Wilson-Wright Misreadings

MISREADING THE SINAI PROTOALPHABETIC INSCRIPTIONS

Brian Edric Colless  MA BD PhD ThD

This is my vehement and aggrieved response to an article by Aren M. Wilson-Wright, concerning the interpretation of four early alphabetic inscriptions from the ancient Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula (Sinai 351, 353, 360, 361). She had already published incorrect readings of other Sinai inscriptions (345, 357). 

   "Beloved of the Lady are those who ...": a recurring memorial formula on the Sinaitic inscriptions.
Bulletin of ASOR, Number 384, November 2020, 133-158.

Wilson-Wright's BASOR article was "peer-reviewed", but obviously by scholars like herself, who are clinging to the rigid paradigm that was promulgated by the great William Foxwell Albright (1966).

She takes no account of my alternative paradigm (first issued in 1988), and now outlined here in revised form (Colless 2014):
https://www.academia.edu/12894458/The_origin_of_the_alphabet
More recently, in the light of newly discovered inscriptions:
https://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2021/04/another-lakish-inscription.html

From my vantage point in this field, I can dismiss this case at a single stroke.  The second letter in the right-hand column of Sinai 351 is not T (a cross) but K (a horizontal version of |=, attested elsewhere as K); and this immediately fractures his reading of all four inscriptions; indeed, every word in his transcription is wrong, dut-tibattun mat naqqab wa-latt (the misidentified letters are in bold type). My personal grievance is that he has taken no account of my published work on this subject (dated 1988 and 1990). However, he has made some good observations on a number of points, and published his new photographs, which can be used to strengthen my own position, but also to correct some of my own misconceptions.  
     My attempt to read the four texts under scrutiny has already been summarized here, and reference needs to be made to it for photographs and drawings :

http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/11/ancient-metal-melting-sinai-inscription.html

   Here is a copy of Wilson-Wright's photograph of Sinai 351, with their mostly accurate drawing, and inaccurate transcription of the text:

 Sinai 351
Transcription (Wilson-Wright) Column 1 is on the left side, in his unique view.
(1) m ⸢ˀ h b b ʕ⸣ l t (2) d t b t n m t n q b w l t
Vocalization
(1) ma⸢ˀahib⸣ ⸢baʕ⸣lat (2) dut-tibattun mat naqqab wa-latt
Translation
(1) Beloved of the Lady are (2) those who tell people about Mat, miner and extractor.

Wilson-Wright (151b) “will seek to justify this translation linguistically and contextually”; for my part, I will endeavour to refute their claims, on the grounds that he has disastrously misread the inscriptions and overlooked the obvious contextual clues embedded in the environment of the texts.

Incorrect readings of letters in their transcription (above, all in their column 2) are highlighted in bold type, and tabulated here:
    T  > K (the alleged cross, for T, is a K); on this crux his entire case is crucified;
    T (Th) .> Sh  (the two supposed "composite bows",  presumed to represent T, from a hypothetical word *tann, are really sun symbols, with two serpents embracing the solar disc (the disc is often omitted, as is the case here) denoting Sh, from shimsh "sun");
    Q  > S./Sadey/ç/ (the basic flaw in the consensus paradigm, causing several more errors);
    LT > T./Tet (both columns purportedly end with the letters LT, but, in his opinion, the pair in the right-hand column have been combined in a ligature;  but the circle and cross sign [+o] is proto-alphabetic Tet, the Egyptian hieroglyph for nefer, "good and beautiful", corresponding to Semitic t.ab "good").

These four mistakes will ensure that Wilson-Wright's arrow from his imaginary "composite bow" will fall wide of the mark. He interprets the text as the pious utterance of a Semitic turquoise miner named Mâth, requesting his readers to speak well of him, and invoking the blessing of the Lady (b`lt, Baalat), a loving goddess. This is plausible in principle, and he adduces Egyptian inscriptions of such a kind, involving the goddess  Hat-hor, Lady of Turquoise, blessing those who pray for the person named in the inscription (p. 153, and  also n. 36, referencing Sinai 106,  plus Sinai 36, 136, 413). He is proposing a “beatitude”, along the lines of “Blessed are they who speak well of Math the Miner” (but overlooking “Woe to you when all people speak well of you”,  Luke 6:26).

Contrariwise, I recognize it as an official proclamation that the metalworking equipment situated in the vicinity of this notice is protected by the prefect of the mining expedition, and is also under the aegis ("beloved") of the Lady, the goddess `Anat, who has a ferocious side; this is more a malediction than a benediction. The “context” for this interpretation consists in the metallurgical apparatus that has been found inside the mine.

I confess that before I stumbled on the K B Sh N M Sh sequence as meaning “melt-furnace”,  working from the clue provided by the archaeological evidence from the turquoise mines, I had thought of many other possible interpretations of this inscription, namely Sinai 351. Wilson-Wright does not countenance any other interpretations. Albright found a serpent in BShN, and I can now see a mongoose in NMSh. At ancient Rehob there was an apiary, and an interesting artefact from the site was a miniature house of clay, with two snakes at the entrance, and a mongoose on the top; some of the Rehob inscriptions have NMSh in them. Here we can detect (improbably) “house (B, logogram) of (sh) the mongoose (nmsh).

Please be aware that the presentation of my case will involve a plethora of technical details from this point on, delivered in my chat style, with gentle jibes and japes, but also snide asides, with value judgements; and even those scholars who think they know something about this area of study may be puzzled by the new paradigm that I am proposing (actually, reiterating). Here we go: the current paradigms are not worth a pair o’ dimes, and those who parade them are parrots imprisoned in a cage. However, if I use the word “pitiful” for this state of affairs, I want the insinuated contempt to decrease, and the implied compassion to increase. When one has found the correct answer to a puzzle, it is not spiteful but helpful to inform the other contestants that they are wrong.

We are going on a long and arduous journey. Diagnosed with heart and kidney failure, I am approaching my High Noon; I am perhaps in my twelfth hour (what the rest of the world calls the eleventh hour, but that starts at 10 o’clock pm). Accordingly (or discordantly) I am discarding my characteristic placidity and pacificity (I am a Pacific pacific person) and coming out with guns blazing, in the great American NRA way (actually I am Not Really Aggressive). I intend to storm the consensus capitol of protoalphabetic research, and burn down its library of conspiratorial congress, since it is packed with a mass and mess of falsehood.  I am not purveying fake news; my case is not about stopping a big steal (though I strongly suspect that my votes have not been counted), but about awakening the unwoke from obliviousness.

