According to an Egyptologist at the University of British Columbia, recently deciphered Egyptian characters on a 3,400-year-old limestone ostracon from Sennefery's Luxor tomb appear to be the first written evidence of the ABC letter order of the early Semitic alphabet.
In his article “The Double Alphabet? Halaham and Abgad on Ostracon TT99 ", Professor Thomas Schneider concludes that a small (approximately 10 x 10 cm, or 4 x 4") double-sided limestone tablet was used by Egyptian scribes as a mnemonic way to memorize the sequence of letters of not one, but two forms of the early Semitic alphabets. On one side of the tablet appeared Schneider's recent discovery: transliteration into cursive Egyptian writing of the sounds that signify the beginning of today's Hebrew alphabet (Aleph, Beth, Gimel). On the other hand, there is a modern, albeit less well-known alphabet sequence called "Halaham", which was deciphered in 2015 on the same limestone by Leiden University doctor Ben Haring.
A limestone tablet dated to the period of the Egyptian 18th Dynasty, from the excavations of Theban Tomb 99 in a necropolis on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, known as the Tombs of the Nobles. The director of the Theban Tombs Project in Cambridge, Dr. Nigel Strudwick, found the object as early as 1995 in what he calls a "later mine grave" dating from around 1450 BC. "The reason the object is in the grave is unknown," Strudwick told The Times of Israel. He said that in terms of its context, it is possible that it was brought into the mine as early as 110 years ago, as the tomb was used as a home back in 1907. “Ostrakon, however, is about the same time as the tomb, judging by the style of the handwritten text. Thus, he could have been lying somewhere in this area of the necropolis 3000 years before he ended up there,where we found it,”said archaeologist Strauvik.
Tomb 99 has been identified as belonging to Senneferi (also known as Sennefer) who lived in 1420 BC, according to a letter found at Papyrus Louvre E3226. The ancient Egyptian dignitary was a famous character, the head of Thebes, where several statues depicting him have survived. Likewise, he wrote his name when he erected a monument in the Temple of Hathor in the turquoise mine at Serabit al-Khadim in Sinai. Coincidence or not, the first inscriptions made in the Semitic alphabet, often called Proto-Canaanite, are found at this site in the Sinai Peninsula. According to the head of the Department of Egyptology at the Hebrew University, Professor Orly Goldwasser, the origin of the Semitic alphabet begins with Canaanite workers from the Serabit el-Khadim quarry, being specialists in the extraction of the precious blue-green stone, were illiterate. Watching with envy as their Egyptian counterparts worship, demonstrating their devotion to the gods through beautiful hieroglyphics, circa 1800 BC e. these workers decided to adapt the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols into phonetic symbols and, in fact, invented our alphabet. Thus, Aleph, today the first letter of the alphabet, was named after their original God, Aluf (which means bull in Canaanite), and is symbolized by the head of a bull. For the "B" sound, they used house or bayit, Goldwasser explains.was named after their original God, Aluf (meaning bull in Canaanite), and is symbolized by the head of a bull. For the "B" sound, they used house or bayit, Goldwasser explains.was named after their original God, Aluf (meaning bull in Canaanite), and is symbolized by the head of a bull. For the "B" sound, they used house or bayit, Goldwasser explains.
Whether Senneferi, who arrived at Serabit El-Khadim several hundred years later, was aware of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet is unknown. However, Goldwasser says, "If this is indeed the same person, all we can assume is that he knew Canaanite, and that is one of the reasons he was there (in his career)." Regardless, Goldwasser says, "he could not have known the alphabetical order from the Sinai inscriptions."
Mysterious "ugly scribbles"
In 1905, renowned Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie led an expedition to the dusty Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai. One day, Petrie's wife Hilda, while walking through the ruins, stumbled and noticed the falling stones with the inscription, which she called "ugly" scribbles. They didn't seem like "real" hieroglyphs to her, Goldwasser explains in How the Alphabet Born from Hieroglyphs in the 2010 Biblical Archaeological Review. In the article, Goldwasser notes: “The vast majority of the inscriptions in this alphabet come from the Serabit region - more than 30 of them. Only one ended up elsewhere in Egypt (two-line inscription Wadi el-Hol). Some of the few, very short inscriptions have been found in Canaan, and date from the late Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age (c. 1750-1200 BC).
