-Sinaites might have been ‘inspired’ by the shapes of hieroglyphs, like Sequoyah was inspired by the shapes of Latin letters. But even for this ‘inspiration’ the chronology is unclear: Did /b/ first look similar to the ‘house’ hieroglyph 𓉐 and then lose its door in the Proto-Canaanite version of the alphabet (because houses there were entered through the roof?), or was /b/ first a simple square □ as in Proto-Canaanite before a door opening was added in the Sinai (maybe inspired by hieroglyphs, maybe simply because the houses there had door openings)? As far as I understand, nobody knows.

It is clear that around the mid-second millennium BCE in West Asia the time was ripe for the development of an alphabet. Both the Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite and the Ugaritic alphabet were invented around the time – the latter based on cuneiform, the former based on a pictographic principle. They did not need individual hieroglyphs to work with, they knew how to draw a pictogram of an ox or a house.

Because Egyptian writing was logographic, it offered thousands of pictograms, basically one for every word of the language. If someone now chose some thirty words that are easy to draw to design an alphabet, you will inevitably find solutions similar to some of the thousands of hieroglyphs. Just as easily you can find similar pictograms among the multitude of characters of the Oracle bone script, the Luwian hieroglyphs, Cretan, Linear A, and others; they are geographically less likely ‘ancestors’ for our alphabet, but it would be easy to find just as many graphic similarities. So the fact that we find some graphic similarities between Proto-Sinaitic and Egyptian characters proves nothing.

The choice of hieroglyphs that are supposed to have inspired Proto-Sinaitic letters often seems rather random. How is this meant? So they took the Egyptian logogram 𓌉 for a mace but then they called it ‘hook’ and drew it in the shape of a hook 𐤅? How is that supposed to be a plausible ‘origin’ or ‘derivation’? And for 𐤄 /h/ they used two different hieroglyphs, 𓀠 and 𓀁, which the Egyptians took good care to keep clearly apart to signify completely different meanings, and just lumped them up into one? That does not make sense.

The fact that different scholars propose different hieroglyphs as models for the alphabetic letters and that other scholars say clearly that the alphabet was not derived from Egyptian writing shows that there is no consensus in science about this. Consequently, the table is original research and does not belong in an encyclopedia, no matter how convinced some Wikipedia authors are that this is correct.

Consequently, the ideas about the Egyptian inspiration can be mentioned in the article together with scholars contradicting them, but their details do not belong here, because these ideas are not generally accepted by the scientific community. And of course the same applies to the claims of hieroglyphic origins of letters in other articles, especially in the letter articles like Aleph; but I guess we should discuss this here. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 11:02, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

You need to provide reliable sources, otherwise we can't do anything. That means reliable sources that make the case, not just sources that provide the background for your case. Zero^talk 07:35, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Okay – here are a few more quotes making clear that the question of the origin of most of the character forms is quite unresolved (in chronological order):

Harald Haarmann (Universalgeschichte der Schrift, 2. Aufl., Frankfurt & New York: Campus 1991, 280): “But whoever the anonymous initiators of the consonant alphabets may have been, and whoever was involved in their continuous transmission, the creation of an alphabetic script without a direct model was an independent achievement from the contemporary point of view, and the end products of the experimental phase, the individual language writing systems, were in no obvious dependence on any of the scripts known at the time.” (“Wer immer aber die anonymen Initiatoren der Konsonantenalphabete gewesen sein mögen, und wer auch immer an deren kontinuierlicher Tradierung beteiligt gewesen war, die Schaffung einer Buchstabenschrift ohne ein direktes Vorbild war vom zeitgenössischen Standpunkt eine selbständige Leistung, und die Endprodukte der Experimentierphase, die einzelsprachlichen Schriftsysteme, standen in keiner ersichtlichen Abhängigkeit zu irgendeiner der damals bekannten Schriften.”)

Wolfgang Schenkel (“Die ägyptische Hieroglyphenschrift und ihre Weiterentwicklungen”, in Hartmut Günther & Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit, (HSK 10.1), Berlin & New York: De Gruyter 1994, 289–297, here 295): “However, the derivation of the character shapes from Egyptian cursive characters, which was already popular in the 19th century and gained renewed momentum in the 20th century with the discovery of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions – the geographical missing link – is problematic [...].” (“Dagegen ist die Herleitung der Zeichenformen aus ägyptischen Kursiv-Zeichen, die bereits im 19. Jahrhundert beliebt war und durch die Entdeckung der proto-sinaitischen Inschriften — das geographische missing link — im 20. Jahrhundert noch einmal Oberwasser erhielt, problematisch […].”)

Harald Haarmann (Geschichte der Schrift, 4th edn., München: Beck 2015, 78): “Several characters of the Proto-Sinaitic script show clear parallels to the Egyptian character inventory, so that one can reasonably assume that the Sinaitic characters are derived from the Egyptian characters. Other characters, on the other hand, obviously come from other sources.” (“Etliche Zeichen der proto-sinaitischen Schrift weisen deutliche Parallelen zum ägyptischen Zeichenschatz auf, so daß man zu Recht annehmen kann, daß sich die sinaitischen von den ägyptischen Zeichen ableiten. Andere Zeichen wiederum stammen offensichtlich aus anderer Quelle.”) [added 14:53, 9 March 2025 (UTC)]

