One of the incidental, but, as it proved, important results of the Harvard Expedition to Mount Sinai in 1927 was the rediscovery of the Sinaitic inscriptions on Serabit el-Khadim, a desolate mountain in the interior of the peninsula, rendered famous by the ruins of a temple of the Egyptian goddess Hathor and by many exhausted turquoise mines.

The district which constituted the field of our investigation is situated on the western slope of central Sinai facing the Gulf of Suez. The remains of ancient mine-workings are divided into two groups of unequal importance: the northern group, of which the numerous openings lie north and south of the upper course of Wadi Baba, and to which belong the mines of the plateau of Serabit, and the southern group, confined to the turquoise galleries of Maghara. The two groups are included in a rectangle which measures about 35 kilometers from east to west and 25 from north to south.

On one of the relatively flat projections of the plateau which forms the top of the mountain of Serabit el-Khadim, three days’ journey by camel from the nearest point of the coast into the interior of the peninsula of Sinai, stand the ruins of the Temple of Hathor. Near it are turquoise mines exploited by the Egyptians from the third to the eighteenth dynasties, and probably also worked intermittently by the local tribes. But the mines were not the raison d'être of the temple, although the goddess of the temple was certainly worshipped by the miners. In the Wadi Maghara also there are Egyptian turquoise mines, and until they were either destroyed or taken away to museums there were inscriptions, carved to record Egyptian expeditions to them. But there is no temple at Maghara.

The present article was begun with the limited purpose of making known the new inscriptions discovered by the Harvard-Catholic University Joint Expedition to Serabit in the spring of 1930. In the course of this study, I perceived that some signs doubtful in the inscriptions already published were made clear by the new slabs, and I decided to go over the entire field again.

Up to this time there have appeared three notices of the great treasure of biblical papyri in the possession of Mr. A. Chester Beatty — the first by Sir Frederic Kenyon in the London Times (November 19, 1931), the second by the same writer in Gnomon (January 1932, pp. 46–49), the third by Professor Carl Schmidt in the Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft. I have seen the last only in an undated offprint which reached America about March 15; the communication was sent to the printer in December 1931. Since a small part of the now famous find has come into the possession of the University of Michigan, it seems desirable to offer more precise information about these pieces.