Aren Wilson-Wright has innocently committed a number of “impeachable” offences in their publications on the Sinai inscriptions (particularly 2016 and 2020); here are three of his bad peaches:
    (1) She has not taken into account the important archaeological evidence from Israeli excavations at Serabit el-Khadim, in February 1977 and March 1978, as reported by Itzhaq Beit-Arieh (1985, Levant 17, 89-116), though he has referred to Beit-Arieh’s “Investigations in Mine L” (1978, Tel Aviv 5, 175-182).  In his summary (115-116) Beit-Arieh suggests connections between some of the Semitic inscriptions and [1] the metallurgical finds associated with mines that have such inscriptions (notably mines L and G); [2] the “coppersmiths” mentioned in Egyptian inscriptions from the temple at Serabit (Sinai 71 85 87 106 114 122 136 413); [3] and also the Amu (Asiatics) of Retenu (Syria-Palestine, the Levant), attested in the Egyptian inscriptions (for example, Sinai 114, “from Retenu 10 Amu”). These copper workers were essential to the whole enterprise, as they made and remade the tools used by the miners. By my calculations, half of the Semitic inscriptions are connected with metallurgy and smiths (bn kr, “sons of the furnace”), and only a few refer to mines and mining. Wilson-Wright (134) alludes to “men of Retenu (rtnw)” and “Asiatics (`3mw)”, and also “translators”, but overlooks the “coppersmiths” documented in the Egyptian records.
 
NOTE: In this regard, I take the opportunity of stating my unpublished hypothesis concerning these ethnic and geographic terms: in Mesopotamia in the Bronze Age the eastern Semites referred to the western Semites of Syria by the names Amurru and Tidnum; in Egypt the record-keepers spoke of the `Amu and Retenu; we can thus propose this equation:
    Amurru Tidnum = `Amu Retenu
This solution assumes a misunderstanding on the part of the Egyptians. What other origins have been suggested for Retenu? I had toyed with a Semitic root RS.N, producing “a pleasant land” (Sinuhe’s “goodly land”) or similar; but Amurru Tidnum is more appealing.)

    (2) Wilson-Wright has ignored or tacitly rejected my research on the protoalphabet (Colless 1988, 1990, 1991, 1992, 2010, 2016), even though I alerted him (in 2018) to my publications on the subject (as summarised on my Cryptcracker site). The reason he gives (n. 26) for sidelining so many of the scholars who “have worked on the Sinaitic inscriptions” is this: “in the interest of space, I only refer to the epigraphic opinions of Butin (1932), Albright (1966), Sass (1988), and Hamilton (2006)”, since “these four scholars represent the state of the art at different points in the history of scholarship”; but “the state of the art “in those periods was abysmal, in the informal sense (mercifully, he does not aggrandize it as science, but as imaginative artistry); none of his mentors, and now also himself, has published a verified table of signs (some of their equations are sheer guesswork) or credible transcriptions and translations based on archaeological context (abundant at the Sinai mines); and yet he can find space (155b and n. 47) to give partial support to Orly Goldwasser’s untenable thesis of the invention of the alphabet by illiterate Semitic miners, and giving his phantom “miner and extractor” named Math a possible place in the process; I presented my refutation of Goldwasser’s ideas on the origin of the alphabet in my 2016  article on the subject. My decipherment and translations of the Sinai inscriptions (1990) arose out of the clues on the site (mining and metallurgy, obviously, and also indications of food and water storage and distribution).

    (3) As an enthusiastc neophyte Wilson-Wright faithfully adhered to the conservative dogmas, and chose to follow an untrustworthy guide (W. F. Albright’s 1966 table of signs and sound-values, as processed with a few additions but no improvements by G. J. Hamilton, 2006; in my view, half of Hamilton’s identifications are fallacious). We all agree that the correct starting point for any system pertaining to the protoalphabet is Gardiner 1916 (JEA),
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/030751331600300101
This groundbreaking article established [1] acrophony as the basis of the formation of the Semitic alphabet, [2] the relation of its pictorial characters to the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, [3] the West Semitic linear consonantary (the Phoenician alphabet) as a subsequent stage of its development. The two main streams flowing from this source are: the Tigris (thihk: paper tiger) of Albright (1966) to Cross (1980, BASOR 238), Sass (1988), Hamilton (2006), Goldwasser (2006, 2010), and all the hopeless and hapless amateurs who have tried vainly and voidly to ride this tiger; and the Euphrates (right-minded) of Butin (1932, HTR) to Colless; solitarily, Douglas Petrovich has borrowed the Colless table, publicised it (PEQ, 147, 2, 2015, 136), but made unnecessary alterations to it in an injudicious book on the protoalphabet. Let it be understood, however, that I am a fervent Albrightian (William Foxwell Albright holds the place in my life that some people reserve for Donald J. Trump) and I am still a  reader of Albright, Wright, Bright, Burrows, and Mendenhall; but, with his feet of clay, Albright muddied the waters of protoalphabetic epigraphy, and so Cross (Canaan), Sass (Sinai), Dijkstra (Sinai), McCarter (Wadi el-Hol), and Hamilton (whose 400-page manual on the subject is deeply muddled) have not achieved decipherment of the proto-alphabetic texts by applying Albright’s table to them; and Wilson-Wright’s piecemeal approach is likewise doomed to failure. From my viewpoint (which encompasses metal-mines with Bronze Age West Semitic inscriptions in America and Scandinavia) the only complete set of reasonable and justifiable translations of the Sinai protoalphabetic inscriptions (a veritable oasis in the Sinai desert) is offered by Colless (1990, with subsequent additions and corrections, including this present essay after it has been cleansingly and salubriously redacted, with my enormities deleted, and Wilson-Wright’s atrocities reduced to fine print in refined footnotes); my corpus of transcriptions and translations is not a corpse, though it has been buried in grave disregard (perhaps conspiratorially so, or simply because it has been published in remote places in the Southern Hemisphere, such as Melbourne and Buenos Aires).  Stefan Wimmer made this point about the tyranny of distance keeping my research out of sight and out of mind, when he accepted my identification of the sun-sign (Ra`) as Sh in the protoalphabet.
 http://jaei.library.arizona.edu| Journal of Ancient Egyptian Connections (Vol. 2:2, 2010| 1–12)

Nevertheless, recapitulating without capitulating, I affirm that the Albright coterie and myself acknowledge the following points (all derived from Alan Gardiner’s theory):
    [1[ the language of the inscriptions is Semitic, and Wilson-Wright (152) categorizes it as Central Semitic (though his opinion would be based on erroneous readings of the texts);
    [2] the sound-values of the letters were assigned by the principle of acrophony (and yet many intelligent onlookers obstinately deny this fact);
    [3] the Phoenican consonantal alphabet and the “Proto-Sinaitic” script are genetically related (denied, with a firm but unfounded dismissal of acrophony, by Barry B. Powell, Writing, 2009;
    [4] the letters were modeled on Egyptian hieroglyphs; Hamilton (5-6) has helpfully summarized the opinions of scholars who have spoken on this subject; Colless (1988, 1990, 1991) is placed in the predominant affirmative group, which also includes Hamilton (1985) and Sass (1988), both doctorate studies, whereas most of the judgements, for or against, would have been made after relatively superficial inspection; surprisingly, Albright’s tables do not have a hieroglyph column; Cross only ceded “several” (five or so) borrowings.

