Wadi el-Hol inscriptions

The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are two rock inscriptions which appear to show some of the oldest examples of phonetic alphabetic writing discovered to date.

[1][2] Wadi el-Hol (where Wadi means valley in Arabic) is a valley on the Farshut Road, north-west of Luxor on the Qena Bend, situated on the west bank of the river Nile in Egypt.

[3] In 1993, American egyptologists Deborah Darnell and her then husband John Darnell found letters in two single-line rock inscriptions carved into limestone cliffs in the Wadi el-Hol valley.

In 1999, they finally published their research, concluding that they had found the earliest surviving alphabet, dating back to around 1800 to 1900 BCE.

[4][5] In particular, the inscriptions appear to resemble the Proto-Sinaitic script from Serabit el-Khadem.