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How the Alphabet Was Born from Hieroglyphs
 To
the Asiatics, as they were called, the lush Nile Delta, with its open
marshlands rich with fish and fowl, was a veritable Garden of Eden.
From earliest times, Canaanites and other Asiatics would come and
settle here. Indeed, this is the background of the Biblical story of
the famine in Canaan that led to Jacob’s descent into Egypt (Genesis 46:1–7).
By
the beginning of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (a few years after 2000
B.C.E.), the pressure of immigrants on the eastern Delta was so strong
that the Egyptian authorities built a series of forts at strategic
points to “repel the Asiatics,” as the story of Sinuhe tells us.1
More
than a century later, however, Egyptian policy toward the Asiatics
changed. Instead of trying to prevent them from coming in, the
Egyptians cultivated close relations with strong Canaanite city-states
on the Mediterranean coast and allowed select Asiatic populations to
settle in the eastern Delta. The last of the great pharaohs of the
XIIth Dynasty, Amenemhet III (c. 1853–1808 B.C.E.) and Amenemhet IV (c.
1808–1799 B.C.E.), even established a new town for them.
 The
XIIth Dynasty was followed by the much weaker XIIIth Dynasty. Thousands
of immigrants from Syria, Lebanon and Canaan then flooded into the
eastern Delta, creating the large Canaanite settlement that would
become Avaris (modern Tell el-Daba), the capital of the famous Hyksos.
The Hyksos were Canaanites who seized power from the Egyptian pharaohs
and ruled all Egypt for more than a hundred years (c. 1638–1530 B.C.E.).
 But
before this, at the end of the XIIth Dynasty during the reigns of
Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV, Egypt was at the height of its power. A
lively trade was conducted with Nubia to the south. Imports from the
Levant entered Egypt by land and sea. Gold and precious stones were
quarried in the eastern desert. And a large-scale enterprise was
regularly conducted to search for turquoise in the high mountains of
southern Sinai, at a site today called Serabit el-Khadem.
On
this mountain deep in the Sinai desert, prey to merciless winds and
scorching heat, are the remains of an ancient Egyptian temple to the
goddess Hathor, “The Mistress of Turquoise.” Founded by Sesostris I,
the second king of the XIIth Dynasty (c. 1953–1908 B.C.E.), the temple
continued in existence, with some interruptions, until the end of the
New Kingdom—for about 800 years.
Building on the work of
Sesostris I, pharaohs Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV exploited
Serabit’s rich turquoise mines. The precious blue stone was a
much-sought-after luxury item in royal circles. No fewer than 28
expeditions to the Serabit turquoise mines are recorded during the
reign of Amenemhet III alone.
 To
ensure the blessing of the gods, the earlier temple was dramatically
enlarged by Amenemhet III and Amenemhet IV. Shrines and numerous
commemorative stelae with hieroglyphic inscriptions were erected on the
path leading to the temple, especially honoring Hathor, the goddess of
turquoise.
Where did all the people who engraved these
inscriptions come from? Most were probably from the Delta. The
turquoise expeditions to Serabit brought together high officials,
scribes, priests, architects, physicians, magicians, scorpion charmers,
interpreters, caravan leaders, donkey drivers, miners, builders,
soldiers and sailors.
 And
many members of the expeditions left inscriptions in the temple
precinct. Some contain only a name or a drawing. All sought the
blessing of the gods for success in their dangerous enterprise—as well
as for a safe journey home. These records also tell us of the hundreds
of miners and stone workers active during the mining seasons, as well
as those who were engaged in the building projects at the temple.
Were these miners and workmen Egyptian? Canaanite? Both?
 Egyptian
society at this time was relatively tolerant, so foreigners were
quickly accepted and integrated into Egyptian society, as long as they
were not political enemies of the state. Some high officials who left
inscriptions at the Serabit temple present themselves as Egyptians, yet
they also mention that they are Asiatic in origin or have an Asiatic
mother. Despite this ancestry, they consider themselves Egyptian. Only
Asiatics who came from outside Egypt are identified as such. Canaanites
from Egypt who arrived with the Egyptian expeditions from the Delta
were not labeled Canaanites in the inscriptions; they are simply
regarded as Egyptians.