The parting of the ways occurs when their tables of signs (largely based on speculation and misreadings of texts) are compared with mine (the earliest charts show presumed hieroglyphic connections, and relations to the Phoenician, Grecian, and Arabian derivatives,  1988, 1990, 1991; next, the proto-alphabet’s relation to the West Semitic syllabary, its progenitor, 1992, 1998; and now a table and a chart of the evolution of all the letters, 2014, 102-103).

My complete decipherment of the Sinai inscriptions was published in 1990 (complete in the sense of offering interpretations of the four dozen available items, but incomplete as regards identifying all the letters); at the same time I composed a step-by-step decipherment, in which a new letter was identified at each step, beginning with Gardiner’s clue, B`LT; this was submitted to BASOR, and promptly rejected. I thought I detected the voice of Frank Moore Cross in the rather irrational rationale given for the rejection. Be that as it may, I was accused of cherry-picking among the Semitic languages to justify the vocabulary I claimed to have detected; but this was the Bronze Age (Middle Kingdom and New Kingdom) when these languages were closer together. By the way, Cross (1967) noted that he had seen Mendenhall’s decipherment of the Byblos syllabic tablets, and they revealed a very ancient language; but when the article was reprinted in an anthology (Leaves),  the note was omitted; Mendenhall’s book on the subject had been published in 1985, and unjustly vilified, and his idea that the seeds of the proto-alphabet were contained in this proto-syllabary was sidelined. This logo-syllabic script (as also the West Semitic language of its inscriptions) is certainly old, dating from the Middle Bronze Age, and it used some Old Kingdom cursive hieroglyphs in its repertoire of signs (James Hoch, 1990); as read by Mendenhall and myself, the first sentence of Text D  has two words that are usually considered to be Akkadian: matati (lands) and kiti (kittu, constancy, truth, loyalty, solidarity, Semitic root kwn); but they may have been common to West and East Semitic.
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2021/01/byblos-syllabic-texts.html

For the Sinai inscriptions, Butin (1928:50) gave me “Babylonian unutu” (vessel, equipment, not in the Bible, but attested once in the Babylonian Talmud, and on an Aramaic magic bowl, Christa Müller-Kessler, ANES 36, 1999, 169-171, “a vessel of oil”) to match the sequence `NT at the beginning of Sinai inscriptions 349 and 357, which Albright took to be ’anta, “you”, and likewise Wilson-Wright in his reading of 349, but unwisely preferring L to N in 357; in the first instance (349) the vessels of  the apparatus (`rk) or equipment (’nt) would be crucibles and moulds for metal working, as exemplified by archaeological discoveries at Mine L; in the other case (357) the vessels were a goatskin waterbag (’b) and a jug (kd), for watering the garden (gn), and a pilgrim flask was found in Mine L; in Wilson-Wright’s published articles on these two texts, he has missed these basic points; and, as I now consult my unpublished glossary, I find that the majority of the words are known in the Bible, and this repertory comes perilously near to supporting Douglas Petrovich’s  impudent and imprudent thesis, that the language (and phonology) of the protoalphabetic inscriptions was Biblical Hebrew.  The other defect in my submitted article was in my palaeography, which needed more work; certainly my drawings were not always exact reproductions of the inscriptions, as is true of Wilson-Wright’s signed drawings, and is particularly true of van den Branden’s erratic sketches; though Albright’s drawings (all except 349 and 357 are by Herbert Huffmon) are useful; and presumably my drawings contained elements that contradicted the authorised consensus; thus I identified many signs as K (as in 351, under scrutiny here) where Albright saw S.adey or Taw; my revolutionary table of signs would have been judged as the disruptive work of a devil’s advocate, who should not be given a hearing. With hindsight I myself can see certain deficiencies, and since then I have attenpted the same feat on my Cryptcracker site, with the bilingual sphinx (Sinai 345) as the starting point:
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/07/alphabetic-sphinx-of-sinai-this.html
The headings in the sideline-index there (with the keywords Asa or Sinai) will conduct you to the other “chapters” of that “book”.

The meagre contribution of Cross (amounting to half of Sinai 358, on a wall in Mine M) contains two errors, which are instructive for our purposes, showing the sleight of hand and misdirection that goes on in this allegedly scientific pursuit. I would read the right-side vertical line as: ox, fish, mouth, eye, crook, water; and I transcribe this, following Butin (1932, 185), as ’S P ` L M. For Cross (and Hamilton, n. 230, contra Colless) there is no mouth-sign in the proto-alphabet, only eye-signs with or without a pupil (even though the Hebrew name for the letter P is Pe, “mouth”); here is an eye with a pupil, and the sign preceding it (a mouth) has no pupil, and therefore the two corners of the mouth have to be prestidigitationally removed [=] so that the lips can say D/Dh (the very sign which begins all four of the stelas we are examining with Wilson-Wright); and the fish on the Albright line is not Samk but Dag, hence D, though Cross and Hamilton eventually and reluctantly allow door (dalt, hence Delta, clearly a door in its Sinai and Arabian examples, and Roman D!) as an allograph for D, since “for some letters, alternate pictographs were used in different scribal traditions” (Cross 1989, 80); that is true, and we should keep it in mind, but the fish (samk) goes with the Djed-pillar Samek [--|-|-|] as shown by tests in the texts, and other indicators, such as the fish in the South Arabian alphabet representing  a sibilant, and the fish in the Samek position in the abgadary on the Izbet Sartah ostracon (see the drawing of the abecedary, by Cross, in Cross 1989, Fig. 5, and BASOR 238, 1980, Fig. 9, and Fig, 10, photograph; his prejudgement made him ignore the possibility that it was a fish). Consequently (though his reading is of no consequence) Cross can force the letters to read ’D D `LM, and extract a false meaning from them, to wit “(Divine) Father, lord of eternity” (Cross 1969, 81, Fig. 2 caption; likewise Hamilton, 358); but previously, Cross (1962, HTR 55, 238, followed by Albright, 1966, 24) had conjured a letter L out of the body of the fish, and produced “’El (god) of eternity”. Sadly, Albright and Rainey (both heroes in my estimation) went bumbling down the wrong path (Anson once sent me a terse message: The fish is D. Period). Albert van den Branden (1979, 214) rightly realized that ’S  is a man’s name and P `L is a verb, hence “Aws a fait”. (Like me, he rarely rates a mention in dispatches in this ruthless war.) As I see it, the full inscription runs thus (with my suggested division of words):
  ’S  P `L MLKTH  “Asa has done his work”.
Butin had also recognized the Phoenician verb p`l, “make, do”, and  this statement (though it is an obituary in its context) has an echo in Genesis 2:2 (my novel translation, to save God from apparently still working on the Sabbath Day): “And by the seventh day God had finished (wykl) his work (ml’ktw) that he had done (`sh), and so he rested  on the seventh day”. Note the different words for “do” (p`l versus `sh, usually considered to be a distinguishing mark between Phoenician and Hebrew), and notice that the word for work has an Alep in Genesis; an Alep may be hiding on the cave wall, but, as Wilson-Wright recognizes,  Alep may quiesce, as in M’HBB`LT becoming MHB`LT; I have proposed that the full form ML’KT in the third line of 349, but W-W suggests B`LT (who is otherwise missing); a faint possibility is the sequence BN KR, “son(s) of the furnace”, as the next line of the text apparently has “brothers” (’hn). This quiescence of Alep may be an indicator of date: its presence denotes Middle Kingdom, its absence indicates New Kingdom, perhaps. So, we are observing the various problems we encounter in reading the Sinai inscriptions; and illegibility of some letters (from weather damage) is a major difficulty; another shortcoming is misidentification of letters, either by mistaken observation of a sign, or applying the incorrect value to a sign, when relying on the Albright paradigm, which is set in stone for the consensus scholars, but, as with the Sinai inscriptions, it is sandstone, fragile and friable, and it will eventually crumble, when it is blasted by the winds of change and truth.

