Tombeaux de Sarbout el Cadem. The tombs of Sarbout el Cadem. (Presqu’isle de Sinai.)

Title

Tombeaux de Sarbout el Cadem. The tombs of Sarbout el Cadem. (Presqu’isle de Sinai.)

View of the archeologigal place of Sarabit al-Chadim on the peninsula Sinai, Egypt. Serabit el-Khadim is a locality in the southwest Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, where turquoise was mined extensively in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egyptians. Archaeological excavation, initially by Sir Flinders Petrie, revealed ancient mining camps and a long-lived Temple of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess who was favoured as a protector in desert regions. Thirty incised graffiti in a Proto-Sinaitic script shed light on the history of the alphabet. The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs. In the 1950s and 60s it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright's interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key. It was generally accepted that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic, that the script had a hieratic prototype and was ancestral to the Semitic alphabets, and that the script was itself acrophonic and alphabetic .

ca. 1820

Artist

Engelmann