Talk:Proto-Sinaitic script

Proposal: Establish a Proto-Sinaitic Research Panel

For better finding, scrutinizing, and determining accurate information about the Proto-Sinaitic, I suggest we establish in Wikipedia a research panel dedicated to this. The Research Panel will:

- Research further into Proto-Sinaitic.

- Gather sources from published papers and related information.

- Build a consensus on the Proto-Sinaitic Script by comparing, scrutinizing, analyzing, and establishing theories.

- Publish any findings under the name of Wikimedia or independently in the Wiki Library. Cnscrptr (talk) 16:27, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Users it may concern: @Temerarius, @C.Fred, @Cnscrptr Cnscrptr (talk) 17:37, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

Concur. Does @Cnscrptr have web space or have a venue in mind?

Temerarius (talk) 18:45, 9 December 2024 (UTC)

I want to establish it in Wikipedia. I don't know how I will bring that to fruition given nobody has used Wikimedia as a publisher. Cnscrptr (talk) 21:50, 10 December 2024 (UTC)

I've made an alt account to take part in the panel: this will create a hair's distance from my vibrantly expressed individualism, and give a more presentable look for the team's sake. I take responsibility for user Sinaitic, below.

Temerarius (talk) 04:29, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Signing in. Getting support from wikipedians or endorsement from the foundation would be a great boon, but I'm sure it'd take time. We have to start on our own. We could use my user page to post about the panel, and where to go next. Does that sound like a good start @Cnscrptr?

Sinaitic (talk) 04:43, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

Hall of shame

As for this page itself, I think the most embarrassing errors are ginap grape, and the duck for tsade. Don't forget good sense for good sources. Temerarius (talk) 02:55, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

The ġinab grape's name was indicated by Colless while its sound value as ɣ comes from Albright. If this synthesis proves true, then likely a part of the glyph or an entirely different one is the origin of said glyph.

The duck for ṯ' was shown by another more recent source.

What are the flaws in these sources? Cnscrptr (talk) 18:05, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

What, seriously? Wilson-Wright's table 5 isn't risible to you? "A more definite conclusion, however, must await" the authors themselves admit. An admitted wild-ass guess isn't encyclopedic. These scholars are usually running the other way, to say "Certainly!"

Temerarius (talk) 00:16, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing that. I removed the glyph accordingly. Cnscrptr (talk) 02:36, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

https://www.academia.edu/40029675

In this one, Wimmer 2010, the authors' first impression (initial gut reaction being crucial according to fakebuster Thomas Hoving) was that the inscriptions were a hoax. And they don't go on to say they were wholly convinced, either. Sounds like they didn't have something better to write about. We probably shouldn't refer to this one either, unless somebody comes up with an interpretation that bolsters its verity.

Temerarius (talk) 19:09, 17 July 2024 (UTC)

As for the ġinab grape, like I said, it came from a synthesis of Colless and Albright's sources depicted in the following pdf already in the TOC section: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19299-revisiting-proto-sinaitic.pdf However, looking into it, the only thing supporting this assertion is Albright's interpretation as ɣ and Colless assigning a name to a Proto-Canaanite ayn glyph with a dot.

As for the acrophony, it does not match as the Proto-Semitic and Proto-Afroasiatic word for grape is ʿanbab, Arabic (which preserved most merged sounds) is 'inab, leaving Ugaritic as the only one with the ɣ phoneme, failing the acrophony test.

Hence, you were right that the ġinab grape, which I've thought about before, is most likely inaccurate and will therefore be removed from the article. Cnscrptr (talk) 02:33, 18 July 2024 (UTC)

Thank you!

Temerarius (talk) 16:09, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

h?

https://archive.org/details/Petrie1939/page/n54/mode/1up?view=theater

This one looks like many earlier Semitic script hs. I'm going to try to check on if Petrie's first dynasty dating, obviously early, is based on style or stratiography. Temerarius (talk) 02:49, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

A complete misrepresentation of the history of writing

I am sorry, but this whole story about the hieroglyphic ‘origin’ of the alphabet is misguided. None of our letters stems from a hieroglyph. The idea that these people took hieroglyphic writing and ‘improved’ it to form an alphabet is wrong. Joseph Naveh (The early history of the alphabet, 2nd edn., Jerusalem 1987, p. 26) writes clearly: “Nowadays [1987!] these romantic views are no longer accepted.”

