________________
THE ALPHABET
of the eighteenth century B.C.; by others (for instance, by Petrie, Bauer and Sethe) to the period of the Hyksos (seventeenth or sixteenth century B.C.), or even to the fifteenth century B.C. (Albright).
Dr. Gardiner and Professor Sethe came to the conclusion that, in the Sinaitic inscriptions, we have to do with a stage of writing intermediate between Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Semitic alphabet (Fig. 102, 1-2). Key Linear Sinaitic Phoenic. Key Linear Sinaitic Phanic
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Fig. 101-The prehistoric-geometric signs theory
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But Gardiner's classical identification of the name of the goddess Ba'alat (Fig. 102, 3) is the only probable one among all the tentative decipherments of the Sinaitic inscriptions (Fig. 102, 2 and 103), although a most extensive literature of decipherments, interpretations and comment has been published. See, however, Albright's recent decipherment (bibl., p. 222).
The acceptance as a probability of the reading of one word and the approval of the ingenuity of the method by which the reading was obtained, on the one hand, and the fact on the other hand that none of the sceptics have as yet proposed a plausible alternative, do not necessarily involve accepting the theory that the North Semitic alphabet was descended (see below) from the early Sinaitic script. Since no categorical conclusions are justified, it cannot be said to have been proved that the latter writing was the great mother-alphabet. The only reasonable conclusion is that we have in the early Sinaitic inscriptions one of the earliest known attempts at alphabetic writing. The Sinaitic theory is still held by many scholars, including Dr. Gardiner (Legacy of Egypt, 1942, PP. 55-64; and personal information given to me quite recently). On the other hand, according to M. Dunand's conclusions in 1945, neither has the acrophonic principle of the Sinaitic script been proved, nor has it been proved that the alphabet descended from the latter, nor even that the Sinaitic script represents an alphabetic writing or that the language of the Sinaitic inscriptions is Semitic.
In this connection, it may be useful to say a few words about the decipherment of the early Sinaitic writing. Although (1) these inscriptions have been known since Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie's discovery in 1904-5, and (2) the Sinaitic theory of the origin of the alphabet has been suggested
