Script - Proto-Sinaitic

Proto-Sinaitic is a historical script value representing one of the earliest known alphabetic writing systems, dating to the Middle Bronze Age (circa 1800–1500 BCE) in the Sinai Peninsula and the Levant. This script is widely considered the progenitor of the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn gave rise to Greek, Latin, and most modern Western writing systems. In character encoding, the Proto-Sinaitic value is assigned to a small set of ancient glyphs, typically those carved on turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadim, where workers adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs into a simplified, acrophonic alphabet. Each symbol originally represented a consonant, often derived from a pictographic source, such as an ox head for the sound /ʔ/ or a house for /b/. The value is used to tag these rare, archaic characters distinctly from later Semitic scripts, helping scholars and digital tools identify and preserve these foundational inscriptions.