One problem with the idea of a hieroglyphic ‘origin’ is that none of the hieroglyphs represents the sounds that the similar-looking Proto-Sinaitic letters represent. That is a detail (deliberately?) missing in the Table of Symbols. If you add a column for Egyptian sound values and put /kꜣ/ next to the ox-head, /pr/ next to the house, etc., the table will at once look much less convincing. Many of the hieroglyphs given here were never used as phonograms in Egyptian writing at all, they were exclusively logograms. How can you call that an ‘origin’ or a ‘derivation’? If anything, when drawing an ox or a house because this happened to be what they chose for their alphabet, the Proto-Sinaites might have been ‘inspired’ by the shapes of hieroglyphs, like Sequoyah was inspired by the shapes of Latin letters. But even for this ‘inspiration’ the chronology is unclear: Did /b/ first look similar to the ‘house’ hieroglyph 𓉐 and then lose its door in the Proto-Canaanite version of the alphabet (because houses there were entered through the roof?), or was /b/ first a simple square □ as in Proto-Canaanite before a door opening was added in the Sinai (maybe inspired by hieroglyphs, maybe simply because the houses there had door openings)? As far as I understand, nobody knows.

It is clear that around the mid-second millennium BCE in West Asia the time was ripe for the development of an alphabet. Both the Proto-Sinaitic/Proto-Canaanite and the Ugaritic alphabet were invented around the time – the latter based on cuneiform, the former based on a pictographic principle. They did not need individual hieroglyphs to work with, they knew how to draw a pictogram of an ox or a house.

Because Egyptian writing was logographic, it offered thousands of pictograms, basically one for every word of the language. If someone now chose some thirty words that are easy to draw to design an alphabet, you will inevitably find solutions similar to some of the thousands of hieroglyphs. Just as easily you can find similar pictograms among the multitude of characters of the Oracle bone script, the Luwian hieroglyphs, Cretan, Linear A, and others; they are geographically less likely ‘ancestors’ for our alphabet, but it would be easy to find just as many graphic similarities. So the fact that we find some graphic similarities between Proto-Sinaitic and Egyptian characters proves nothing.

The choice of hieroglyphs that are supposed to have inspired Proto-Sinaitic letters often seems rather random. How is this meant? So they took the Egyptian logogram 𓌉 for a mace but then they called it ‘hook’ and drew it in the shape of a hook 𐤅? How is that supposed to be a plausible ‘origin’ or ‘derivation’? And for 𐤄 /h/ they used two different hieroglyphs, 𓀠 and 𓀁, which the Egyptians took good care to keep clearly apart to signify completely different meanings, and just lumped them up into one? That does not make sense.

The fact that different scholars propose different hieroglyphs as models for the alphabetic letters and that other scholars say clearly that the alphabet was not derived from Egyptian writing shows that there is no consensus in science about this. Consequently, the table is original research and does not belong in an encyclopedia, no matter how convinced some Wikipedia authors are that this is correct.

Consequently, the ideas about the Egyptian inspiration can be mentioned in the article together with scholars contradicting them, but their details do not belong here, because these ideas are not generally accepted by the scientific community. And of course the same applies to the claims of hieroglyphic origins of letters in other articles, especially in the letter articles like Aleph; but I guess we should discuss this here. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 11:02, 7 March 2025 (UTC)

You need to provide reliable sources, otherwise we can't do anything. That means reliable sources that make the case, not just sources that provide the background for your case. Zero^talk 07:35, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Okay – here are a few more quotes making clear that the question of the origin of most of the character forms is quite unresolved (in chronological order):

Harald Haarmann (Universalgeschichte der Schrift, 2. Aufl., Frankfurt & New York: Campus 1991, 280): “But whoever the anonymous initiators of the consonant alphabets may have been, and whoever was involved in their continuous transmission, the creation of an alphabetic script without a direct model was an independent achievement from the contemporary point of view, and the end products of the experimental phase, the individual language writing systems, were in no obvious dependence on any of the scripts known at the time.” (“Wer immer aber die anonymen Initiatoren der Konsonantenalphabete gewesen sein mögen, und wer auch immer an deren kontinuierlicher Tradierung beteiligt gewesen war, die Schaffung einer Buchstabenschrift ohne ein direktes Vorbild war vom zeitgenössischen Standpunkt eine selbständige Leistung, und die Endprodukte der Experimentierphase, die einzelsprachlichen Schriftsysteme, standen in keiner ersichtlichen Abhängigkeit zu irgendeiner der damals bekannten Schriften.”)