The expedition lists at Serabit also
contain the names of many “interpreters.” The presence of these
dragomans is strong evidence that some language barrier must have
existed. The hundreds of recorded donkeys that served as pack animals
were probably driven by Asiatic caravan experts, who would be able to
direct turquoise shipments back to Egypt. And no doubt Asiatic soldiers
in Egyptian service escorted these caravans. The bottom line: There
were surely many more Canaanites at Serabit than are listed as such in
the hieroglyphic inscriptions at the site.
One final note: Nowhere in the many inscriptions at the site is there a mention of slaves. Canaanites, yes; slaves, no.
It was here at Serabit, I believe, that the alphabet was invented—by Canaanites!
The
invention of the alphabet ushered in what was probably the most
profound media revolution in history. Earlier writing systems, like
Egyptian hieroglyphic and Mesopotamian cuneiform with its curious
wedge-shaped characters, each required a knowledge of hundreds of
signs. To write or even to read a hieroglyphic or cuneiform text
required familiarity with these signs and the complex rules that
governed their use.
By contrast, an alphabetic writing
system uses fewer than 30 signs, and people need only a few relatively
simple reading rules that associate these signs with sounds.
This
great invention had far-reaching social and cultural implications. With
the alphabet, writing broke out of the “golden cage” of the
professional scribal world. Writing was no longer their monopoly. When
many more members of society could learn to read (and write), access to
information and knowledge was no longer as limited as it had been.
Alphabetic writing eventually gave many more people control over their
lives and enabled larger segments of the population to take a more
active role in the cultural and administrative affairs of their
respective societies.
But how was it done?
Although,
as I believe, the alphabet was invented by Canaanites, we still owe a
significant debt to the Egyptians, for it was Egyptian hieroglyphs that
provided the trigger and the means that made the invention of the
alphabet possible.
To understand how this came about, we
must first examine some very odd Serabit inscriptions—just a few dozen
that markedly differ from the hundreds of hieroglyphic inscriptions at
the site. The credit for first noticing one of these unusual
inscriptions in Serabit goes to Hilda Petrie, wife of the famous
Egyptologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie, who was leading an
archaeological expedition to Serabit in 1905. It was she who called
attention to some fallen stones on the ground by one of the mines,
bearing several awkward signs that seemed not to be real hieroglyphs.
Then
more of these inscriptions began turning up on rocks by the turquoise
mines, and even inside the mines. A few came from the desert roads
leading to the temple. From the temple precinct itself, however, only
two small statues and a sphinx bore inscriptions in this strange new
script.
 Petrie
studied these crude inscriptions and observed that they appeared to be
a kind of imitation of hieroglyphic signs. Yet the repertoire of signs
was very small. Petrie ingeniously identified these awkward signs as an
alphabetic script, different from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system with
its hundreds of signs. Yet Petrie was unable to read these strange
inscriptions.
In 1916, some ten years later, Sir Alan
Gardiner, the famous English Egyptologist, noticed a group of four
signs that was frequently repeated in these unusual inscriptions.
Gardiner correctly identified the repetitive group of signs as a series
of four letters in an alphabetic script that represented a word in a
Canaanite language: b-‘-l-t, vocalized as Baalat, “the Mistress.” Gardiner suggested that Baalat
was the Canaanite appellation for Hathor, the goddess of the turquoise
mines. Were these inscriptions carved by Canaanite workmen?
  An
important key to the decipherment was a unique bilingual inscription.
It is inscribed on a small sphinx from the temple and features a short
inscription in what appears to be parallel texts in Egyptian and in the
new script.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic inscription on the sphinx reads:
“The beloved of Hathor, the mistress of turquoise.”
The text in the strange script, now identified as a Canaanite text, reads:
m-’-h-(b) B-‘-l-[t], “The beloved of Baalat.”
 Each of the critical letters in the word Baalat is a picture—a house, an eye, an ox goad and a cross.
