Proto-Sinaitic script

Looking at our modern capital A, if you picture it flipped upside down, you can picture a rough sketch of an animal's head with horns.

The Proto-Sinaitic script then can be considered not only a common ancestor of Hebrew, but also of other Semitic languages such as Arabic, as well as the common ancestor of Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and modern Western languages, which use these alphabets today.

So whenever you write or type using this alphabet, remember to thank the peoples of the ancient Near East.

Hey everyone.

So kind of late, Late Bronze Age.

It was a, an evolution from hieroglyphs, and there was an intermediate form called Proto-Sinaitic.

They found some chicken scratches on some caves that were copper mines in the Sinai Peninsula- They actually found those, I think, in the late 1800s.

And basically they could kind of deduce that those scratches were an intermediate form that had been derived from hieroglyphs-

Yep.

'Cause it ties into something we showed earlier.

If you remember when I talked about the Y symbol, the sixth letter of the Phoenician alphabet, and I mentioned the Proto-Sinaitic that that alphabet is believed to have come from, the Proto-Sinaitic symbol for that letter was a mace hieroglyph.

Wow.