A very controversial study was proposed on November 17 at the annual meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research as archeologist and epigrapher Douglas Petrovich of Wilfrid Laurier University from Waterloo, Canada suggested that Hebrew is actually the world's oldest form of alphabet.
He proposed that some of the alphabet found on stone slabs at several Egyptian sites were actually the early forms of Hebrew. There are also proofs in the book of Exodus to prove Petrovich's hypothesis.
Petrovich started to formulate his hypothesis in January 2012 while conducting some research at the Egyptian museum in Cairo. There, he discovered the word "Hebrews" in a text from 1874 B.C. which included the earliest known alphabetic letter. He cross-referenced it at the Old Testament, which cited that Israelites spent 434 years in Egypt from 1876 B.C. to 1442 B.C.
From there, the archeologist then combined previous identification of some letters in the ancient alphabet with his own identifications and he translated 18 Hebrew inscriptions from three Egyptian sites. He also discovered several biblical figures which came up in these translations and they include Joseph - who was sold into slavery and became a political figure in Egypt-, Joseph's wife Asenath, Joseph's son Manasseh and Moses, who led the Israelites out of Egypt.
In another inscription dated sometime in 1834 B.C., it said "wine is more abundant than the daylight, than the baker, than a nobleman."
Many Biblical scholars found Petrovich's claims controversial because although the Old Testament did prove Petrovich's claims, many opposed the idea that the Israelites occupied the land of Egypt in the period Petrovich claims.
Petrovich is currently writing a book which aims to explain his analysis of these inscriptions and show how an early version of Hebrew can make sense of the Egyptian inscriptions he discovered.
Currently, the oldest alphabet in the world is the Semitic language of the eluxive proto-consonantal script that many scientists have tried to identify for the past 150 years.
