High-resolution photography at the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in Egypt’s south-central Sinai Peninsula highlighted faint letters that one epigrapher reads as “This is from Moses.” A parallel corpus records appeals to the Hebrew God El and the erasure of the Egyptian goddess Hathor—fuel for fresh arguments that the world’s earliest alphabet preserves traces of the biblical Exodus.
A re-survey of more than two dozen Proto-Sinaitic graffiti—rock-cut lines first noticed in 1904—reveals new findings. Independent researcher Michael Bar-Ron says stacked characters on inscription Sinai 357, opposite Mine L, include the Hebrew phrase zot m’Moshe (“This is from Moses”). His reading, he told The Humble Skeptic podcast, has been endorsed for review by University of Mainz lecturer Pieter van der Veen and Egyptologist David Rohl.
A June field note released by the Patterns of Evidence project reports new panels that pair petitions to El with scratched-out titles of Baʿalat/Hathor, mirroring the golden-calf episode in Exodus 32. The same note says structured-light scans have expanded the inscription catalogue to “well over twenty” and will be posted as open-access 3-D models later this year.
The geographical arc of the script—from Egypt through Sinai into Canaan—“maps neatly onto the route described in Exodus,” and cites the new translations’ slavery-and-deliverance vocabulary as circumstantial support for a Semitic departure from Egypt, according to Greek Reporter.
How solid is the evidence?
Most specialists agree that Proto-Sinaitic (≈ 1800 BCE) is the oldest widely attested alphabet, but its interpretation remains disputed. Every proposed translation relies on a corpus of fewer than forty texts, many badly weathered, and that an alternative inscription set from Umm el-Marra, Syria, could yet pre-date Sinai by 500 years. Epigraphers such as Philippa Steele caution that “sign shapes alone” cannot fix either language or meaning.
Bar-Ron has submitted his 213-page “Proto-Thesis” to Ariel University for formal peer review, and teams linked to Patterns of Evidence plan to drill micro-cores behind key panels to test for pigment and tool-mark sequences once Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities grants clearance. Meanwhile, rival scholars are scheduling a comparative scan of Sinai 357 with structured light to assess whether the putative mēm-shin sequence is geological noise or deliberate carving.
The preparation of this article relied on a news-analysis system.