Wolfgang Schenkel (“Die ägyptische Hieroglyphenschrift und ihre Weiterentwicklungen”, in Hartmut Günther & Otto Ludwig (eds.), Schrift und Schriftlichkeit, (HSK 10.1), Berlin & New York: De Gruyter 1994, 289–297, here 295): “However, the derivation of the character shapes from Egyptian cursive characters, which was already popular in the 19th century and gained renewed momentum in the 20th century with the discovery of the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions – the geographical missing link – is problematic [...].” (“Dagegen ist die Herleitung der Zeichenformen aus ägyptischen Kursiv-Zeichen, die bereits im 19. Jahrhundert beliebt war und durch die Entdeckung der proto-sinaitischen Inschriften — das geographische missing link — im 20. Jahrhundert noch einmal Oberwasser erhielt, problematisch […].”)

Harald Haarmann (Geschichte der Schrift, 4th edn., München: Beck 2015, 78): “Several characters of the Proto-Sinaitic script show clear parallels to the Egyptian character inventory, so that one can reasonably assume that the Sinaitic characters are derived from the Egyptian characters. Other characters, on the other hand, obviously come from other sources.” (“Etliche Zeichen der proto-sinaitischen Schrift weisen deutliche Parallelen zum ägyptischen Zeichenschatz auf, so daß man zu Recht annehmen kann, daß sich die sinaitischen von den ägyptischen Zeichen ableiten. Andere Zeichen wiederum stammen offensichtlich aus anderer Quelle.”) [added 14:53, 9 March 2025 (UTC)]

Ben Haring (“Ancient Egypt and the earliest known stages of alphabetic writing”, in Philip J. Boyes & Philippa M. Steele (eds.), Understanding relations between scripts II: Early alphabets, Oxford & Philadelphia: Oxbow 2020, 53–67, here 64): “[…] several signs even resist convincing hieroglyphic derivation. Egyptological researchers basically think of solutions to this problem in two different directions. One is to connect some Proto-Sinaitic and similar signs to cursive Egyptian writing (i.e. hieratic and cursive hieroglyphic inspiration in addition to monumental hieroglyphic; Kammerzell 2001, 145–151; Darnell et al. 2006, 76–82, 84–85). This […] poses the danger of self-confirming hypotheses. The search for prototypes in a vast Egyptian textual corpus of widely different genres, on different material supports, and in different sorts of monumental and cursive scripts is bound to be at least partly successful. But an even more compelling reason to be very cautious about this sort of analysis is that the corpus of Proto-Sinaitic and apparently related material is so very small, and therefore hopelessly insufficient for palaeographic comparison. […] Whereas some signs, such as the rejoicing man 𓀠 for h(e) and the lamp wick 𓎛 for ḫ(arm?) find possible or even compelling prototypes in Egyptian hieroglyphs, others, like the hand for kaph and the ‘corner’ for pe, are unlikely to have been inspired by hieroglyphic signs […].”
“If this is true, we may be dealing with a notation system that started off graphically as a mixed mode, some of the prototypes being characters of the Egyptian writing system(s), and others being concrete referents. Such a mixed-mode approach may be more productive than forcing all Proto-Sinaitic signs into a hieroglyphic matrix.” (ibid. 65)

Andrew Robinson (“Alphabetized: The origins of the world’s chief writing system come to life in an illuminating historiography”, Science 376(6600) (24 Jun 2022), 1387) about the Egyptian origin of the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet: “And yet, as always seems to be the case with the origins of the alphabet, this evidence is insufficient and awaits the discovery of more inscriptions, no doubt followed by more arguments among scholars.”

Cäcilia Töpler (“Alphabet”, in Martin Neef & Said Sahel & Rüdiger Weingarten (eds.), Schriftlinguistik (WSK 3), Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter 2024, 146–151, here 148): “The first alphabets originated in the West Semitic language area: the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was found in the Sinai desert […]. An actual impetus or origin of alphabetic writing is unknown; the ‘whether’ and ‘how’ of a connection between the first alphabets mentioned above is also under discussion […].” (“Die ersten Alphabete entstanden im westsemitischen Sprachraum: Das protosinaitische wurde in der Sinai-Wüste gefunden […]. Ein eigentlicher Anstoß oder Ursprung alphabetischen Schreibens ist unbekannt; auch das Ob und Wie eines Zusammenhangs zwischen den genannten ersten Alphabeten ist in der Diskussion […].”)

