The inscriptions of Wadi el-Ḥôl: an essay of historical description of the issue

Abstract

Nearly a century has witnessed a long sequence of efforts applied to describe and demonstrate the problem of the origin of “alphabetic” writing in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, considering so called “Proto-Sinaitic” and “Proto-Canaanite” inscriptions. The description “alphabetic” being irrelevant on the grounds of grammatology is revised in the present article in favor of “phonological” mode of writing. The article offers some new inferences of how phonological writing could be formed in the deprived and constricted group of Western Semites in Egypt of the Middle Kingdom. Most and even recent approaches to the issue are of paleographic, grammatological and linguistic kind with an obvious lack of historical approach. A new hypothesis on historical background of the Middle Kingdom is offered to depict terms mating to the problem of origin of what is here called heterography of the traditional Egyptian system of writing. One of the points is demonstrated: why and under what circumstances “Western Semitic phonography” being invented even at the beginning of XXth century BC fell into oblivion for

Keywords:

Wadi el-Ḥol, Upper Egypt, Middle Kingdom, West Semitic, alphabetic writing, ideography, morphography, heterography, grammatology