Skip to main content

DECIPHERING THE PROTO-SINAITIC SCRIPT: ABOUT MY NEW BOOK

From its initial appearance, in around the 18th century BC, the origins of proto–Sinaitic writing can be traced back to Egypt’s Middle Kingdom period, when it was somehow derived from the hieroglyphs, its parent–system. The importance of proto–Sinaitic lies in the fact that it represents the alphabet’s earliest developmental period—a kind of ‘missing link’ between the hieroglyphs and these early Semitic alphabets from which our own Latin one descends, by way of the Phoenician and Greek. However, up until now, proto-Sinaitic has remained for the most part undeciphered. The intriguing possibility of giving voice to a lost culture or civilization from thousands of years ago is tantalizing. Representing one of the most enticing problems in modern archaeology, the enigmatic allure surrounding ancient languages and the undeciphered scripts in which they are encoded is truly vexing. In the course of my research into deciphering the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions, I have inadvertently uncovered some incredibly enthralling information about the people who have invented the first alphabet: The epigraphic evidence suggests that the Egyptianized Canaanites who first devised the proto–Sinaitic script were surprisingly instrumental in the formation of early Israelite culture and proto–Judaism.

 
Author Quote

"The proto-Sinaitic inscriptions provide us with some archaeolinguistic evidence that can be used to help bridge the gap between the ancient Egyptian and Canaanite languages, histories, and cultures."


BUY IT  on Amazon.ca or Amazon.com. If shipping costs from the North American marketplace are too hefty (specially for international buyers), the book has also been made available as an e-book in Google Play Books as a more economical option. Don't forget to check out my book trailer.

For excerpts from the book, click on the following links (which will bring you to my sister site).





"The Israelites Leaving Egypt", oil on canvas, as interpreted by Scottish painter David Roberts (ca. 1830). Source: Wikimedia Commons.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES: TO B(IBLE), OR NOT TO B(IBLE), THAT IS THE QUESTION...

As it relates to the academic study of the Bible in the 20 th century, there are primarily two opposing poles that have emerged among scholars — with biblical minimalists on the one end, and biblical maximalists on the other. To oversimplify, minimalists tend to not consider the Bible as a valid historical document due to the contradictions that can be found between the biblical narrative and all that has been dug up by archaeologists over the past century in the Near East. Maximalists, on the other hand, usually assume that the Bible texts are more or less correct, unless archaeological evidence can incontrovertibly prove otherwise. To exacerbate matters, some radical minimalists in the field have not only raised the question of historical reliability of the Bible, but they have altogether dismissed it as being purely fictional — only to be read as (religious) literature. Most scholars hate these labels because, after all, a label is just a label, and nothing is ever so clear...
4 comments
Read more

Homo Symbolicum and the Written Word: Perpetuating the Human Mind After Death

Since the very earliest times, we humans have dreamed of overcoming the limits imposed by our bodies, and of using technology to surpass the intellectual, physical or psychological boundaries of our existence. The development of writing in the ancient world is usually ranked as one of the most important of human cultural achievements, as significant as the domestication of fire, the invention of agriculture, and even the development of the wheel. With the invention of the alphabet, writing technology has given us a means to record our words and therefore allows our thoughts to outlive us; the dead can speak to the living. The use of the alphabet permits us to build on the knowledge of others, over generations. It is at the  core  of our civilization — and some would go so far as to say it is at the essence of our  humanness . The technology of writing, it could be said, is a sort of ‘brain storage’ device. Ernst Cassirer, the 20 th  century Jewis...
Post a Comment
Read more