Inventing the Alphabet by Johanna Drucker;

Author:Johanna Drucker; [Drucker, Johanna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN000000 LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / General, LAN001000 LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Alphabets & Writing Systems, HIS016000 HISTORY / Historiography, HIS054000 HISTORY / Social History
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

Premodern Encounters with the Sinai Inscriptions

The earliest description of the Sinai inscriptions is attributed to a first-century Greek historian, Diodorus Siculus. His description of the experience is cited here in a nineteenth-century account: “And according to Diodorus Siculus . . . , there was in his day and earlier a spot of the like kind in the peninsula of Sinai, a luxuriant palm grove with fountains and streams, an oasis in the midst of a desert region, otherwise without water or shade, and with a southern exposure.”76 And from Siculus directly: “Moreover, an altar is there built of hard stone and very old in years, bearing an inscription in ancient letters of an unknown tongue.”77 Siculus’s engagement with the inscriptions stops there, but the mention serves as a touchstone for later inquiry for travelers who saw it as part of the path of the Israelites from Egypt.

A sixth-century Greek merchant, Cosmas, also recorded seeing inscriptions in the Sinai. His account was barely noted in the centuries between its composition and the beginning of the modern period, according to the nineteenth-century scholar Charles Forster, who provided considerable detail:

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