SINAITIC INSCRIPTIONS

also called Proto-sinaitic Inscriptions, archeological remains that are among the earliest examples of alphabetic writing; they were inscribed on stones in the Sinai Peninsula, where they were first discovered in 190405 by the British archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie. Apparently influenced both by Egyptian hieroglyphic writing and by the Canaanitic writing system (19001800 BC; probably ancestral to the North Semitic alphabet), the Sinaitic inscriptions date from approximately the beginning of the 16th century BC. As yet not satisfactorily deciphered, the small number of different Sinaitic symbols appear to indicate that the writing system was alphabetic rather than ideographic. In 1916 British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner tentatively deciphered one group of symbols as the name of a Semitic female deity, Ba'alat; this conclusion was based on similarities in letter form between the Sinaitic symbols and Semitic counterparts and has been accepted by scholars as probably correct. Gardiner's research indicates a relationship between the Sinaitic writing system and the North Semitic alphabet; a relationship with the South Semitic alphabets of the Arabian Peninsula is also sometimes postulated.