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Manna up-close (left) and a valley full of manna (right) SINAI PENINSULA, EGYPT – In a startling new discovery that is turning the heads of biblical scholars and skeptics alike, manna—a nondescript bread-like eatable—has reportedly been found covering the ground each morning in a dry and desolate region outside of Serabit El-Khadem. Hossam Almeleh, an anthropology student at the University of Cairo, was conducting a research project with Dr. Daunis Abadi and two of his classmates when he stumbled upon a 27-acre desert flat completely covered with a white bread-like substance. "I had only walked over a knoll a...

I would make the startling suggestion that the alphabet was invented by a single human being, who created this remarkable technology to record the Greek hexameters of the poet we call Homer. Certainly everyone agrees that the invention of the alphabet made possible the development of philosophy, science and democracy, some of the finest achievements in the history of human culture. But who invented the alphabet? Was it really the Semitic-speaking Phoenicians, as many of us learned in grammar school? Or was it actually the Greeks, to whom the Phoenicians supposedly passed it? I don't believe the Phoenicians actually had...

In a landmark article in the March/April 2010 issue of BAR, Orly Goldwasser, professor of Egyptology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explained how the very first alphabet, from which all other alphabets developed, was invented by illiterate Canaanite miners in the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem in the Sinai peninsula. Inspired by Egyptian pictorial hieroglyphs and a desire to articulate their own thoughts in writing, these Canaanites created 22 alphabetic acrophonetic signs scratched into the rock that could express their entire language. But Goldwasser did not convince everyone. Anson Rainey, emeritus professor of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic...

By the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (a few years after 2000 B.C.E.), the pressure of immigrants on the eastern Delta was so strong that the Egyptian authorities built a series of forts at strategic points to "repel the Asiatics," as the story of Sinuhe tells us.1 More than a century later, however, Egyptian policy toward the Asiatics changed. Instead of trying to prevent them from coming in, the Egyptians cultivated close relations with strong Canaanite city-states on the Mediterranean coast and allowed select Asiatic populations to settle in the eastern Delta. The last of the great pharaohs of...

SINAI PENINSULA, EGYPT – In a startling new discovery that is turning the heads of biblical scholars and skeptics alike, manna—a nondescript bread-like eatable—has reportedly been found covering the ground each morning in a dry and desolate region outside of Serabit El-Khadem.