I now have an opportunity to state my full case, in debate with a colleague (“my learned friend”, as is said in New Zealand court rooms; and I want it to be known that I do sincerely admire her grasp of Semitics, and I think she should be leading the vanguard in establishing the ancient phonology of the West Semitic scripts, sorting out the sibilants, distinguishing the gutturals). Your Honour, in a non-adversial fashion, I want to say to my adversaries that they need to give up their addiction to gasolene-burning, air-polluting sports utility vehicles and get into electricity-driven cars (or onto an electric bicycle, in my case) and drive on the left-hand side of the road. I simply mean to say that  you are all going the wrong way.

What is my authority for passing such severe judgement on the work of my esteemed collaborators in this field? Simply the fact that I have been deeply involved, totally immersed, in the writing systems of the world for most of my life (born 1936). In seeking the origin of the alphabet, my focus has been on West Semitic evidence from the Mediterranean region, including the islands Crete and Cyprus, and even from trans-Atlantic regions. In my Dip. Ed. Year at Sydney University (1958) I copied out by hand (how else? no photocopiers in the Fisher Library then!) the details of the Ahirom inscription from the journal Syria (Dussaud 1924), and eventually (in 1965 for MTh London [failed]) graduating to the palaeography section of S. R. Driver’s Notes on the Books of Samuel (now ever at hand as I seek to put the Qeiyafa inscriptions in their historical context) and I began adding to my store of ancient languages and scripts: Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Akkadian, Sumerian, Greek, including Linear B, starting with Leonard Cottrell’s Bull of Minos, and finally, following Cyrus Gordon and Jan Best, convincing myself that at least some of the Linear A texts are Semitic: I found on offering tables ATAI SOWAYA, “I bring my offering”, YATAI SOUYA, “My offering is brought”; note the nominative u and accusative a. 
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2016/09/semitic-crete.html
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2017/06/aegean-syllabic-signs.html

I was introduced to the protoalphabet by the table of signs in Albright’s Archaeology of Palestine, and ultimately his two published decipherment attempts (1948 and 1966), the second of which is a disastrous failure, because he chose to read the established M’HBB`LT not as “beloved of Baalat” but as “Swear to bring a sacrifice (`lt whole burnt offering)”, thereby incinerating his entire scheme in a holocaust; nevertheless, if Albright had lived to see the results of the Israeli excavations at the Serabit turquoise mines. then he may have responded to Beit-Arieh’s call to look for connections between the inscriptions and the metallurgical evidence; but nobody did, not even Benjamin Sass (1988), even though he was there, and found a forge at Mine G,  and an undeciphered inscription announcing a “melt-furnace” with a “brazier”. Another keen visitor to the Sinai mines, Emile Puech (Origine de l’alphabet,  RB 1986, and subsequently 2002, after he had seen and frowned upon my 1988 and 1990 publications) meritoriously has the fish as Samek, the door as Dalet, the boomerang as Gimel, the mouth as Pe; but he accepts Albright’s unfounded Sh and Th, and  Qaw; he provides useful photographs and drawings, particularly of the metal-melting inscriptions, but he abstains from making such a connection. For my part, felicity had arrived through close acquaintance with Romain Butin’s photographs, drawings, and tables; and I gained some profit from the failed attempt at decipherment by van den Branden (1979), but his table of signs was superior to Albright’s (fish as Samek, 8-sign as Sadey, bag); in 1987 I gave a lecture on the origin of the alphabet in Christchurch (NZ), and a student of Albert van den Branden happened to be there (a good omen); thereafter Takamitsu Muraoka gladly accepted my series of articles on the West Semitic scripts, for Abr-Nahrain, the journal of the department at Melbourne University in which I had done my advanced studies in Semitics. Incidentally, I have refrained from publishing a glossary of the vocabulary I have identified in the Sinai collection, since those of Albright and van den Branden are utterly worthless and baseless, full of fake news and alternate facts, and I did not wish to make the same mistake, and put a blot on my record; but I am more confident now, even though my trusty system suffers from lack of visible means of external support.

Multitudes of scholars and amateurs have tried to crack the protoalphabetic code, and so the correct solution is likely to be lurking in the mass of partial decipherments; it can be plucked out of the entwining branches of this tree by astute fruit-picking, supported by linguistic decipherment of the texts, involving a patient and persistent process of trial and error.

Not the circular argument but a linear argument, or better, lineal method, following ancestral lines (descent)

We wish we had more inscriptions to work with, to enable us to view the distortions and contortions that the signs went through in the stages from their pictorial to their stylized forms.