 Gardiner correctly saw that each pictograph has a single acrophonic value: The picture stands not for the depicted word but only for its initial sound. Thus the pictograph bêt, “house,” drawn as the four walls of a dwelling represents only the initial consonant b. Baalat is written as shown in the drawing, in the blue highlighted areas (although the final tav is not legible in line A).
This
ingenious principle is at the root of all of our alphabetic systems.
Each sign in this script stands for one consonant in the language.
(Vowels were not represented. The representation of vowels came later,
and in different ways in different alphabetic systems.)
The
alphabet was invented in this way by Canaanites at Serabit in the
Middle Bronze Age, in the middle of the 19th century B.C.E., probably
during the reign of Amenemhet III of the XIIth Dynasty.
We
are reasonably confident about the place of the invention because
almost all of the examples of the new script—which we may now identify
by the name scholars call it, Proto-Sinaitic—come from this one site.2
We
are also confident about the time of the invention because there are
some very specific connections between the Middle Kingdom Egyptian
hieroglyphs in Sinai and the new script.3
There is one hieroglyph that appears to have a special use, with very
few exceptions, only in Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in the Sinai
during the Middle Kingdom. We might call this the “Sinai Hieroglyph.”
The sign looks like a striding man with bent, upraised arms.
In the Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions in Sinai, this sign is a
logogram; that is, it stands for an entire word, not just part of a
word. It probably means something like “foreman.” This hieroglyph
appears dozens of times in Egyptian Middle Kingdom inscriptions at
Serabit. (Its phonetic reading in Egyptian in this specific use in
Sinai, however, is unknown.) This hieroglyph is rare even in later New
Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions at Serabit. And it hardly ever appears
anywhere else in Egypt.4
 A
letter in the new Proto-Sinaitic alphabet looks very much like this
Middle Kingdom Egyptian hieroglyph. The Proto-Sinaitic sign almost certainly stems directly from the Egyptian hieroglyph.
  The
Canaanites at Serabit probably connected this pictogram, which they saw
everywhere at the site, with a loud call or order emitted by an
official when he raised his hands to assemble the people, a typical
shout such as Hoy! (also known in Biblical Hebrew),5 which may be the origin of the letter h in the Proto-Sinaitic script.
If
I am correct that the first alphabetic script was invented at Serabit
el-Khadem in the reign of Amenemhet III (mid-19th century B.C.E.), I
believe I can plausibly explain the process by which it was
invented—not by sophisticated scribes, but by comparatively unlettered
Asiatic workers.
The inventors at Serabit clearly used
models of hieroglyphs taken from the Egyptian Middle Kingdom
inscriptions around them. The Proto-Sinaitic pictograms were adapted
from the hieroglyphic pictograms and appear mostly in the area of the
turquoise mines and the roads leading to the mines.
It may
seem strange, but I believe the inventors of the alphabet were
illiterate—that is, they could not read Egyptian with its hundreds of
hieroglyphic signs. Why do I think so? The letters in the
Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very crude. They are not the same size.
They are not written in a single direction: Some are written left to
right, others right to left and some from top to bottom. This suggests
that the writers had mastered neither Egyptian hieroglyphic nor any
other complex, rule-governed script.
   For
these illiterate Canaanites the pictorial meanings of the new letters
were paramount. The iconic meaning of the hieroglyphs (what they
actually pictured) served as an important mnemonic tool for the
Canaanite adopters. The iconic meaning of the hieroglyphs was so
important that even today, when the Hebrew letters have lost all iconic
connection to the old pictorial models (we can’t recognize what the
letters are supposed to picture), most letters are still named after
the old pictures!
The modern Hebrew letter aleph is the ’alp, the word for “ox”; the letter bêt is the bayt or “house”; the letter ‘ayin,
“eye,” is the name of the old pictorial letter in Proto-Canaanite
script (see drawings near the end of the article). But looking at a
modern Hebrew aleph, bêt or ‘ayin, we can no longer see the ox, house or eye (nor are these original pictograms evident in the Latin letters A or B).
 Mostly
by taking Egyptian hieroglyphs as pictorial models, the Canaanite
inventors of the alphabet used the small selection of pictograms they
chose in a completely new way, with no reference to (and no knowledge
of) the correct reading of the signs in Egyptian!
