According to William Albright, in his book "The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions And Their Decipherment", the first inscriptions in the category now known as Proto-Sinaitic were discovered and copied by E.H Palmer in Wadi Magharah during the winter of 1868–1869. His text was not published until 1904. However, E.H. Palmer notes that he was not the first, others had done work before him and as such his work was more of a "Re-discovery". In the winter of 1905,
Flinders Petrie and his wife
Hilda were conducting a series of archaeological excavations in the
Sinai Peninsula. During a dig at
Serabit el-Khadim, an extremely lucrative
turquoise mine used between the
Twelfth and
Thirteenth Dynasty and again between the
Eighteenth and mid-
Twentieth Dynasty, Petrie discovered a series of inscriptions at the site's massive invocative temple to
Hathor, as well as some fragmentary inscriptions in the mines themselves. Petrie immediately recognized hieroglyphic characters in the inscriptions, but upon closer inspection realized the script was not the combination of
logograms and
syllabics as in Egyptian script proper. He thus assumed that the inscriptions showed a script that the turquoise miners had devised themselves, using linear signs that they had borrowed from hieroglyphics. He published his findings in London the following year. Ten years later, in 1916,
Alan Gardiner, one of the premier
Egyptologists of the early and mid-20th century, published his own interpretation of Petrie's findings, arguing that the
glyphs appeared to be early versions of the signs used for later
Semitic languages such as
Phoenician, and was able to assign sound values and reconstructed names to some of the letters by assuming they represented what would later become the common Semitic
abjad. One example was the character , to which Gardiner assigned the
⟨b⟩ sound, on the grounds that it derived from the Egyptian glyph for 'house' , and was very similar to the Phoenician letter
bet, whose name derives from the Semitic word for “house”,
bayt. Using his hypothesis, Gardiner was able to affirm Petrie's hypothesis that the mystery inscriptions were of a religious nature, as his model allowed an often recurring word to be reconstructed as
lbʿlt, meaning "to Ba'alat" or more accurately, "to (the) Lady" – that is, the "lady"
Hathor. Likewise, this allowed another recurring word
mʿhbʿlt to be translated as "Beloved of (the) Lady", a reading which became very acceptable after the
lemma was found carved underneath a hieroglyphic inscription which read "Beloved of Hathor, Lady of Turquoise". Gardiner's hypothesis allowed researchers to connect the letters of the inscriptions to modern Semitic alphabets, and resulted in the inscriptions becoming much more readable, leading to the immediate acceptance of his hypothesis. == Development ==