A great exhibition of multifaceted irony in this arena is that Gordon J. Hamilton (Solemnity of Mary, Toronto) publishes a book on the origin of the alphabet (as a Catholic Biblical Quarterly monograph), dedicates it in memoriam to Romain F. Butin, S. M., 1871-1937, Semitist, The Catholic University of America, and then abandons Butin to follow the aberrational line of W. F. Albright, who was a Methodist, as I am (with a Jewish great-grandmother), and in most other respects besides alphabet origins I am an Albrightian.

We need to take a closer look at Hamilton’s manual, since Wilson-Wright  (136, n. 16) considers its “detailed analysis” to represent the current “state of the art”, as the opinions of Butin (1932), Albright (1966), and Sass (1988) each did for their time. That is how he can quietly exclude (“in the interest of space”) my coherent interpretations of the inscriptions and my valid identifications of the sound-values of the signs: Here is an example of a point where I should have been invited to assist: referring to the 8-shaped character in the inscriptions, W-W says (137b), “Butin (1932: 172) read the next letter [between N and B on Sinai 351] as a s.adé, but subsequent scholars have recognized it as a qôp and identifed it as a simplified representation of a monkey (Hamilton 2006: 209)”.  Wrong!  The letter Qaw (qaw “measuring line”) can be seen at all stages of its development (even in Roman Q/q) as a cord wound on a stick (--o--, Hieroglyph V25, --o< V26); I could claim the glory of discovering this, but it is so obvious, that it reveals itself; the Hebrew name Qop for Q certainly means a monkey; and I think I have found two Bronze-Age examples of an ape-image representing Q (one in Egypt, another in Puerto Rico), but this must have been a secondary allograph.

Detailed discussion of Sinai 351

Let us return to this stela and first contemplate the representation of the god Ptah standing in his shrine, holding his long was-sceptre (which has been scientifically identified as a bovine pizzle, as the Ankh symbol of life is a bull’s top vertebra, and it is sometimes attached to the sceptre).  W-W (155b) sees it as “a schematic rendering of the Egyptian god Ptah”; he offers counterparts on Sinai inscriptions (61, 124, 125, 136). This combination of Ankh and Was is attested on Sinai 56, with Amenemhet III (19th C BCE) described as “Beloved of Hathor the Lady of Turquoise”, and “living eternally”, while the goddess is pictured holding the Ankh-Was sceptre and applying it to his face, “A protection and life behind him”.  Ptah is depicted on the important round-topped stela Sinai 114, also from the time of Amenemhet III, which includes 10 Asiatics from Retenu in its list of members of the expedition for that year (note that the word for “ten”, `ShRT is possibly discernible on Sinai 349); the Was-sceptre has four vertebrae of the Djed-pillar (now known to be a spinal column, signifying stability). Sinai 124 has Ptah in his shrine and Hathor, Lady of Turquoise outside it; both are holding a sceptre, and they are facing each other; this is likewise the situation, we might say, here in Sinai 351: Ptah is in his chapel on one side of the stela, and the Lady (B`LT) is named on the other side, in the familiar formula “Beloved of the Lady”, equivalent to the Egyptian “Beloved of Hathor the Lady”; both the Egyptian and the Semitic expression appear on the bilingual sphinx, Sinai 345, as W-W well knows, having studied it in an earlier essay, in which he unsuccessfully essayed to read its inscription.

Why is Ptah on this Semitic stele? What business does he have there? W-W (155b) rightly notes that “this deity goes unmentioned in the text of the inscription”, but he hypothesizes that Mâth (the supposed name of his phantom protagonist in the four inscriptions) “copied this image from an Egyptian inscription in order to represent ‘the Lady’”. Now, when my critics want to express their failure to comprehend my ideas, they use the term “bizarre” (in French and English); my response to W-W’s explanation is to apply the word “silly”, but I bring its old connotations with it, as preserved in its German cognate,  selig “blessed”, and in the spirit of Wilson-Wright’s pious Mâsh I declare, “God bless us every one”.

If this was a Rabbinic discussion on a point of Talmudic halakah, I would help my opponent (h.aber or “cobber”) with his argument, so that the discourse could continue. In his defence, we can point to our knowledge of the manliness of the goddess `Anat, who is “the Lady” of the inscriptions, in my view. Her violent nature is manifested in the Aqhat legend. My translation is located here:
https://sites.google.com/view/collesseum/baal
Brave young Aqhat has refused to give his wondrous bow to the goddess, saying: “The bow is a weapon of warriors, shall womenfolk hunt with it now?” She goes off in adolescent rage, and confronts the chief deity El in his mansion, and threatens to strike his head, so that his grey hair and beard are bloodied, if he does not assist her (17.6); she contrives to slay Aqhat (18.4), but the bow is broken in the process (19.1). In the Wadi el Hol inscription she is the patroness of a contingent of Semitic soldiers, who celebrate her with wine and animal sacrifices.
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2009/12/wadi-el-hol-proto-alphabetic.html
She certainly needs to be propitiated, in view of the bloodthirsty scene in the Baal myth (3.2), where she ardently slaughters a host of men, “wading knee-deep in the blood of soldiers”. Does her confrontation with young men at the foot of a mountain hint at human sacrifice, for which Western Semites were notorious?
https://sites.google.com/site/collesseum/baal
Leaping over to the column on the left-hand side of the stela, let us consider the expression “beloved of the Lady (B`LT, Baalat)”. It is customary to connect this Sinai Baalat with the Byblos Baalat, and this seems likely to me; I would identify “the Lady” as `Anat; she is named and depicted in the Wadi el-Hol vertical inscription, and offered communal sacrifices in the horizontal line of the text; at the turquoise-mining site (specifically Rod el-‘Air) there is an altar dedicated “to `Anat” (Sinai 524, or 44 in my numbering); in a hymn from Ugarit (KTU 1.108, Gibson 137, Wyatt 396) `Anat was “The Baalat (the Lady, the Mistress) of kingship (mlk), the Baalat of dominion (drkt), the Baalat of the high heavens ($mm rmm); the Sinai  Lady (b`lt) was not Dame (rbt, Great Lady) Athirat (Asherah in the Bible); `Anat addresses her as “Mother, Dame Athirat of the sea, Creatress (qnyt) of the gods” (Baal 4.3);  the mother of the gods appears twice in the Sinai inscriptions, in the sequence `’M, “Spring of the Mother”, in which the eye-sign (`ayin) functions as a rebus (or rebogram) for the homphone `ayin, meaning “spring” or “fountain”, and this valid interpretation earned me a bizarreness award from the ultraconservative Academy (Hamilton, 382); it occurs in Sinai Semitic inscription 377 as a name for Bir Nas.b, but on a destination sign, situated on the track to and from Serabit at a distance of about 800 metres from the spring itself (Sass 37-39), which was the main source of water for the expeditions, no doubt carried in vessels by the multitude of donkeys mentioned in the Egyptian inscriptions; in the horizontal line of Sinai 357 it occurs in the sequence M ` ’M, “water of the Spring of the Mother”, in a context of irrigating a vegetable garden (see further below).