   Confirming
their ignorance of the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Canaanite
inventors of the alphabet would sometimes conflate two different
hieroglyphic pictograms. For example, Egyptian hieroglyphic
distinguishes two different kinds of snakes. One sign pictures a cobra
generally; the other depicts a horned viper.
These different pictograms are signs for different sounds in Egyptian,
the first for the sound “DG” and for the second, “F.” These two snakes
are never confused in Egyptian writing. The Canaanite inventors of the
alphabet, however, failed to note the distinction and simply conflated
the two snakes into a single Proto-Sinaitic sign that they used for the
letter “N,” from their word for “snake,” probably naḥash.
 For a few letters, the Canaanites took as models not hieroglyphs, but important objects from their own world.6 For example, a drawing of the palm of the hand represents “K,” kaf in Canaanite;
there is no pictogram of a palm of the hand in Egyptian hieroglyphic.
Similarly with the Proto-Sinaitic sign depicting a composite bow; there
is no comparable sign in Egyptian. In Proto-Sinaitic it stands for
“SH”; the word for a composite bow in Canaanite was ŝa-na-nu-ma or the like.7
These examples represent independent creativity on the part of the
Canaanite inventors of the alphabet and tend to confirm that they took
the Egyptian hieroglyphic signs idiosyncratically and without regard to
their function or value in Egyptian.
We might be even more
specific about who the inventors of the alphabet were: We may even know
their names. They apparently emerged from among the circle of one
Khebeded. He is mentioned in several Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions
at the site and is referred to as the “Brother of the Ruler of Retenu.”
Retenu was the area between Gaza and the Baqaa in Lebanon. “Ruler of
Retenu” was the title carried by rulers in this area of the Levant.
When Asiatic rulers migrated to the eastern Delta, it seems that they
kept the title “Ruler of Retenu.” It is clear that this “Khebeded,
brother of the Ruler of Retenu” is a Canaanite. In one stela at Serabit
(Stela 112), Khebeded pictures himself proudly riding on a donkey with
an attendant both fore and aft. No Egyptian would picture himself
riding on a donkey. On another stela at the site, Khebeded is pictured
with the typical Canaanite “mushroom” hair dress. From the references
in these stelae, it appears that Khebeded was involved with Egyptian
expeditions to Serabit for more than a decade. He is clearly the
highest-ranking Canaanite who left a hieroglyphic inscription in the
Serabit temple. He was probably a leader of the Canaanite workforce.
   The
quality of the hieroglyphs in an inscription that Khebeded added on a
stela (he only added his inscription to an existing stela with much
better hieroglyphs) in the temple is very poor. His inscription on
Stela 92 would have been an embarrassment for an educated Egyptian
scribe (see images later in the article).8
Hieroglyphic signs of different sizes are crammed next to each other,
and vacant spaces appear at the end of the line. But the hieroglyphic
pictograms in Stela 92 bear a remarkable resemblance to the signs in
the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. Perhaps most striking is the pictogram
for “house,” in the Egyptian hieroglyphic text of Stela 92. The resemblance to the house in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions representing bêt is unmistakable and is very different from the original Egyptian hieroglyph.
  The
only Egyptian inscriptions where the square house is consistently used
come from this area of Sinai and from the Middle Kingdom. And it
appears unequivocally several times in Stela 92, which is probably a
hieroglyphic Egyptian text made by Canaanites who were familiar with
the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions. They confused the picture of their own
“house”-letter with the correct Egyptian hieroglyph!
The
Proto-Sinaitic alphabet may well have been invented in the circle of
the Canaanite Khebeded and his followers, many of whose names appear in
his stela.
John Darnell, who discovered a two-line
inscription in the Wadi el-Hôl (near Thebes) similar to the
Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions from Serabit (see sidebar “The Wadi el-Hôl Inscription: Earlier than Serabit?“), has suggested that the alphabet must have been invented in Egypt in a location with “a plurality of cultural contexts.”9 But isn’t “a plurality of contexts” an exact description of Serabit in the Middle Kingdom?
