We are now one week into the New Year, so I consider it is time to clear out the holiday cobwebs and start our brains functioning fully again. My After Christmas Musings last week were an attempt to get you back into the process gently. I hope it worked. Now let’s return to the Valley of the Writing or Serabit el-Khadem or Serabitel-Khadem. This area has been called various names over the centuries. Barthold Niebuhr, a German explorer, came across it in 1761 and referred to the place as Sarbut al-Khadem. Others have called it Wadi Mukatteb, literally the Valley of the Writing. Now the reference being used in the Biblical Archaeology Review (BAR) literature is Serabit el-Khadem. You have to admit Sarbut el-Khadem and Serabit el-Khadem are too similar to be considered different places. Especially when the places so named are found in the same area of southern Sinai.
I believe this is the same place referred to in the Bible as Kibroth Hataavah. There are just too many coincidences which line up which I discussed in the series of Nuggets based on David Rohl’s research. (See Proof of the Exodus) The variations in the spelling of the name are not a problem. Given the nature of Hebrew and other Semitic languages, vocalization of words from a written script are rather fluid. Indeed in written Hebrew the vowels were not added to the text of ancient Hebrew until around 600 AD. (Sorry for those purists among you – I refuse to call it CE. It will always be BC and AD as far as I am concerned.) The vowel points and other markings which added the keys to vocalization were added by the Massoretes to preserve the pronunciation of words in the ancient Hebrew text.
It is fair to say in the development and standardization of all major languages spoken over a wide area there is variation in the way words are spelt. That was true of English before and during the Middle Ages. It is true of the development of the Indonesian language across the length and breadth of the archipelago and even across the straits into Malaysia where common words are involved. There is a process involved as languages develop and become standardized. This is particularly true when nationalism or colonialism is present as was the case with the Dutch in Indonesia and the British in Malaysia and their influence on the spelling of words. This same process is evident in the languages of the Ancient Near East (ANE).
Now let’s investigate what Orly Goldwasser has to say about this area and its role in the development of alphabets in her BAR article titled How the Alphabet was born from Hieroglyphs. (Article 20 – from Forty Groundbreaking Articles from Forty Years of Biblical Archaeology Review (Volume One).
Orly Goldwasser suggests that Serabit el-Khadem, which she refers to as Serabit, was the centre of turquoise mining for the pharaohs of the XII and XIII dynasties leading to the time when the Hyksos dominated the area and developed their capital in Avaris. I have discussed that background extensively in the series of Nuggets related to the Proof of the Exodus beginning with the first Nugget linked above. Goldwasser suggests there was a significant centre in Serabit populated by Canaanites. There are Canaanite inscriptions in the area of the Valley of the Writing together with Egyptian inscriptions. Goldwasser claims there were 28 recorded expeditions to mine turquoise at Serabit during the time of Amenemhet III. To ensure the blessings of the gods Egyptians, Canaanites and other people groups from all walks of life left their tributes recorded on the rocks. It’s Orly Goldwasser’s linguistic research that is most interesting to me.
There is evidence in archaeological inscriptions at Serabit (I will use the name Goldwasser uses to be consistent with the author of the article) that the names of many non-Egyptians are including among those who left inscriptions. Furthermore there is no listing of Cannanites as slaves, which is in harmony with what was found at Tell ed-Daba (Avaris) according to David Rohl. Confirming the fact that Canaanites (Asiatics), those equated with Joseph, were fully accepted into Egyptian society and not numbered as slaves. What is clear from the inscriptions is that the characters left by the Canaanites appear to be using an alphabet that has been developed from Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform characters which depicted the word or concept, to form a phonetic kind of representation of a letter ~ sound representation. Now that is remarkable. As Goldwasser claims it appears to be the Canaanites who invented a true alphabet representing the sounds of the language as opposed to the pictographic approach of hieroglyphic or cuneiform characters. This new alphabet would have given far more flexibility to handle multiple languages of the area than did the pictogram approach.
Goldwasser credits the discovery of this feature of a Canaanite alphabet to Hilda Petrie, wife of Sir William Petrie, the famed Egyptologist. In 1905 on an expedition with her husband she noticed some inscriptions with some awkward looking characters that seemed to not be real hieroglyphs. There appeared to be more of these same characters found on the rocks at Serabit. They appeared crude imitations of the Egyptian and cuneiform scripts of Mesopotamia but were smaller and less exact in their detail. Hilda Petrie had correctly identified these crude “characters” as belonging to an alphabet script somewhat different from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system with its hundreds of characters. Rather the Canaanite characters were less in number and appeared to be representative of the sounds of the language, in other words a phonetic script in modern terms.
In 1916 Sir Alan Gardiner, an English Egyptologist, discovered a repetitive group of characters that represented a word in the Canaanite language [b-‘-l-t] which appears to match a vocalized representation of the Canaanite term for Baalat meaning “mistress”. Were these inscriptions left by Canaanite workmen at the turquoise mines of Serabit? What finally clinched the theory was the discovery of a unique bilingual inscription on a small sphinx with the meaning of the inscription being left in a two parallel texts:- Egyptian hieroglyphics and this new Canaanite text.
The Egyptian text read: “The beloved Hathor, the mistress of turquoise.”
The Canaanite text read: “The beloved Baalat, the mistress of turquoise.”
The Canaanite text that records “Baalat” is made up of a set of four pictures – a house, an eye, an ox goad and a cross.
These are the same pictures which represent the Hebrew characters depicting the same sounds. Beth, Ayin, Aleph and Tau.
Gardiner saw that each of these four pictograms had a single acrophonic value across ANE languages. This ingenious alphabet was based on a different principle – acrophonic representation rather than pictographic representation. In other words the new alphabet stood for the initial sound of the depicted word rather than the total concept or picture depicted. Each sign in the new Canaanite script represented one consonant of the language . The vowels were not represented. The system for representing the vowels came later and were different for each language specific alphabet system.
This new system was seemingly invented by comparatively untrained Asiatic workers, not by sophisticated scribes. Those who invented this script at Serabit had clearly used the hieroglyphs of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom which they had seen all around them at Serabit. They were unskilled in reading the hundreds of pictographs of the Egyptian hieroglyphs but had invented a simplified crossover script between the Ancient Near Eastern languages. The pictograms of the ANE languages had been converted to a phonetic script system which represented the initial sound in each pictographic symbol thus creating a new phonetic alphabet which worked for the Asiatic workmen of Serabit and beyond.
Source: Orly Goldwasser, How the Alphabet was born from Hieroglyphs. (Article 20 – from Forty Groundbreaking Articles from Forty Years of Biblical Archaeology Review (40 by 40 – Volume One)
We will continue to look at the ramifications in following Nuggets.