As we know, if a person is loved by `Anat they will be the recipient of her deep affection, and she will confront their enemies with relentless aggression. In one scene in the Baal myth (3.3), after the bloodbath that she perpetrated (3.2), we see her soft side; she is adorned with murex, with corals on her breast, playing her lyre, and singing of her love for Baal; but upon sensing that Baal is in danger, when she sees his two messengers approaching, she rehearses a long account of the enemies of her beloved that she had put down in the past, and declares her readiness to do likewise to any new foe who would rise against Baal. That was in the period when Baal had to oppose the god Yam-Nahar, representing the wild waters of sea and flood; subsequently (6.1-2), when Mot, the god of death and drought, had overthrown Baal, and ‘Anat had buried him on his Mount Sapan,  the heart of  `Anat with regard to Baal was deeply affectionate and also fiercely protective, like the heart of a heifer towards her calf, like the heart of a ewe towards her lamb; and when she met Mot she dealt with him agriculturally: she split him with a blade, winnowed him in a sieve, burned him in a fire, ground him in millstones, scattered him in a field.

Incidentally, when we think of Athena, who was born fully armed from the head of Zeus, goddess of warfare but also promoter of animal and vegetable fertility, and always the Virgin (parthenos), we have in Athena an exact counterpart to `Anat the Virgin (btlt), with metathesis of n and t. Is this an original and viable thought?) (I now find that Martin Bernal, grandson of Alan Gardiner, had suggested this, in his Black Athena, I, 21: Egyptian Neit = `Anat = Athena.)

{Defence: `Anat was “manly” (though the attempt to find such an epithet in Baal 3.6 (??) violent and aggressive. Ptah a creator not a warrior like `Anat, patron of soldiers in Wadi el-Hol.}

Sinai 351 Column 1 (right side)

Identifying the letters one by one from top to bottom.

[D] There is general agreement on recognizing the two parallel strokes as D here, though initially (1988, 1990) I identified it as Z, but eventually I found the true Z as a double-triangle sign [|><|] in four places (Sinai 375a has both D and Z; Thebes 4 likewise, also exhibiting the real Qaw, cord on a stick, and Pe as a mouth). Perversely, Douglas Petrovich has reverted to my first classification of the protoalphabetic letters and takes = as Z, but in this instance he joins with Hamilton in constructing an untidy Samek from the first two letters: --|--|-|, to be viewed vertically (the telegraph pole after the hurricane passed through).

[K] The alleged T, seen as a simple +, is difficult to establish. [The crossbar is perhaps not integral to the character, but merely a section of a mysterious line that seems to run from the top of the god’s shrine to the opposite edge of the stela. Nevertheless, if we accept it as part of the glyph, there is a correspondence with the K on Sinai 360 and 361. The closeup of this letter (Fig. 6) seems to show a hand with fingers pointing downwards (especially if the distraction of the horizontal stroke is removed, but it could be indicating thumb and little finger), and thus an inverted version of the upraised hand form of K (kap, Fig. 32) on Sinai 349 and on the  Gezer cultic stand (which, by the way, reads KN B, “temple stand”, where the house sign is a logogram; Colless 1991, 31-32). ]

[B] The ground plan of a simple house. Not a logogram this time,  nor a syllabogram, but an acrophonic consonantogram; I will let it simply be B. In the West Semitic proto-syllabary it was BA.

[Sh] The Albright system wants this to be Th/T, from *tann, “composite bow”, even though the extant examples do not really look as if they could be strung and employed to shoot arrows; it is possible that some users of the sign thought of it in that way, but all the evidence, starting with the proto-syllabary (SHI), points to the sun-symbol in its various forms. The Sh-sign (acrophnically derived from shimsh “sun”) has two serpents guarding the sun (Hieroglyph N6B) but with the disc omitted, whereas the Wadi el-Hol examples are related to N6, a single snake with the disc included. The root that has emerged from this sequence (KBSh in Hebrew, KBS in Arabic, “subdue”) is the correct one for the true meaning of the full term that is being unveiled here: kibshan, “furnace, kiln”.
[N] A clear snake; Butin and Albright plausibly invoked nah.sh “snake” for N, the letter Nun (“water-snake”, Butin); in the proto-syllabary it was NA.

[M] A water-symbol with waves; MU in the proto-syllabary.

[Sh] Another sun-symbol with dual serpents but without the disc.
[N]  Another cobra.

[S.] The original Sadey (ç, emphatic s, either ss or ts) represented by a tied bag (Gn 42:35), root S.RR “bind”; not Q, contra the Albright line. The rot well and truly starts here; this error should cause the right sign for Q to be misnomered, but the true Q (qaw, a measuring line, represented by a cord wound around a stick, analogous to Hieroglyphs V24 and V25), which occurs in Sinai inscriptions 376 and 363, and already had a place in the proto-syllabary. Apparently it was assumed that its 8-shape (qop, a monkey) could become –o, an emaciated ape; but a monkey-sign may have been an allograph for Q, hence the name Qop for the letter.

[B[ Again a square house.

[W] Waw, a nail [--o].

[T.]  T.et, recognized tentatively by Butin as the Egyptian nfr symbol F35 (“beautiful, good”) and its sound is acrophonically derived from Semitic t.ab, “good”; in the proto-syllabary it was T.A. Those are the verified facts; both are rare but attested in proto-syllabic and proto-alpabetic texts (as a search through my essays in academic journals and on the web will reveal; starting at section 20 here). To his shame, Wilson-Wright (137b), a novice in this house of learning, defiantly declares: “Taken as a whole, this letter does not match any of the letters known from Serabit el-Khadem or the rest of the alphabetic corpus”. However, he rightly  rejects (n. 18) Hamilton’s discreditable attempt to make the character a horizontal H. Albright (1966:20) proposed a ligature of W and T, and with the preceding W he produced the toponym Wawat; Wilson-Wright unthinkably makes it W LT; Albright’s WWT is much more reasonable than W-W’s W LT, but this is the letter Tet, not a ligature of two signs.