  It
was indeed a world unto itself. The workers in the mines spent long
days and nights in the isolated desert, secluded in their camps. The
difficult, dangerous work and the long expeditions no doubt cost lives.
The Canaanites watched the Egyptians praying, worshiping and writing to
the gods. When a name was written, it remained with the god forever.
When a blessing was sought, it remained with the god long after the
moment of prayer.
 The
isolation, fear, pressure and the sudden appreciation of “eternalizing
the name” would naturally lead the Canaanites to try to write their own
calls to their own gods (Baalat and El) in their own language.10
Was
it the cognitively seductive nature of the hieroglyphic script, with
its hundreds of little pictures, that made some Canaanite workers at
Serabit feel that they could “almost read” and that gave them the
feeling of “Yes, we can”?
As already noted, the vast
majority of the inscriptions in this alphabet come from the Serabit
area—more than 30 of them. Only one has come from elsewhere in Egypt
(the two-line Wadi el-Hôl inscription). Some few, very short
inscriptions (most only a couple of letters) have been found in Canaan
dating to the end of the Middle Bronze Age and the Late Bronze Age (c.
1750–1200 B.C.E).
  The
alphabet was not an instant success—at least based on the existing
examples. One thing is certain: It did not travel fast. Only rarely did
a Canaanite caravaneer or soldier bring the alphabet elsewhere. For a
half millennium after its invention, this alphabet was rarely used—at
least as far as it is reflected in the archaeological record.
As
the Semitist Seth Sanders has observed: “In this earliest phase, the
alphabet is a quick and dirty tool of foreign workers, scrawled in
desolate places: the mines, the gush of terror. There is no high
culture there ... The alphabet’s first documented use boils down to the
most basic and touching form of communication—‘I was here.’”11
The
Middle Kingdom in Egypt was followed by what is known as the Hyksos
period (the XVth–XVIIth dynasties: 17th–16th centuries B.C.E.). In the
Hyksos period, Canaanites ruled Egypt. (This period is sometimes cited
as a model for Joseph’s rise to power in Egypt, as described in Genesis 37–47.)
As noted earlier, the Hyksos capital at Tell el-Daba has been
intensively excavated for almost 40 years by Viennese archaeologist
Manfred Bietak and his team. Not a single Proto-Sinaitic inscription
has been found there. The Canaanite rulers of Avaris would never adopt
such an undeveloped, “primitive,” low-class script for their own
records. When they presented themselves in inscriptions (which are
scarce in Avaris), it was naturally in prestigious Egyptian hieroglyphs.
As
the alphabetic script wandered with Canaanite caravans, it piously
retained its pictorial forms for hundreds of years. People learned the
letters from one another orally. For this kind of use, the pictorial
nature of the signs was very important. It was easy to learn the
alphabet simply by memorizing the pictures. The first sound of the
picture was the letter. To remember the alphabet, all one had to do was
memorize the pictures. The rest followed from that: The “name” of the
letter leads one to a picture, which helps to recreate the form of the
letter: In the margin at right you can see the ox-shaped head of the
letter aleph, the box-shaped house (bêt) for “B,” the hand-like kaf for “K,” wavy lines representing mayim (“water”) or “M,” the snake-like naḥash for “N,” the eye for ‘ayin and the head (rosh) for “R.”
       During
this early period (until the 13th–12th centuries) the script continued
to be used in a very restricted way, mainly to record personal and
divine names. No administration, institution or scribal school was
involved. No official power-holders would have an interest in
sustaining or developing this subversive fringe invention of the
nomads. That is probably why individual re-creations of the signs
differ so widely, even though they always preserved their fundamental
iconicity.
During the 12th century B.C.E., the dominant
civilizations that had cultivated the complex hieroglyphic and
cuneiform scripts in Egypt and Mesopotamia fell out of power. New
peoples—Israelites, Phoenicians, Moabites and Arameans—appeared in
Canaan and the Levant. For these new people, emerging on the periphery
of the old great cultures, it was only natural to write in the
fringe-born system of writing that traveled in their own milieu. It
suited their languages, their social needs and their newly established
identities.
