The Alphabet's first draft
In 1993, Egyptologists John and Deborah Darnell were surveying ancient desert tracks west of the Nile when they found inscriptions on a limestone cliff. Located in the Wadi el-Hol, or "Gulch of Terror," the site was a known stop for ancient caravans, soldiers, and traders. Among hundreds of typical Egyptian hieratic and hieroglyphic carvings, two short inscriptions stood out. They were something new—a script that was a link between pictorial hieroglyphs and the abstract symbols of a phonetic alphabet.
Dated to between 1900 and 1800 BCE, these are among the oldest known examples of alphabetic writing. The dating comes from the style of surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, some of which mention specific Middle Kingdom events and individuals. One nearby text, for example, refers to Bebi, an Egyptian general in charge of "Asiatics," likely Semitic-speaking people who were often conscripted into the Egyptian army or worked on trade expeditions. The alphabet inventors were probably Semitic speakers who adapted Egyptian writing to their own language. They borrowed shapes from Egyptian hieroglyphs but assigned them new phonetic values based on the first sound of the Semitic word for that object—a system called acrophony.
From picture to sound
The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions contain a mixture of symbols. One is a vertical, zigzagging line, a variation of the Egyptian hieroglyph for water, which was normally horizontal. This vertical orientation was only used during the early Middle Kingdom, helping to date the script. In Semitic languages, the word for water was "mayim." The symbol eventually became the letter 'M'. Another symbol, an ox-head, or 'aleph' in Semitic, became the letter 'A'. This adaptation of pictures into sounds was a radical simplification. Egyptian hieroglyphs required hundreds of complex signs, but this new alphabetic system needed only a couple dozen.
The two inscriptions are short. One has 12 signs, the other 16. Their exact meaning is still debated because the corpus of text is too small for a confident translation. One interpretation suggests the text refers to a celebratory feast for the Canaanite goddess 'Anat. Another reads part of the text as "rebbe" (chief) and "ʾel" (god). Despite the uncertainty in their meaning, the inscriptions mark an important moment in the history of information technology. This proto-Sinaitic script is an ancestor of the Phoenician, Ancient South Arabian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets. Every time you read or write in English, you use a system that traces its ancestry back to these carvings on a desolate Egyptian wadi.