Considering his failed solution again, which is not just improbable but impossible:

“Those who (dt) talk about ([t]btn) Mâth (mt) the miner (nqb) and (w) crusher (lt)”

His mistakes are (working backwards from the end):
    LT is actually the letter Tet;
    NQB would be “mine” rather than “miner”, according to Albright, but *naqqab as “miner”  on the analogy of dayyan “judge”) is reasonable; no matter, it is undeniably NS.B, “prefect” (1 Kings 9:23);
    Th (two instances,  and the one in [t]btn has to be doubled to provide the meaning he desires) is actually Sh;

    T of dt has to work in two separate words,  and he carries this situation over into the other three related inscriptions, even though they will be in contexts that he can not comprehend; but his attempts end in failure, as this letter is K not T.

Here is the correct reading of the sequence, with my suggested meaning:

“This (d) is the melt-furnace (kbsn ms) of the prefect (nçb) of the expedition (wt.)”

Sinai 351 Column 2 (left side)

Pace Albright, Hamilton, and Petrovich, we all know that the sequence of signs in this column, even though some of them are murky, adds up to “beloved of Baalat”.  Perversely, Wilson-Wright would like this to be the first line of his interpretation of the whole inscription; but 361 also has the Lady column to the left of the “Math” sequence, while 360 mysteriously makes no mention of her at all; but 353 has the same statement as 351 fitted into a single column, with D (“This is”) at the top, and the Lady (Baalat) at the bottom.

If there were any doubt about this sequence being M’HBB`LT on 351, there is a confirmatory counterpart on 374, from the adjacent Mine M; its first column is short, possibly reading TTN D (Wilson-Wright has it as “they give”),  though I have tried it as TKN and related it to the roots TKN and TQN, “set in order”, and having it as “equipment” (tiqqun) here in 374, and “repairs: (tknt) in 370; but  374 and 351 are the only two documents that have this full repertoire of signs for the phrase “beloved of Baalat” (though it may have been in the shattered 350).  Closely related is the meandering text of 365A, a plaque found at a campsite, from which Butin (1932:191-193) and myself (1990:18-19) can clearly extricate MShKNT and M’HBTB`LT; the ’Alep and the two B’s are intact, but the participle is now feminine, marked by an additional T, agreeing with MShKNT, “tent-dwelling(s)”; compare the Tabernacle-abode of God (Numbers 10:17); on the other side, the words ZT ’RWDYT further define the dwelling(s) as Arwadite, confirming the idea that the coppersmiths came from the Syria region (Retenu; cp. Beit-Arieh 1985:115-116).

However, Sinai 353, the related stela of 351, has a reduced set of consonants for the same expression: MHB`LT; also

ABT TABLE (300).tiff

The situation in the academic field of ancient West Semitic epigraphy and palaeography resembles a modern ball game: the playing field is fenced off from the onlooking crowd; one of the players has been sent off for alleged infringement of the rules; he is now beyond the pale, literally, but the spectators are showing more interest in his actions, because he has the ball, while the players in the circumscribed arena aimlessly kick an uninflated bladder of a ball to one another.

Confusion of  Sh and T/Th (as in English “thing”); and Z and D/Dh (as in English “this”, properly “dhis”_
  notably T  in the word tltt “three” in Sinai 375, and Z in mpkt zkt “pure turqoise” in 375a, and the very rare letters Ghayin and Z., which are lacking in the Sinai texts)

Sinai 351 (Butin 1928, Plate III)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_xbY5l60NZR4/SLvwKH39VuI/AAAAAAAAAKI/3CiacGxWkek/s1600-h/ABT+EVN+TBL.jpg.

<https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inventing-alphabet-180976520/>:

The origin of the alphabet is not to be found in the minds of ignorant workmen at the Sinai turquoise mines at the time of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom in the Middle Bronze Age. The illiterate people on those expeditions were the hundreds of Egyptian “stonecutters”, none of whom would have mastered the art of writing, and been awarded the prestigious status of “scribe”.  By contrast, the small contingents of Semitic coppersmiths who participated in the royal Egyptian mining missions over several centuries (MK and NK) not sophisticated scribes

Handwriting not calligraphy

Diagnosed with heart and kidney failure, I am approaching my High Noon; I am in my twelfth hour (what the rest of the world calls the eleventh hour, but that starts at 10 o’clock pm). Accordingly (or discordantly) I am discarding my characteristic placidity and pacificity and coming out with guns blazing, in the great American way. I intend to storm the consensus capitol of protoalphabetic research, with its library of wicked congress, and burn it down, since it is packed with a mass and mess of falsehood.

Recognition is due (overdue, already)

I think I now know why my research results are being ignored: it is because I give my knowledge away free. There is no advertising on my websites (the trillionaires who own them must think I am a bludger). So I will have to start charging for it, and if it has a price it will be deemed to have redeemable value, and then the scholars who have marginalised me will happily plagiarise me. Right? Of course right! (Where is that sound of a fiddling violin coming from? On the roof?)

Wilson-Wright thought he was entering a region of mines in Sinai, but he had unwittingly stepped onto a minefield, as I did at my entry to Sinai at the Suez Canal.

I will gladly receive and read any irate messages protesting inveterate allegiance to my cause. The Academia site is constantly informing me that people are citing me, but to know who they are and what they are saying about me would require monthly deductions from my pension.

I am not setting myself up as a victim. I am on the winning side: Aotearoa New Zealand has won the America’s Cup regatta again, against all comers; the Black Caps cricket team has bowled all its opponents out; and the nation has been victorious over all forms and shapes of virus that human civilization has hurled against it. Aren Wilson-Wright is the one who has suffered from the conspiracy of a wicked cabal, which fed him on falsehood.

I do not doubt Aren’s sincerity, but the time has come for severity if we want to attain verity, and serenity; accordingly, I have chosen a comic routine as my method of publicizing my position in this academic enterprise. It is ludicrous that the complex writing systems of the ancient world have been deciphered, but the simple little alphabet has concealed its origin and its system. I am offering a breakthrough that allows us to read the allegedly undeciphered West Semitic scripts, namely the proto-syllabary, the proto-consonantary, the neo-consonantary, and the neo-syllabary. The basic lesson to learn in this quest is that none of them functioned like the plain Phoenician consonantal alphabet that issued from the melting pot of the Bronze Age.