So all I am saying is: It’s complicated. For example, for /d/ we have Colless saying it was derived from 𓉿, Simons not being sure whether it is from 𓆟 or 𓆡, and the people I quoted saying that it is more probable that 𐤃 is simply a door drawn from nature, without any hieroglyphic or hieratic model. I would not call this a scientific consensus, and therefore Wikipedia should not present it as if it was. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 17:42, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for your collation here. I agree at a bare minimum that nothing in the literature would permit us to state direct correspondences between Proto-Sinaitic letters and hieroglyphic prototypes without qualification like we're presently doing. Remsense ‥ 论 22:42, 8 March 2025 (UTC)

Coincidentally, a few days ago I changed History of the alphabet to insert it is conjectured that, given that the provenance is by no means rock solid.

Nevertheless, the citations in favour are not small beer (copied from History of the Alphabet):

• "Sinaitic inscriptions". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2019-08-21.
• Goldwasser, O. (2012). "The Miners that Invented the Alphabet – a Response to Christopher Rollston". Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections. 4 (3). doi:10.2458/azu_jaei_v04i3_goldwasser.
• Goldwasser, O. (2010). "How the Alphabet was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (2): 40–53.
• Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
• Goldwasser, Orly (2010). "How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs". Biblical Archaeology Review. 36 (1). Washington, D.C.: Biblical Archaeology Society. ISSN 0098-9444. Retrieved 6 Nov 2011.

So it may be that for NPOV we have to include both perspectives (it is not Wikipedia's role to arbitrate in academic disputes but I admit to finding Daniel's quasi-paradolia explanation persuasive). 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 16:46, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

To ensure clarity for those skimming the discussion: this primarily regards the unclear origins of specific letterforms in the earliest attested alphabet, not the general fact that alphabetic writing as a concept emerged in a context of hieroglyphic writing proximate to but not centered in that time and place. That is to say, it's correct to say that the Proto-Sinaitic script descends from hieroglyphic writing in the broad strokes (do-ho-ho). Remsense ‥ 论 16:48, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I perfectly agree that some influence of Egyptian writing played a role, but probably more in the concept (the existence of characters for individual sounds and the acrophonic principle) and only secondarily in the actual shape of just a few of the letters. I would call this inspiration though, not descent. The Greek alphabet is descended from the Phoenician. There we can trace both the shape and the sound value of every letter to a Phoenician letter. With hieroglyphs, the sound values have nothing to do with the allegedly corresponding alphabetic letters at all, and visual similarities are sometimes striking (which does not mean they cannot be coincidental) but often disputed and very much depend on which shape in which of the few documents we have one chooses for comparison. – In short, let’s agree on inspiration, okay?
As to the references – this is Orly plus a second-hand account plus a different encyclopedia. The same Encyclopedia Britannica, by the way, in a different article cites a multitude of theories about the origin of the alphabet, among which the Egyptian theory is only one. The article Proto-Sinaitic script quotes a couple more authors who argue for an Egyptian ‘descent’ of the letter shapes, but this is still far from consensual. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 21:12, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

I had been working on History of writing for the past few months but hadn't worked on this particular junction yet—do you feel my description I've rewritten spurred by this post suffices? Remsense ‥ 论 21:32, 9 March 2025 (UTC)

(Sorry, I was busy.) I guess it’s quite a good summary. I would probably replace “it adapted concepts and at least some of its written letterforms” with probably some, but maybe we should first find a suitable description in this article before dealing with short versions of it in other articles. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 18:51, 11 March 2025 (UTC)

Given your research into the matter, you should revise and improve the article and use the sources you found to remake the table using the most reliable acrophonies and names for each glyph and perhaps removing the column

Last year, myself and several others undertook an effort to remake the previous table, although I was biased in my quest to find symbols for all Proto-Semitic phonemes while using observations and synthesis to pinpoint whether one glyph was dag, nūn, or samk and revise names (e.g., ṣimaḥ based on a Hebrew word for plant instead of ṣad) that I have undone.