Sometime during this period of change, the new
script must have become institutionalized, maybe even promulgated in
schools. As a result, the script quickly underwent a process of
linearization and abstraction.12
More experienced writers could relinquish the pictorial link between
the letter and its name. At this stage, the “script of the caravans”
lost one of its greater assets: its mnemonic power. From this moment on
(12th–11th centuries B.C.E.), the user of the script would have to
learn a list of arbitrary signs. It would be difficult if not
impossible to find the pictures of a bull, a head or a snake in the
script.
During the ninth century B.C.E., the alphabet
became the official script of the entire Near East. With its
adoption—first for Greek, and later for Latin—the alphabetic script,
invented in the milieu of Canaanite miners in the remote Sinai desert,
became the script of Western civilization.
The alphabet
was invented only once. All alphabetic scripts derive from this
original one, which we may call the Serabit alphabetic script.
The
invention of the alphabet altered, in the long run, the lives of
millions of people for millennia. It was not invented by learned
scribes in schools, however. It was the child of a few great
minds—perhaps one—who lived among the Canaanites working in the
turquoise mines of Sinai. Egyptian hieroglyphs, however, made this
invention possible. Through the invention of the alphabet, the
long-lost ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs secretively live within our own
script to this day.
I would
like to thank Professors Joseph Naveh and Benjamin Sass, both of whom
contributed greatly to my understanding of various aspects of ancient
epigraphy treated in this article. Thanks also to Dan Elharrar of the
Hebrew University for his invaluable technical assistance in preparing
images for this article.
The Wadi el-Hôl Inscription: Earlier than Serabit?
 In 1993 Egyptologist John Darnell discovered in the Wadi el-Hôl
near Luxor, Egypt, an alphabetic inscription similar to those at
Serabit el-Khadem discussed in the accompanying article. Initially, it
was thought that this inscription might be earlier than the Serabit
inscriptions. If so, was the alphabet invented earlier than the Serabit
inscriptions and somewhere other than Serabit, perhaps near the Wadi
el-Hôl?
Although there was some early scholarly speculation that this
indeed might be the case, this view has now been largely abandoned. The
el-Hôl inscription is faintly carved into a limestone wall on the
ancient road between Thebes and Abydos. The inscription could be read
“(The) besieger
The alphabetic inscription from el-Hôl represents an early and
slightly deviating version from its origins at Serabit. The el-Hôl
inscription exhibits features of influence from the Egyptian writing
system, as well as the inscription’s Canaanite communicators. Here is
an example of each:
In the vertical portion of the el-Hôl text,
the “seated man” sign is used as an unpronounced determinative or
classifier; this sign is not a letter, but rather tells the reader that
the following word belongs to a particular category or classification
[MAN]. This is a typical hieroglyphic characteristic. It is not used in
any alphabetic writing system. In this respect, the el-Hôl inscription
is not as “purely” alphabetic as the Serabit inscriptions.
 The pictorial style of the el-Hôl letters, however, indicates that
the Serabit system was communicated (probably by a Canaanite) to the
Wadi el-Hôl scribe.
  The letter resh, for example, (fourth letter from the top) was carved in the shape of a head with the typical Canaanite “mushroom” headdress and does not follow the model of the Egyptian hieroglyphic head.
Most probably the el-Hôl alphabetic inscription was brought here by
some Canaanites who used the typical Canaanite head. After all, it is
“their” script.—O.G.
A Cuneiform Alphabet at Ugarit
 During the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.E., many of the royal
scribes in the Canaanite coastal city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra in
Syria) were trained in a unique form of the wedge-shaped cuneiform
script. Unlike the normal cuneiform script, which includes hundreds of
signs, the new Ugaritic script is made up of only a couple dozen.
After studying the script, scholars realized that Ugaritic is, in
fact, an “alphabetic” cuneiform script that adapted the techniques of
cuneiform writing (i.e., clay tablets, stylus and wedge-shaped signs)
to an alphabetic system. Thirty cuneiform characters were used to write
all sorts of documents, from letters to literary texts.
