protoSinaitic

Proto-Sinaitic is an early alphabetic script dating to the Late Bronze Age, generally dated around 1850–1550 BCE. It arose in the Sinai Peninsula and the Levant and is widely regarded as the earliest known alphabet, the immediate ancestor of Phoenician, which in turn gave rise to Greek, Latin, and many other scripts. The name reflects its discovery in the Sinai region, though some scholars prefer the term Proto-Canaanite to emphasize its Levantine linguistic context.

The script was discovered at Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai, where inscriptions were found by early 20th‑century excavations. Additional inscriptions in the broader region have been attributed to Proto-Sinaitic, and the term remains a matter of scholarly usage, with Proto-Canaanite sometimes used to describe the language and early signs more broadly.

Proto-Sinaitic signs are largely simplified pictograms derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and other symbols. They function as a consonant alphabet and are believed to employ acrophony, whereby signs come to represent the initial sounds of words for objects. The corpus is relatively small, with a handful of dozen signs, and the signs show variation across inscriptions. The direction of writing is generally considered to be right-to-left, similar to later Phoenician.

Linguistically, the underlying language of Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions is usually described as Northwest Semitic, a transitional form between Proto-Semitic and later Canaanite dialects. Significantly, Proto-Sinaitic is viewed as a key step in the shift from pictographic writing to a fully phonetic alphabet, paving the way for the Phoenician script and the broader alphabetic tradition.