On a partly related matter, fellow editor Temerarius has associated the Y-shaped waw variant with 𓌀, the was-sceptre, although this doesn't count as an academic source. Cnscrptr (talk) 22:54, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Specific points

Just so the ontology or whatever is clear here: I'll put aside the laser-targeted excising of ancient Israelites and the Hebrew language justified by three distinct arguments tried one after the other, and just make clear why the final reason isn't right. While it is nigh-universal scholarly consensus that Hebrew is a Canaanite language and Israelite ethnicity emerged in Canaan among a thoroughly Canaanite cultural context, it is likewise universally understood that said ethnogenesis occurred. By contrast, there was no Canaanite ethnicity as such, so the idea that "Canaanite", "Israelite" and "Hyksos" are three top-level categories requires deliberate stretching of what we're talking about and why. Secondly, the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet is misplaced, but likely deserves mention as one of the direct descendants of Phoenician alongside Greek and also Aramaic. Remsense 🌈 论 16:15, 25 August 2025 (UTC)

Politico-religious interpretations and article vandalism when it comes to hypotheses surrounding the script's supposed "daddy" status

Other examples of earliest known alphabetic writing systems include "group writing" found in pyramids in Egypt or yet still the large-scale use of Ugaritic alphabet although commonly dated to the later 14th century BC and in which one of the oldest known ABCs was written. The Byblos Script is thought to have been contemporaneous to the Proto-Sinaitic script. Both scripts are still undeciphered although the Byblos syllabary is assumed to be a syllabary and has striking graphical resemblance with the Proto-Sinaitic and other alphabets commonly found in or near the Canaanite region. Contemporaneous Egyptian inscriptions mentioning the city of Byblos ("kpn") have also been found very close to Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions meaning that the Phoenician alphabet may equally have descended from the Byblos script. Another example of an early alphabetical system is the inscription found at Avaris, capital city of the Hyksos and that resembles the Safaitic script.

Indeed, deducing the visual origin of any writing system can be notoriously difficult and this is compounded by the fact that writing systems may not always have had one single origin. On top of that, writing systems have multiple, sometimes independent attributes such as alphabetical order, letter naming conventions, direction of writing, number of glyphs, graphical style or the languages written in it including associated pronunciation of those letters. Studying the attributes of a writing system together as a whole first is an approach that finds it's origins in outdated ideas surrounding nationality and religious identity and may produce misleading results. When it comes to language classification for instance, theories such as the wave model may complement or sometimes even supplement the tree model, the latter being more focused on establishing a hierarchy of languages rather than identifying relationships between languages or scripts.

Due to what is arguably the current loss of interest in the field of Semitic epigraphy by the general public, the field today attracts fewer scholars motivated primarily by scientific advancement alone, with many also motivated by the interpretation or confirmation of religious texts. The hypotheses surrounding the evolution of Proto-Sinaitic and the small number of Proto-Canaanite inscriptions from the Bronze Age is based on rather scant epigraphic evidence such that one is invited to friendly caution in concluding to a "Phoenician/Hebrew/Sinaitic" single-source origin for any alphabet. It is only with the Bronze Age collapse and the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the Levant that Proto-Canaanite is clearly attested (Byblos inscriptions 10th–8th century BC, Khirbet Qeiyafa inscription c. 10th century BC).

One such example of blanket repeated undoing of changes is User:Oklopfer which needs to take the time to read changes before undoing them from his phone.

The way in which the Proto-Sinaitic glyphs were ordered is presently unknown and often assumed to be the "abg" but this remains to be proven.

Timestampy (talk) 13:08, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

The second and third paragraphs stray far from the topic, see WP:COATRACK. Due to what is arguably the current loss of interest in the field of Semitic epigraphy by the general public, the field today attracts fewer scholars motivated primarily by scientific advancement alone, with many also motivated by the interpretation or confirmation of religious texts is a complete digression. Also, Wikipedia articles don't invite anybody to do anything. I don't know whether there's anything in the first paragraph of true relevance, I'll leave it to Oklopfer to respond to that, but the second and third paragraphs are clearly out of place. Largoplazo (talk) 14:38, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for quickly removing your fast undo of this Talk section, I appreciate it. My adding in the main article of plenty of detail regarding the Proto-Sinaitic script and removing of inaccurate and misleading elements might not make one happy. I'm noticing that I'm not being asked to be accurate about this script, quite the contrary. I'm also noticing that I have received a grand total of zero requests for any kind of citation before the targeted and blanket mobile phone undos that User:Oklopfer has made on my edits on multiple articles. Indeed, I argue that what I removed was either repetition or misleading the reader on the nature and current understanding of the script. I'm not arguing against any hypothesis as I find them all to be worth pursuing and describing. I argue that passing off mere hypotheses as all-encompassing fact are misleading at best.

