Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Proto-Sinaitic script" in English language version.
Its importance lies in the fact that proto-Sinaitic represents our alphabet's earliest developmental period. So far, only two major discoveries of these inscriptions have been made. The first batch came to light in 1904-1905, in the Sinai, when Hilda and Flinders Petrie discovered what are now referred to as the Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions. The second group was discovered by John and Deborah Darnell in as recently as the 1990s, in Middle Egypt, and is known as the pair of Wadi el-Hol inscriptions.
The problem of the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions is directly linked with that of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. The latter are a group of inscriptions, numbering about thirty, discovered near Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai, dated variously to the eighteenth or fifteenth centuries BC, which have been only partially deciphered but which seem to represent a form of early West Semitic (for a recent overview with bibliography, see Pardee 1997b).
By the beginning of the second millennium BCE (the late Middle Bronze Age in Canaan), the scribes of Ugarit began to use a new script based on twenty-seven cuneiform characters. The southern Canaanites also developed new scripts of their own, two variations in fact-Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite-both of which were also based upon the use of acronyms (Albright 1966; Cross 1967; Naveh 1982). Unfortunately, only a few examples of each have been recovered to date, and the ones that do exist are mostly incomplete and therefore difficult to decipher. As a result, some fundamental questions regarding the time of the first Proto-Canaanite scripts and the origins of the alphabet remain unanswered... Proto-Sinaitic... Today archaeologists know of some thirty to forty Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions that have been found on statuettes and stelae and carved into the rock faces around Serabit el-Khadim...
