History of the Alphabet

THE HISTORY OF THE MODERN ALPHABET

 

 

As one goes back before 1200 BC, the Phoenicians suddenly cease to be Phoenician. This is due to the collision of terminology between two academic fields. Classicists knew of the Phoenicians through the Greeks, while archaeologists and epigraphers knew of the Canaanites from cuneiform, Egyptian, Canaanite, and the Phoenician texts and from the Bible. Initially, the two groups of scholars did not realize that the Phoenicians and Canaanites were the same culture. The Semitic term Canaanite means “Purple People,” and Phoenician is just the literal Greek translation. For convenience, scholars designated 1200 BC as the dividing line, using the term Canaanite for the culture before 1200 BC and Phoenician after 1200 BC. (Due to further academic compartmentalization, their inscriptions and alphabet are considered Canaanite until 1050 BC and Phoenician afterwards. And Biblical scholars follow that text in using Canaanite even later.)

Ignoring the Greek translation of their name and blissfully unaware of academic debate yet to come, the Canaanites continued to refer to themselves as Canaanites throughout.

The key to understanding the Canaanites’ relationships with both northern Egypt and Mesoamerica lies in the roots of the alphabets…

We are so accustomed to our alphabet that we decipher its code automatically. But these commonplace symbols harbor secrets and reveal designs from their first forging four millennia ago under an Egyptian sun. After relating what is known of that creation, this paper seeks to recover what has been lost.

With its bustling international ports and porous borders, northern Egypt was more cosmopolitan than the south. From neighboring Canaan (Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, and parts of Syria) immigrants poured into the prosperous Nile Delta as traders, laborers, refugees, and slaves. Just as the mixing cultures of our Mississippi Delta birthed Jazz, blues, and rock-n-roll, so the clashing and melding cultures of the Nile’s delta spawned phenomenal innovation, including the world’s first alphabet.

For centuries, these Canaanite immigrants lived amidst the countless scrolls and inscriptions of the literate Egyptians without having a way to write their own language. Finally, some ingenious scribe, lost to history, created a simple code for recording the Canaanites’ spoken (Semitic) language. For each sound in their language, they chose an Egyptian hieroglyph such that the Canaanite name for the object that it depicted started with that sound. For example, an Egyptian hieroglyph depicting water MMMMM was called mem, the Semitic name for “water,” and was used to write the sound M. Its waves can still be seen in our modern Latinate letter M. Anyone who understood the principle could immediately sound out any inscription could immediately sound out any inscription by simply pronouncing the initial sound of the name of each object depicted. This created instant literacy!

Whereas previous writing systems had hundreds or thousands of symbols requiring years of study that only elites could afford, this first alphabet brought literacy to the working classes and even to the poor and enslaved. Its modern name the pro-Sinaitic  alphabet, comes from ancient mineshafts ion Egypt’s barren Sinai Peninsula where poor (even enslaved) Canaanite immigrants scrawled alphabetic inscriptions on mine walls. Albright’s translation renders these as desperate pleas: “Oh my God, rescue [me] from the interior of the nine. [Swe}ar to [a sacrifice].” Never before could people of such modest means record their thoughts.

The alphabet adapted readily to other languages spawning the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin alphabets. It both democratized and spread literacy, allowing knowledge to accumulate and proliferate as never before. No single invention did more to create the intellectual revolution that, over time, transformed the ancient world to the modern one.

Surprisingly, none of the subsequent languages adapted that (acrophonic) principles from the first alphabet to create their own instantly-readable codes. Instead, those same original letters were borrowed from one language to the next. The direct descendants of symbols scrawled by desperate miners millennia ago today represent the sounds of hundreds of dominate most of the planet.

Precious few proto-Sinaitic  inscriptions survive, due to the perishable nature of most writing surfaces. Even those that were inscribed in the living stone were vulnerable to erosion and a tragic modern attempt to harvest the ancient mines with dynamite. Thus, while it has been possible to fully trace the origin to most letters, this dearth of inscriptions has left gaps in our knowledge.

Finally, most treatments of the development of the alphabet follow only the 22 letters tht carried on into the Phoenician, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin alphabets. However, the proto-Sinaitic alphabet had several letters that were dropped in the North before the development of these familiar alphabets.  

I propose a new theory that I believe offers fresh insights into the history and development of the alphabet and explain for the first time the origin and meaning of its letter order.

While studying the earliest alphabet, I happened to notice some redundancies. For example, kaph (our letter K) came from the hieroglyph of a hand, while yodh (our I) showed a hand with part of its arm. And the word kaph literally meant “palm” (of the hand), while yodh meant “hand.” Why confuse readers by having two different letters that both depict hands? With only 28 letters to select symbols for and hundreds of Egyptian hieroglyphs at their disposal, the alphabets’ inventor(s) had no need for such redundancy and confusion.

The redundancies became more apparent in the alphabet’s earliest form. For example, our letter L comes from lamed, which has meant “ox-goad” (a cattle prod) since roughly 1000 BC. But Robert Good demonstrated that its earliest form had depicted “rope,” and Darnell et. al. recently confirmed this with their discovery of the oldest known alphabetical inscription (left by Canaanite soldiers under an Egyptian commander, circa 1800 BC). This letter “rope” overlapped in a similar way with the meaning and depiction of the letter harm meaning “loops of rope” or “netting.” Why have one letter depict rope and another looped or knotted rope?

It will take another example for the pattern to emerge: The letter name zayin (our letter Z) means “weapon” in Hebrew, but its original pictograph must have depicted a specific weapon. Numerous theories have attempted to interpret its simple parallel lines Z (arrows, a manacle, a scythe, a sword, an ingot, an olive tree, or a copper axe). In fact, the key to its origin is that its name is identical to the Egyptian word zyn, “arrow.” (Vowels were not originally notated for either language.) There are many instances of Semitic loan words from Egyptian, and Egyptian texts often refer to the Canaanites as “people of the bow” and as bow-wielding mercenaries in the service of the Egyptians. It is suspected that zyn was adopted because it was a fun (especially for the “people of the bow”) onomatopoeic word, mimicking the Doppler-shifting sound of an arrow’s flight. (A similar use is the Hebrew word for a “fly,” zuuv, which mimics its buzzing sound and is the source of Satan’s name Ba’al-zuuv or Beelzebub, meaning “Lord of the Flies.”) The parallel lines used to write this letter likely depicted a pair of arrows in mid-flight, in the very act of making their namesake sound, zyn. Meanwhile, the proto-Sinaitic letter tann depicted a “bow.” Together these letters formed another obvious pair, Bow and Arrow.

These are not accidental redundancies, the letters were in pairs such that the oblect of one letter lay within that of its pair. Palm within hand. Rope within knot. Arrow within bow.

Six more letters depicted local animals in their habitats, almost like a children’s book: Our letter A began as an ox (the Latin A is a simplified, upside-down version of the original pictograph), the farm tractor of its day, while our H began as an overhead view of the “premises of a farm,” showing the fenced-in fields where the oxen worked, grazed, and lived.

Hopefully, this will give everyone something to dig deeper into, and a short history of our own alphabet.