Several alphabetic scripts appeared about 1800-1500 BC in the Levant along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Among them, short Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were found engraved on votive objects at the turquoise mines of Serabit al-Khadim in the Sinai. Proto-Canaanite ostraca or texts scratched on pottery sherds were recovered at Gezer and at Lachish incised on the blade of a bronze dagger. Finally, the famous Bronze Age Mediterranean harbor of Ugarit produced an abecedary impressed with a triangular stylus on a clay tablet in the same style as the cuneiform script. The first lengthy and intelligible alphabetic inscription is a funerary text written in the 22 letter Phoenician alphabet on the sarcophagus of Ahiram, a king who ruled Byblos about 1000 BC. All of these early alphabets shared the same acrophonic principle,
I. e., the pictographic signs stood for the initial sound of the word they suggested. For example a sign representing a house, stood for ‘B’, the initial sound of ‘bay’, the word for ‘house’, in the Canaanite language spoken at the time in the Levant. Also, the first alphabetic scripts represented only consonants, or sounds that stop or restrict the air flow of speech such as b, c, d, f, g, etc. There were no letters for vowels, or a, e, i, o, u. These sounds had to be guessed. For instance, the English word ‘love’ would have been inscribed ‘lv’. Because they use the same acrophonic and consonantal system, all the early alphabets are held to derive from an earlier still unknown original prototype.
The great innovation of the first alphabet was to systematically create a special sign to match each phoneme or distinct sound of a language. It is likely that the individual or scribal school that invented the first alphabet took the idea from the Egyptian hieroglyphic system, which included phonograms standing for a consonantal sound, among other syllabic signs, logograms, and determinatives. For example the hieroglyph in the shape of a zigzag line stood for ‘n’and the sign representing a horned viper stood for ‘f’. The alphabetic principle was particularly advantageous because languages use only a limited number of sounds. As a result, the alphabet streamlined writing to 40-22 signs, compared to the 600-150 signs used in previous syllabaries. In turn, this signified that alphabetic writing and reading became more accessible and literacy ceased to be the privilege of the scribal elite.
The second great advantage of the alphabet was to be easily adaptable to different languages. The Phoenicians sea-merchants, located in present-day Lebanon at the turn from the second to first millennium BC, played a major role in its dissemination as they crisscrossed the Mediterranean Sea peddling their goods. The alphabet spread south when it was adopted by the Hebrews and Aramaeans and towards the West to Greece, perhaps as early as twelfth-eleventh century BC. The Greeks adapted the Semitic alphabet to their Indo-European language adding 7 signs for vowels. As a result, their 27-letter alphabet could accurately and completely transcribe every spoken word, leaving no ambiguity. For instance, words sharing the same consonants as in English ‘bad’, ‘bed’, ‘bid’, could be clearly distinguished. Phoenician, Archaic Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek daily life texts were cursive scripts written on papyrus or parchment. Papyrus was a paper-like material made from the stem of the papyrus plant. Parchment made of sheepskin or vellum, of calf skin, were also used for alphabetic writing.
The Etruscans, who occupied the present province of Tuscany in Italy adopted the Greek alphabet, only modifying the shape of letters. In turn, the Etruscan alphabet became that of the Romans when they conquered Etruria in the early sixth century BC. Subsequently, the Roman or Latin alphabet was imposed on all the nations of the Empire, such as the Gauls, the Angles, and the Germanic tribes who inhabited present day France, England, and Germany. The alphabet used today in the West is the direct descendant of the Latin alphabet. The alphabet was thus invented only once in the Levant in the second millennium BC and ever since was incessantly manipulated to accommodate many tongues and cultures. In other words, all the present-day Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Armenian, Ethiopian, Tamil, Ethiopian, Navaho, as well as the Western Latin alphabet all derive from the same unknown original prototype (Figure 8). Alphabetic systems are now used on all the continents of America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia. China is unique in preserving its own system.
The alphabet that prevails throughout the word is now 3500 years old. The cuneiform script had lasted for three milleniums. It replaced the 5000-year-old token system. Each of these communication systems exhibits an unmatched stability among human creations.
World History
