The letters of the earliest script used for Semitic languages have been shown to be derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the 19th century, the theory of Egyptian origin competed alongside other theories that the Phoenician script developed from Akkadian cuneiform, Cretan hieroglyphs, the Cypriot syllabary, and Anatolian hieroglyphs. Then the proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were studied by Alan Gardiner who identified the word "" "Lady" occurring several times in inscriptions, and also attempted to decipher other words. William Albright in the 1950s and 1960s published interpretations of proto-Sinaitic as the key to show the derivation of the Canaanite alphabet from hieratic, leading to the commonly accepted belief that the language of the inscriptions was Semitic and that the script had a hieratic prototype.