In 1993, American egyptologists
Deborah Darnell and her then husband John Darnell found letters in two single-line rock inscriptions carved into limestone cliffs in the Wadi el-Hol valley. They returned to the site for several seasons through the 1990s to further study the inscriptions. In 1999, they finally published their research, concluding that they had found the earliest surviving
alphabet, dating back to around 1800 to 1900 BCE. In particular, the inscriptions appear to resemble the
Proto-Sinaitic script from
Serabit el-Khadem. ==See also==