An exhibition entitled “Sinai...Birthplace of the Alphabet” was launched at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square on Monday.
The exhibition displays 40 artifacts of carved inscriptions symbolizing the names of various ancient Egyptian gods, such as Hathor and Betah.
Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anany, who opened the exhibition, said that the launch was part of the ministry’s celebrations of Sinai Liberation Day. He added that the exhibition has been organized in cooperation with a mission from Germany’s University of Bonn and will run for six months.
The minister pointed to the huge global significance of the artifacts, which carry inscriptions in Proto-Sinaitic — a script derived from hieroglyphs and the ancestor of historical and modern alphabets that have spread across the globe.
The exhibition's artifacts date from the second millennium BC in Serabit al-Khadim, southwest Sinai, and show the alphabet from which the Semitic and Greek alphabets were derived, among many others. By extension, the script on display in the museum is the ancestor to the Coptic script and even the Latin alphabet that we use today.
The exhibition, according to the minister, also celebrates the 100th anniversary of the first explanation offered for the Proto-Sinaitic script, by Egyptologist Alan Gardiner in 1916.