Toward the end of the Late Bronze Age, the Ugaritic alphabet
spread to Canaan. Single tablets in this special cuneiform script have
been found at Canaanite Beth Shemesh, Taanach, Nahal Tabor and other
locations.
In Canaan, during the 13th and 12th centuries B.C.E., two
alphabetic writing systems lived side by side: the cuneiform Ugaritic
alphabet, practiced by educated scribes in the urban centers, and the
“script of the caravaneers” born in the mines of Serabit el-Khadem and
practiced occasionally and in a limited form (mostly for writing names)
by the non-urban Canaanite populations who inhabited the hill country
and the urban fringes.
Does this mean that the alphabet was invented again,
independently, by the learned scribes in Ugarit, several hundred years
after the Canaanite miners of Serabit had already come up with the same
idea?
The answer is no. The sophisticated scribes of Ugarit only
domesticated the brilliant traveling innovation of the miners and
caravaneers of Serabit that they somehow learned. The scribes of Ugarit
“translated” what probably looked to them like weird iconic (pictorial)
signs into their own “civilized” wedge-shaped script.
The proof that we are not dealing with an independent alphabetic
invention is twofold. First, the order of the cuneiform alphabetic
signs is essentially the same as the order of the iconic
Proto-Canaanite alphabetic signs. Second, the names of the alphabetic
cuneiform signs go back to the iconic meanings of the signs of the
Proto-Canaanite script.1
In other words, the names of these wedge-shaped signs are very similar
to the names of the Proto-Canaanite pictorial letters, although the
Ugaritic cuneiform is not pictorial at all. All this is evidenced in
abecedaries like this one found in Ugarit.
During the “translation” process, the wedge characters of the
Ugaritic script renounced the iconic relationship between the name of
the letter and its appearance. In this way, the mnemonic power of the
Proto-Canaanite alphabet was completely lost to the Ugaritic scribes.
Ultimately, the cuneiform alphabet of Ugarit disappeared from the
historical stage, probably during the 12th century B.C.E. It ceased to
exist a few decades after the city-based schools, scribes and
institutions that promoted it vanished with the fall of the great Late
Bronze Age civilizations.
language abilityinteresting article, but it is very hard to have an faith in an author who does not know the the difference between bring & take, or that there can not be 2 UNIQUE items the same. • • • • • • • Alphabet ArticleThank you for your excellent article. A couple of quick reflections. There is an argument that mass literacy was not initiated by the alphabet but the printing press. China has mass literacy. As we both have discussed in print, the genius of hieroglyphs is the multilayered semantic-phonetic representation and word-recognizability. Also finds such as the Izbet Sarta Abecedary, where there was an earlier scribal center, suggest that writing, including alphabet, was a specialized technology. • • • • • • • How The Alphabet Was BornThank you for watering the fields. It's tempting to see in the Jehovist narrative of Genesis 2:5,6 an allusion to an autonomous language and myth distinct from Mesopotamian (shrub of the field) and Egyptian (herb of the field) empirical influence; originating in the Sinai desert. On Stela 112 one of Khebeded's companions holds aloft a double-handled jar that is also the Egyptian hieroglyphic for "heart", perhaps signaling their intention to adapt this script to a semi-nomadic life. • • • • • • • Proto-Sinaitic AlphabetExcellent article. Thank your for the detail and depth. Keep up the great work. • • • • • • • Levant- Phoenician alphabetIt is indisputable based on hard archaeolgical evidence that the Phoenicians created the alphabet. Its simple form of language spread quickly throughout the region and world. The Phoenicians are directly traced by DNA to modern day Lebanese along Lebanon's coastal cities of Tyre & Sidon. Archaeology is not a tool for the mish-mash of civilization or for the political appropriation of history and culture. I look forward to critically reviewing and responding to Orly Goldwasser's hypothesis. • • • • • • • Article on Facebook AlphabetWhile the article is worth reading I think it contained too much information for a facebook publication. We use the TMI when we feel someone is taking too much time to tell a story or sharing some news. Thanks for being on facebook. RB • • • • • • • |
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