Where Did the Alphabet Come From?

Where were the earliest alphabetic inscriptions found?

The oldest evidence for alphabetic writing dates from the second millennium BC and comes from the Sinai Peninsula and Egypt.^[2] In 1905, the archaeologists Flinders and Hilda Petrie explored the Egyptian turquoise mines and the Hathor temple at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai.^[1] Among many Egyptian inscriptions, they recorded a few dozen unusual carvings whose signs looked like certain hieroglyphs but could not be read as Egyptian.^[1] These Proto-Sinaitic texts were cut into statuettes, stone panels and rock faces.^[2]

In the mid-1990s, two rock inscriptions in a very similar script were found at Wadi el-Hol, near Thebes in Upper Egypt.^[2] A scattered group of early texts from sites in the Levant, written on pottery and other objects, is known as Proto-Canaanite.^[1][2] The Penn Museum describes Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite together as the earliest known alphabet, used to write Semitic languages.^[1]

How did Egyptian hieroglyphs become letters?

The Egyptologist Alan Gardiner realised that the Sinai signs were the picture-based forerunners of the Phoenician alphabet.^[1] In 1916 he published his reading, which rendered an inscription on a small sandstone sphinx brought to London by the Petries as "Beloved of Ba'alat," a Canaanite goddess.^[3]

The method behind the letters is called acrophony.^[1] Each picture stood for the first consonant of the West Semitic word for the thing it showed.^[1] A drawing of a human head, for example, became the letter r, because the West Semitic word for "head" was ra'sh.^[1] A hand stood for k, through the word kaph, meaning "palm" or "hand."^[2] Most Phoenician letters kept the names of their pictures, such as aleph for the ox-head sign and bet for the house.^[1] The ox and house hieroglyphs helped shape A and B, and those first two signs later gave the whole system its name.^[3] Most if not all of the early signs have plausible links to Egyptian hieroglyphs, but their sounds come from Semitic words, not Egyptian ones.^[2]

In a University of Chicago Oriental Institute catalogue, Joseph Lam concludes that the alphabet was invented by Semitic speakers in the Egyptian world, inspired by hieroglyphs but not bound by their rules.^[2] Scholars disagree about who they were: the Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser argues that they were illiterate Canaanite miners who could not read hieroglyphs, while Christopher Rollston of George Washington University argues that the writers probably did know them.^[3]

How old is the alphabet, and why are the dates debated?

The early inscriptions are hard to date because they were not found in clearly layered archaeological deposits.^[2] Some scholars place them as early as the start of the second millennium BC, the time of Egypt's 12th Dynasty.^[2] The Penn Museum dates the Egyptian inscriptions beside the Wadi el-Hol letters to about 1900–1800 BC and says most scholars accepted an invention by Canaanites possibly as early as 1800 BC.^[1] Lam cites a similar date of about 1850–1700 BC for the Wadi el-Hol texts from Darnell and colleagues, and names Benjamin Sass, who has raised the possibility that the alphabet began only in the fourteenth century BC, as the strongest recent challenge to this early dating.^[2]

The earliest datable Proto-Canaanite text, a four-sign inscription on the Lachish Dagger, is attributed to the seventeenth century BC, while most Proto-Canaanite objects come from the thirteenth century or later.^[2]

A recent study of inscribed clay tags from a tomb at Umm el-Marra in Syria, which dates to about 2400–2300 BC, cautiously linked their symbols to the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet.^[1] The Penn Museum calls this a sensational claim, noting that the inscriptions are short and the resemblance could be coincidence.^[1]

What did the Phoenicians and the Greeks change?

According to Smithsonian Magazine, for six centuries or more after its invention the alphabet was seen only in words scratched on objects such as daggers and pottery.^[3] Both the magazine and the Penn Museum tie its later spread to the upheavals at the end of the Bronze Age, around 1200 BC, when local languages gained ground; in Canaan these were written with alphabets descended from the Sinai script.^[3][1]

Around the start of the first millennium BC, the alphabet settled into a fixed form, written from right to left.^[2] Lam explains that this form is linked with the Phoenicians because its twenty-two letters matched the sounds of the Phoenician language exactly.^[2] Like the earliest alphabet, it wrote only consonants.^[2][5] The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls this writing system perhaps the Phoenicians' most significant contribution, one that became the root of Western alphabets when the Greeks adopted it.^[4]

The ancient historian Herodotus wrote that the Phoenicians taught the alphabet to the Greeks, and the oldest known Greek alphabetic inscriptions date to the 700s BC.^[1] Lam notes that some scholars argue the Greek alphabet branched off earlier, from Proto-Canaanite in the eleventh century BC, but says this cannot be fully accepted until more inscriptions support it.^[2] The key Greek change was to adapt the vowelless Phoenician alphabet to write vowels as well as consonants.^[5] Scholars still debate when this happened, whether Greece or Phrygia was first, and whether it happened once or several times.^[5] The Greeks kept the Phoenician order of letters: alpha, beta, gamma, delta.^[6]

How did the alphabet reach Latin and English?

According to the Cambridge classicist Philippa Steele, the Greeks carried the alphabet to Italy, where it passed to the Etruscans and to the Romans, who kept the same order: A, B, C, D.^[6] The Latin alphabet used for English today developed from that Greek alphabet.^[1]

W was not part of the Phoenician, Greek or Roman alphabets.^[9] Old English writers spelled the sound "uu" and, by the 8th century, used a runic letter called wyn; in the 11th century, after the Norman Conquest, Norman scribes brought in w, a joined double u.^[9]

J began as a scribe's variation of the Roman letter i in medieval Latin and had no sound of its own at first.^[7] It was given its own consonant sound in English around 1600 to 1640.^[7]