It was in the mining area of Serabit that a transformation from hieroglyphic style representations of words to phonetic symbols began to take place
. The early alphabet discovered in 1869 within the mine shafts has been called the proto-Sinaitic script. It dates from the 15th/I 6th century BC. It is identical to the earlier 17th/18th century BC proto-Canaanite script, the earliest evidence we have of the alphabet, but the Serabit inscriptions provide a much larger source of the material. The scholar William Albright made some of the early steps in deciphering the inscriptions, although there is still much to be discovered.