RECENT NEW DISCOVERY
[back]During the summer of 1999 Yale Egyptologist, Professor John Coleman Darnell, while exploring ancient Egyptian roads, discovered a stone inscription in Wadi el-Hol, which is just west of Thebes. The inscription contains by far the earliest alphabetic writings known to archaeologists, dating back to around 2000 B.C., about three centuries earlier than the previous earliest known use of an alphabet.
Although most of the text is still not deciphered, Darnell believes that this writing was used to communicate with Semitic mercenaries who were involved in an Egyptian civil war at that time.
The discovery of this inscription lends strong evidence supporting the theory that the Semitic alphabet was primarily derived from a subset of Egyptian hieroglyphics chosen to match Semitic sounds and given Semitic names.
However, one stone does not make a theory. From what I have seen of the Memoir materials, Dr. Walker and Rivah believe that although Egyptian glyphs played a key role in the development of the alphabet, the influence of the Sumerian glyphs should not be ignored.