Ben Haring (“Ancient Egypt and the earliest known stages of alphabetic writing”, in Philip J. Boyes & Philippa M. Steele (eds.), Understanding relations between scripts II: Early alphabets, Oxford & Philadelphia: Oxbow 2020, 53–67, here 64): “[…] several signs even resist convincing hieroglyphic derivation. Egyptological researchers basically think of solutions to this problem in two different directions. One is to connect some Proto-Sinaitic and similar signs to cursive Egyptian writing (i.e. hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic inspiration in addition to monumental hieroglyphic; Kammerzell 2001, 145–151; Darnell et al. 2006, 76–82, 84–85). This […] poses the danger of self-confirming hypotheses. The search for prototypes in a vast Egyptian textual corpus of widely different genres, on different material supports, and in different sorts of monumental and cursive scripts is bound to be at least partly successful. But an even more compelling reason to be very cautious about this sort of analysis is that the corpus of Proto-Sinaitic and apparently related material is so very small, and therefore hopelessly insufficient for palaeographic comparison. […] Whereas some signs, such as the rejoicing man 𓀠 for h(e) and the lamp wick 𓎛 for ḫ(arm?) find possible or even compelling prototypes in Egyptian hieroglyphs, others, like the hand for kaph and the ‘corner’ for pe, are unlikely to have been inspired by hieroglyphic signs […].”
“If this is true, we may be dealing with a notation system that started off graphically as a mixed mode, some of the prototypes being characters of the Egyptian writing system(s), and others being concrete referents. Such a mixed-mode approach may be more productive than forcing all Proto-Sinaitic signs into a hieroglyphic matrix.” (ibid. 65)

Andrew Robinson (“Alphabetized: The origins of the world’s chief writing system come to life in an illuminating historiography”, Science 376(6600) (24 Jun 2022), 1387) about the Egyptian origin of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet: “And yet, as always seems to be the case with the origins of the alphabet, this evidence is insufficient and awaits the discovery of more inscriptions, no doubt followed by more arguments among scholars.”

Cäcilia Töpler (“Alphabet”, in Martin Neef & Said Sahel & Rüdiger Weingarten (eds.), Schriftlinguistik (WSK 3), Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter 2024, 146–151, here 148): “The first alphabets originated in the West Semitic language area: the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was found in the Sinai desert […]. An actual impetus or origin of alphabetic writing is unknown; the ‘whether’ and ‘how’ of a connection between the first alphabets mentioned above is also under discussion […].” (“Die ersten Alphabete entstanden im westsemitischen Sprachraum: Das protosinaitische wurde in der Sinai-Wüste gefunden […]. Ein eigentlicher Anstoß oder Ursprung alphabetischen Schreibens ist unbekannt; auch das Ob und Wie eines Zusammenhangs zwischen den genannten ersten Alphabeten ist in der Diskussion […].”)

So all I am saying is: It’s complicated. For example, for /d/ we have Colless saying it was derived from 𓉿, Simons not being sure whether it is from 𓆟 or 𓆡, and the people I quoted saying that it is more probable that 𐤃 is simply a door drawn from nature, without any hieroglyphic or hieratic model. I would not call this a scientific consensus, and therefore Wikipedia should not present it as if it was. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 17:42, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your collation here. I agree at a bare minimum that nothing in the literature would permit us to state direct correspondences between Proto-Sinaitic letters and hieroglyphic prototypes without qualification like we're presently doing. Remsense ‥ 论 22:42, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Coincidentally, a few days ago I changed History of the alphabet to insert it is conjectured that, given that the provenance is by no means rock solid.

Nevertheless, the citations in favour are not small beer (copied from History of the Alphabet):

• "Sinaitic inscriptions". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-08-21.
• Goldwasser, O. (2012). "The Miners that Invented the Alphabet – a Response to Christopher Rollston". Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections. 4 (3). doi:10.2458/azu_jaei_v04i3_goldwasser.
• Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
• Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
• Goldwasser, Orly (2010). "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (1). Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society. ISSN 0098-9444. Retrieved 6 Nov 2011.

So it may be that for NPOV we have to include both perspectives (it is not Wikipedia's role to arbitrate in academic disputes but I admit to finding Daniel's quasi-paradolia explanation persuasive). 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:46, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

To ensure clarity for those skimming the discussion: this primarily regards the unclear origins of specific letterforms in the earliest attested alphabet, not the general fact that alphabetic writing as a concept emerged in a context of hieroglyphic writing proximate to but not centered in that time and place. That is to say, it's correct to say that the Proto-Sinaitic script descends from hieroglyphic writing in the broad strokes (do-ho-ho). Remsense ‥ 论 16:48, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I perfectly agree that some influence of Egyptian writing played a role, but probably more in the concept (the existence of characters for individual sounds and the acrophonic principle) and only secondarily in the actual shape of just a few of the letters. I would call this inspiration though, not descent. The Greek alphabet is descended from the Phoenician. There we can trace both the shape and the sound value of every letter to a Phoenician letter. With hieroglyphs, the sound values have nothing to do with the allegedly corresponding alphabetic letters at all, and visual similarities are sometimes striking (which does not mean they cannot be coincidental) but often disputed and very much depend on which shape in which of the few documents we have one chooses for comparison. – In short, let’s agree on inspiration, okay?
As to the references – this is Orly plus a second-hand account plus a different encyclopedia. The same Encyclopedia Britannica, by the way, in a different article cites a multitude of theories about the origin of the alphabet, among which the Egyptian theory is only one. The article Proto-Sinaitic script quotes a couple more authors who argue for an Egyptian ‘descent’ of the letter shapes, but this is still far from consensual. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 21:12, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I had been working on History of writing for the past few months but hadn't worked on this particular junction yet—do you feel my description I've rewritten spurred by this post suffices? Remsense ‥ 论 21:32, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

(Sorry, I was busy.) I guess it’s quite a good summary. I would probably replace “it adapted concepts and at least some of its written letterforms” with probably some, but maybe we should first find a suitable description in this article before dealing with short versions of it in other articles. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 18:51, 11 March 2025 (UTC)