Far to the west of Babylon lay the land of Canaan, the ancient name given to Palestine (the earliest recorded use of the name to refer to this region is to be found in Herodotus’ Histories, fifth century Bc). Here another important contribution to the western world was being made, the invention of the alphabet. Cuneiform and, to a much lesser extent, hieroglyphs were used in Syria and Palestine as early as the third millennium BC but they were unwieldy and took many years of training to master. By the beginning of the second millennium new independent city-states appeared in the region and they began to experiment with their own simpler ways of writing. One script originated in the important coastal town of Byblos. Only about a dozen examples survive, but these are enough to show that it was syllabic and consisted of about a hundred signs. Some of these were possibly borrowed directly from Egyptian hieroglyphs (see pp. 41, 58 below). The solution to an alphabet did, in fact, lie with hieroglyphs. The Egyptians had already evolved some signs that were exclusively consonantal (for instance, when they wanted to create a ‘d’ sign, they drew the hieroglyphic sign for a hand, ad in Egyptian). The step the Egyptians failed to take was to extract all the consonantal signs and create an alphabet from them. This was done by a Canaanite about 1500 BC. This innovator took an Egyptian hieroglyph and used it to express a consonant in his own Semitic language. The Semitic word for ‘water’ is maym. The scholar took only its first consonant m and found the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘water’, which happens to be a wavy line. He then assigned this sign to the sound m. Similarly with ‘house, in Semitic bet. To get a sign for b, the scholar took the Egyptian hieroglyph for ‘house, a bilateral, and assigned it the sound b. Once the concept was grasped that consonantal sounds could be written down and that any word could be written using a selection from just over twenty consonants, any culture could evolve its own signs to represent each consonantal sound. In the Syrian town of Ugarit on the Mediterranean coast, for instance, writing had been traditionally expressed in Babylonian cuneiform. Once the concept of the alphabet was grasped in Ugarit, it was written with cuneiform signs. By the thirteenth century bc the writers of Ugarit were using only twenty-two consonants. At some point (scholars have put forward dates as early as 1300 bc and as late as 1000 bc), the Phoenician cities developed their own alphabet, and probably transmitted it to the Greeks in the ninth or eighth century bc. Perhaps because they wished to use the alphabet primarily for the recording of poetry, the Greeks introduced vowels. (See further below p. 132.)
World History
