Sprengling Martin. The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinai Inscriptions

The University of Chicago Press, 1931. — 88 p.In 1904-1905, the famous English Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942) discovered near Serabit el Hadim on the Sinai Peninsula inscriptions in a hitherto unknown script. After decades of hard work to decipher them, they have been translated, giving truly invaluable information about the history of the alphabet. The Proto-Sinai script became a visual demonstration of the process of transformation through which the first world alphabets - the Proto-Canaanite and Phoenician scripts evolved from their ancestor - the heretical script. This reaffirms the regularity that great inventions in human history do not appear suddenly. The alphabet is not an ingenious idea of ​​the Bedouins of the Levant - it is a product of the millennial writing tradition of Ancient Egypt, which the Palestinian Semitic tribes only developed.