HUMILITY Joseph Naveh

Abraham Malamat

The field in which we work, which I would like to place in the general framework of “articultural science”, is in its present state more a branch of sophistry than science. If it were a self-respecting science it would have a set of elegant equations on display. (How do we construct an equation for our precious acrophonic principle?) We have tables of elements (LMN elements and other signs), and their periodic nature consists in the fact that different versions of them appear from time to time; they are constituted by sets of failed hypotheses, promoted by academicians who refuse to countenance failure in their theories. They take no account of quantum mechanics, particularly the “relational interpretation” (Carlo Rovelli 1996, 2021, the book Helgoland), which states that “reality is only interaction” (Rovelli 2014:18), the world is made up of “interactive relationships” (41); “all facts are relative facts”, and “the properties of all things are relational: they express how things interact, not how things are” (Rovelli, New Scientist, 13 March 2021:39). The term “property” would mean characteristic attributes. Well, with regard to relationships, we do have a fairly healthy obsession with relating letters of the proto-alphabet to Egyptian hieroglyphs, making a plethora of mistakes in the process (Hamilton 2006). In the matter of properties, I might be able to adduce my insistence that the characters of the early West Semitic writing systems (two syllabaries and two consonantaries) could function in an inscription as syllabograms, consonantograms, logograms, ideograms, rebograms (or morphograms), just as Egyptian glyphs could, and the properties of each in a particular setting were defined by their interactions with the other entities in the sentence.

This is my vehement and aggrieved response to an article by Aren M. Wilson-Wright, concerning the interpretation of four early alphabetic inscriptions from the ancient Egyptian turquoise mines in the Sinai Peninsula (Sinai 351, 353, 360, 361).
    "Beloved of the Lady are those who ...": a recurring memorial formula on the Sinaitic inscriptions. Bulletin of ASOR, Number 384, November 2020, 133-158.

From my vantage point in this field, I can dismiss her case at a single stroke: the sequence that he reads as t b t n m t (in which he discerns a name “Math”) is actually K B Sh N M Sh (“melt furnace”) in each of those inscriptions.  This is not a mere clash of personal opinions, but a case of truth versus error. My personal grievance is that she has taken no account of my published work on this subject (dated 1988 and 1990). However, she has made some good observations on some points, and published his new photographs, which can be used to strengthen my own position, but also to correct some of my own misconceptions.   My attempt to read the four inscriptions (and forty others) was published in a reputable journal in 1990, and has been summarized at this site:
http://cryptcracker.blogspot.com/2007/11/ancient-metal-melting-sinai-inscription.html
    Here is a copy of Wilson-Wright's published photograph (BASOR, and Zürich), not quite as clear as her original, together with her mostly accurate drawing, and herdefective transcription of the text:

.Sinai 351

Transcription (Wilson-Wright)
(1) m ⸢ˀ h b b ʕ⸣ l t (2) d t b t n m t n q b w l t
Vocalization
(1) ma⸢ˀahib⸣ ⸢baʕ⸣lat (2) dut-tibattun mat naqqab wa-latt
Translation
(1) Beloved of the Lady are (2) those who tell people about Mat, miner and extractor

The first part of the formula ("Beloved of the Lady", also a recurring motif in other contexts) is not in doubt, though its position in other related texts (353, 361) shows that it should be placed at the end of the statement; thus AWW's column 2 should come first. Any doubts about its letters can be clarified by an exact counterpart on 374 (but with a different entity as the recipient of her love); 353 and 361 omit the 'Alep in M'HB ("beloved"), and this may be an indication of later date, and an intimation of a wide-ranging chronology (Middle Kingdom to New Kingdom) for the various Math inscriptions; consequently,  the death-knell is already sounding for this hypothetical personage (the era of long-lived patriarchs would have ended by then).

Incorrect readings of letters in his transcription 0f the right-hand column (see above) are highlighted above in bold type, and tabulated here:
    T  > K (the alleged cross, for T , is actually K; clear photographs (such as Butin, Plate III, and Wilson-Wright's reproduction) show that there are two downward pointing "fingers", making a horizontal version of |=, attested elsewhere, and now visible on the lice-comb inscription.
    T (Th) > Sh  (the two supposed "composite bows",  presumed to represent T, from a hypothetical word *tann, are really sun symbols, with two serpents, though the disc is often omitted, as here, denoting Sh, from shimsh "sun"; in the West Semitic Proto-syllabary it was the syllabogram SHI);
    Q  > S./Sadey/ç (this is one of the major failings of the consensus paradigm),
    LT > T./Tet (both columns purportedly end with the letters LT, though the two in the right-hand column have supposedly been combined in a ligature;  but the circle and cross sign [+o] is proto-alphabetic Tet, the Egyptian hieroglyph for nefer, "good and beautiful" (F35), corresponding to Semitic t.ab "good"; it also appeared in the West Semitic syllabary representing T.A).

These errors  ensure that Wilson-Wright's arrow from his "composite bow" will fall wide of the mark. He interprets the text as the pious utterance of a Semitic turquoise miner named Math, requesting his readers to speak well of him, and invoking the blessing of the Lady (Baalat), a loving goddess. This is plausible in principle, and he adduces Egyptian inscriptions of such a kind, involving the goddess  Hat-hor, Lady of Turquoise, blessing those who pray for the person named in the inscription (p. 153, and  also n. 36, referencing Sinai 106,  plus 36, 136, 413). Nevertheless, the quartet of consonantal misreadings demolishes this interpretation,  and likewise predicts the downfall of his constructions for the other three inscriptions that purport to contain the "memorial formula" DTBTNMT ("those who tell about Math"), instead of  DKBShNMSh ("this melt-furnace"). 

My understanding of the inscription (Colless 1990:30-31) is as follows:

   D (Dh) "This" or "This (is)".
  KBShN MSh "furnace of melting". The word kibshan is known in the Bible, meaning "kiln" or "furnace", and here it is modified by MSh, "melting" (Hebrew mss with Sin or Samek); this sequence will also be found in the other three inscriptions under review, and in this case the "melt-furnace" interpretation is supported by metallurgical equipment excavated at Mine L, the site of this inscription (Colless 1990:6, after the reports of the Israeli expedition to the Sinai mines, by Beit-Arieh in Levant 17 (1985) 89-116).
  NS.B WT. "prefect of the expedition". Hebrew ns.yb, "officer in charge"(1 Kings 4:19, 9:23); wt. could be Egyptian wdw (wdy), "expedition", in Egyptian inscriptions 294 and 302.
  M'HB B`LT "beloved of Baalat (the Lady)". It is uncertain whether this refers to the officer or the apparatus, but the probability is that it means that the furnace and its equipment are under the protective aegis of the goddess, and if she is `Anat, then we know from the myths of Ugarit that she should not be crossed.
  Using Wilson-Wright's formulation, we could say:
  "Beloved of Baalat is this melt-furnace of the prefect of the expedition."

Contrariwise, taking all the necessary corrections into account, I recognize it as an official proclamation that the metalworking equipment situated in the vicinity of this notice is protected by the prefect of the mining expedition and under the aegis ("beloved") of the Lady, the goddess `Anat, who has a ferocious side; this is more like a curse than a blessing. The context for this interpretation consists in the metallurgical apparatus found inside the mine

In discussing