*If

The *if represents the possibility of alternatives. My alternative? The alphabet was divinely granted to Moses on Mount Sinai, written in fire on stone by the finger of G-d. Indeed. The scene of Moses on Sinai occurred sometime in the 14th century BCE or a little later, thus within a century of the first alphabetic inscriptions. It occurred somewhere in the land of the Midianites, location of the turquoise mines and the uncovering of the first alphabetic inscriptions, which epigraphers call "proto-Sinaitic."