Albright William Foxwell. The Proto-Sinaitic Inscriptions and Their Decipherment

Harvard University Press, 1969. — 64 p.The first inscription of the category now known as Proto-Sinaitic was discovered and copied by E. H. Palmer in Wadi Magharah during the winter of 1868-1869. The text was not published until 1904 and seems subsequently to have eluded rediscovery. But this find was useless until the Sinai expedition of (Sir) W. M. Flinders Petrie, who, while digging at Serabit el-Khadem in early 1905, discovered eleven inscriptions on objects or in rock panels shaped like stelae (steliform), with unidentified script which seemed to have strong Egyptian affinities. Photographs of two of the objects appeared in Petrie's official report, together with his suggestion that the script represented a linear alphabet which had been used by Syrian miners. Speculation about the inscriptions now began, but the first break-through did not come until 1915, when the late (Sir) Alan Gardiner (in a paper presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science) recognized that several signs were acrophonic and succeeded in reading a commonly occurring group of signs as l-b'lt, "(belonging) to Ba'lat (Baalath, 'the lady')." This interpretation correlated beautifully with the prominence of Hathor, the Egyptian patroness of the temple at Serabit el-Khadem, especially since the small sphinx bears an Egyptian dedication to Hathor together with a Proto-Sinaitic dedication to Ba'lat.The decipherment
Historical background and inferences
The texts and their interpretation
Grammatical sketch