Serabit el-Khadim (Arabic: سرابيط الخادم Arabic pronunciation: [saraːˈbiːtˤ alˈxaːdɪm]; also transliterated Serabit al-Khadim, Serabit el-Khadem) is a locality in the southwest Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, where turquoise was mined broadly in antiquity, mainly by the ancient Egyptians. The earliest trace of alphabetic writing was found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt, at a temple to the Goddess Hathor. Since 2800 BCE, turquoise was mined here, mainly by the ancient Egyptians.
Sir Flinders Petrie’s archaeological excavation initially revealed ancient mining camps and a long-life Temple of Hathor, the Egyptian goddess. Hae temple was founded during the Middle Kingdom in the reign of Sesostris I (who reigned from 1971 BC to 1926 BC) and was partly rebuilt in the New Kingdom.
Location of Serabit el Khadim
Serabit el Khadim is located southwest of the Sinai Peninsula, about 10 km north of Wadi Maghara and 43 km east of Abu Zenima.
Archaeological findings
Thirty incised graffiti in a “Proto-Sinaitic script” shed light on the history of the alphabet—the incisions date from the beginning of the 16th century BC. The mines were worked by prisoners of war from southwest Asia who presumably spoke a Northwest Semitic language, such as the Canaanite, which was ancestral to Phoenician and Hebrew. After a century of study and the initial publication by Sir Flinders Petrie, researchers agree on the decipherment of a single phrase, cracked in 1916 by Alan Gardiner: לבעלת l bʿlt (to the Lady) [baʿlat (Lady) being a title of Hathor and the feminine of the title Baʿal (Lord) given to the Semitic god]. However, m’hb (loved) is frequently cited as a second word.
The script has graphic similarities with the Egyptian hieratic script, the less elaborate form of the hieroglyphs. In the 1950s and 1960s, it was common to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, using William Albright’s interpretations of Proto-Sinaitic as the key. It was generally accepted that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic, that the script had a hieratic prototype and was ancestral to the Semitic alphabets, and that the script was itself acrophonic and alphabetic (more specifically, a consonantal alphabet or abjad). The word baʿlat (Lady) lends credence to identifying the language as Semitic. However, the lack of further progress in decipherment casts doubt over the other suppositions, and the identification of the hieratic prototypes remains speculative.
Romanus François Butin of the Catholic University of America published articles in the Harvard Theological Review based on the 1927 Harvard Mission to Serabit and the 1930 Harvard-Catholic University Joint Expedition. Both articles analyse the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions during earlier expeditions to the site. His article “The Serabit Inscriptions: II. The Decipherment and Significance of the Inscriptions” provides an early detailed study of the inscriptions and some dozen black and white photographs, hand-drawings and analysis of the previously published inscriptions, #346, 349, 350–354, and three new inscriptions, #355–368. At that time, #355 was still in situ at Serabit but had not been snapped by the previous Harvard Mission. In 1932, he wrote:
“The present article was begun with the limited purpose of making known the new inscriptions discovered by the Harvard-Catholic University Joint Expedition to Serabit in the spring of 1930. In this study, I perceived that some signs doubtful in the inscriptions already published were made clear by the new slabs, and I decided to go over the entire field again.”