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But although the Petrie discovered the inscription and admitted it was something other than the more elegant Egyptian alphabet they were accustomed to, another decade passed until a famous Egyptologist named Sir Alan Gardiner deciphered it. Studying a small sphinx dedicated to the goddess Hathor, inscribed in two scripts (Egyptian hieroglyphs and Canaanite letters) on both sides, Gardiner noticed “a repeating group of characters as a sequence of four letters in an alphabetic script that was a Canaanite word: b - ' -lt, read as Baalat, Lady,”writes Goldwasser. The Canaanites addressed their goddess as Baalat, transforming the little sphinx statue into the "Rosetta Stone" for Gardiner to finally decipher the Proto-Canaanite alphabet. Interestingly, he writes:"For half a century after its invention, this alphabet was rarely used, at least as far as it is reflected in the records of archaeologists." However, the paucity of archaeological evidence does not mean that Canaanite itself was not widely spoken in Egypt. It definitely was - and there is even fascinating evidence from the third millennium BC. BC that transliterated Canaanite spells were used in an Egyptian tomb, as discovered by Professor Richard Steiner in 2002. And now, with the deciphering of Schneider and Haring from the 15th century BC, we see that the alphabet was also transliterated into Egyptian. It definitely was - and there is even fascinating evidence from the third millennium BC. BC that transliterated Canaanite spells were used in an Egyptian tomb, as discovered by Professor Richard Steiner in 2002. And now, with the deciphering of Schneider and Haring from the 15th century BC, we see that the alphabet was also transliterated into Egyptian. It definitely was - and there is even fascinating evidence from the third millennium BC. BC that transliterated Canaanite spells were used in an Egyptian tomb, as discovered by Professor Richard Steiner in 2002. And now, with the 15th century BC deciphering by Schneider and Haring, we see that the alphabet was also transliterated into Egyptian.
Aleph as "elta" (lizard), "Vet" as bibia (snail), and Gimel as (dove), according to Schneider's new decoding of the limestone tablet. The small ostracon has ink inscriptions on both sides, which are a list of words written in hieratic script and hieroglyphs. Based on their sounds, the researchers conclude that the lists are part of the alphabet or alphabetical listing. “This is a partial double binding to two alphabetical ordering systems,” Schneider told The Times of Israel in an email. As can be seen from the modern Ugaritic cuneiform tablets, of the numerous early Semitic languages, two writing systems originally existed simultaneously. It is less clear whether this was for two different Semitic languages (in practical use or in terms of the ordering principle),”he said.
In a 2015 article, Harring deciphered what researchers call the "front side." Written in both hieratic script and hieroglyphics, the obverse appears to record the first seven or possibly more letters of the Halanam sequence, Schneider says. "The obverse may reflect some form of Northwest Semitic language, close to early Aramaic," Schneider said: "However, the downside is less clear, with animal designations with equivalents in different languages." On either side of the stone tablet, it seems that the scribe uses two methods of transferring the alphabet - through italic hieratic writing and pictorial hieroglyphic, which Schneider calls "classifier." Hieratic transcriptions clearly establish the acrostic (sequential order) of letter words.
It is less clear how the hieroglyphs of the classifier function. They could be used in the traditional way to indicate the class of meaning of foreign terms,”he writes. Although Proto-Canaanite predates the dating of the ostracon, there is no evidence that the Egyptian scribe knew about the forms of phonetic symbols (which we call letters today) - although he may have accompanied his master at some point before Serabit el-Hadim where they were invented hundreds of years ago. “We do not know if the Proto-Sinai characters were already ordered alphabetically, and they were clearly not used during this ostracon,” Schneider writes.
We still don't know why this limestone tablet was written, Schneider says. “It wasn’t a complete primer, so perhaps it’s just an attempt by the scribe to write down the alphabet sequences that he learned to memorize? The common purpose of these sequences was the spelling order of foreign words and names, probably for administrative use,”says Schneider. At the conclusion of his article, Schneider writes: "Depending on who wrote the ostracon, he points to knowledge of the two Semitic alphabets either among the Theban artisans working on the tomb, or the multilingual elite of the administration of the Egyptian state and its provinces around 1400 BC."
However, Hebrew University's Goldwasser was more specific. In a correspondence with The Times of Israel, she wrote that Schneider probably meant "two sequences of Semitic alphabets" rather than alphabets. From the ostracon we learn that two mechanisms or sequences of the Semitic / Canaanite alphabets were apparently known to the Egyptian scribe, Goldwasser says. “This is not surprising,” writes Goldwasser. At least in Egypt, around the same time, they are also attested in Ugaritic, an extinct northwestern Semitic language spoken - and written in cuneiform - in the Syrian city of Ugarit, she continues. “We know quite a few Egyptian scribes who apparently spoke Canaanite fluently. There were many Canaanite Egyptians, and the links between Egyptian cities and cities on the Lebanese coast were strong,”writes Goldwasser. At the same time, it is very difficult to find a “direct” explanation for these Canaanite letters in Egyptian, she adds. If Schneider and Haring are right, this is the first evidence that the Egyptians not only wanted to write down Canaanite words in Egyptian, but also knew the Canaanite letters - in two orders.