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Place

Serabit el-Khadim

Site of an Egyptian turquoise mine and a temple of Hathor in the Sinai Peninsula, where early alphabetic inscriptions were found.

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Also known as
Serabit el-Khadem
In Serabit el-Khadim

Serabit el-Khadim is in the Sinai Peninsula. Its inscriptions are central to the debate over where and when Invention of the alphabet happened.

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  • Invention of the alphabet Disputed Scholarship & press 12

    Disputed: Scholars differ on the date and the place. Gardiner placed the Sinai inscriptions in the early second millennium BCE; a date after 1500 BCE was later proposed and accepted by several scholars, and Antiquity (2021) says the date is still disputed. Similar inscriptions at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt are dated slightly earlier, and some scholars see the alphabet's origin in Levantine societies rather than at the Sinai mines.

    The Metropolitan Museum places the invention in the early second millennium BCE, by Semitic speakers who drew on Egyptian hieroglyphic writing; Serabit el-Khadim and Wadi el-Hol are the main evidence.

Proof 2 sources
  1. Alphabet Origins: From Kipling to Sinai, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 22 Dec 2014. Scholarship & press
    Archaeological discovery has also played an important role in our understanding of the origins of the alphabet, which was invented in the early second millennium B.C. and spread across the Mediterranean world in the first millennium B.C.
    the recent discovery of additional alphabetic writings on the cliffs alongside a road through the desert at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt have added credence to his idea that the alphabet was invented in the early part of the second millennium B.C. by Semitic speakers
  2. Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish, Antiquity (Cambridge University Press), 15 Apr 2021. Scholarship & press
    The date for the development of early alphabetic script is still disputed
    A date after 1500 BC (in the Eighteenth Dynasty), or even later, was soon suggested
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