In an article that is wholly unrelated to religion, citing religious scholars to support misleading vandalism is also not welcome. Confirmation of political motives through nationalistic or religious doctrine can focus solely on said doctrines rather than on archaeaology and epigraphy (this seems logical to me especially when one may consider them to be true). Is the basis of this article to validate political motives or is it to describe and study a script currently found in Egypt? Let me guess, these problems would all go away if we renamed the script to the Proto-Egypt Script?

I see massive digressions in Talk sections above this one and you don't seem to take any issue with that whatsoever. On a more general note, I can only express concern that Wikipedia may not be a worthwhile source to edit if widespread censorship on Wikipedia vandalism has already taken place most notably for topics surrounding the region just north of the Sinai peninsula.

As you said, I would completely agree with you that the second and third paragraphs I wrote in my previous talk edit are out of place here but in current circumstances and political attitudes towards this script, I argue that they are sadly relevant. See Nationalism and archaeology. Timestampy (talk) 15:29, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

I was commenting on two different things: the apparent (till I got to the end) irrelevance of your post here for talk page purposes, and the tangential nature of the second and third paragraphs when you added them to the article. All the other discussions on this talk page are about the article. Largoplazo (talk) 15:36, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

"All the other discussions on this talk page are about the article."

Your suggestion that my talk section "is not" about the Proto-Sinaitic Script article constitutes gaslighting. Are you saying that my edits are not written in good faith? Timestampy (talk) 15:47, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Who's gaslighting whom? The bulk of your post here was a verbatim copy of what you'd added to the article. It wasn't commentary about the article. Largoplazo (talk) 16:37, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

The reason I copied the text is obvious. It was implied to me that it was better for the Talk section and I took the initiative of copying it here as a precaution following repeated vandalism of my edits. I'm faced with people who think what I wrote is not for the main article and others that it's not for the talk section. I'd argue that what isn't for the main article are political interpretations of what are otherwise perfectly interesting hypotheses surrounding the script as the "mother-of-all". It's worth nothing that other misleading articles can be seen elsewhere such as on the Syria page which mentions the Ugarit alphabet as "the oldest alphabet in history" which of course is not proven to be true since Proto-Sinaitic and other alphabetical scripts have been dated to earlier times. That doesn't take away from how some of the things I found on the main Proto-Sinaitic Script article were not evidence-based but wishful thinking at best. It's my edits on this article that have attracted vandalism on my other edits elsewhere on Wikipedia. Other articles have not attracted such censorship scrutiny. To me, this is further proof that what I copied here is currently relevant to the main article (my exact wording far from perfect of course) but it would, of course, be fantastic if that isn't the case. Given the attitude my edits have received here, I'm standing by most of the gist of the paragraphs I wrote. I'm not seeing any self-doubt from others here when it comes to previous edits. Unfortunately, I'm starting to think that this article is part of the north-of-the-Sinai-peninsula edit wars on Wikipedia and that partial editing is the norm here and that we are not dealing with an epigraphy-motivated article. With this observation in mind I'd like to apologize (to myself) for editing this page as it was my intention to avoid political or religious topics (it's for this same reason that I did not edit the Syria page). I would also like to thank all participants that I have interacted with on this page to bring this political issue to my attention. I'll say that we can all be even more self-confident and find a resolution to any matters dear to all of us. I'll leave you to be attentive to your own matters and will not attempt further edits on the main article. Thank you for your patience. Timestampy (talk) 17:22, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

To editor Timestampy: I see that you added a large amount of material to Ugaritic alphabet with a minimum of sources. Much of it is now present as unattributed opinion, which is unacceptable. Even if you are a subject-matter expert, you are not allowed to do that here. Wikipedia is a compendium of reliably published information, not a compendium of the opinions of editors. Zero^talk 15:33, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your much appreciated comment, I will add and improve sources and their diversity to edits I have already made including the Ugaritic alphabet article. Timestampy (talk) 15:50, 17 June 2026 (UTC)

References