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Inventors of the First Alphabetic System:
Hints from Two Alphabetic Inscriptions in the
Middle Bronze Age (1900-1500 BCE)
Chulhyun Bae*1
Abstract
During the Middle Bronze Age (1900-1500 BCE) some Asiatics, called
Canaanites, who would have learned Egyptian writing, hieratic and
hieroglyphic Egyptian scripts, left the earliest specimens of alphabetic writing.
Yet they could reconstruct and remember the general form of the letters they
had learned through the meaning of the names, on the basis of their
acquaintance with Egyptian writing systems. The appearance of the alphabet
is a remarkable advance in civilization, outdating the clumsy writing systems
of the Near East. At the time of its creation, it was a practical expedient to
counter the lack of a native writing system among Canaanites who had
migrated to the Nile Delta as foreign workers. This new device was never
regarded as an improvement or a replacement for the sophisticated systems of
Egypt or Mesopotamia. No large scale writing or official use was involved at
the time of its creation. The alphabetic system, however, enables ordinary
people to read and write even the simplest of words and sentences and left far
reaching consequences for human civilization.
Keywords: alphabet, hieroglyph, hieratic, Proto-Sinaitic, Wadi el-Hol, Serabit
el-Khadem, Semites, acrophonic principle, disruptive innovation
*
Associate Professor, Department of Religious Studies, College of Humanities, Seoul National
University, e-mail: [email protected]
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1. Introduction
There are a myriad of ways in which the transmission of knowledge has
taken place throughout human history. From the very beginning of human
civilization, the spread of human knowledge, the core of civilization, has been
crucially facilitated by the use of writing. Writing, as a method of recording
and communicating information, forms part of this human knowledge that
emerged and evolved over millennia. Its appearance, in several forms, dates
from around the end of the fourth millennium before the Common Era.
Of the various writing systems that emerged from the ancient Near East,
the alphabetic system has undoubtedly exerted the most permanent influence
upon human civilization. The two other dominant systems of writing,
Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, were invented in the
Middle East around the end of the fourth millennium BCE. They were each
used for more than 2500 years and eventually disappeared along with their
respective cultures. The alphabetic system, however, has remained in use
without interruption into modern times and is still pervasive today. In fact,
with the notable exceptions of Chinese and Japanese, the most common
languages of the world utilize alphabetic scripts that are ultimately descended
from the linear West Semitic alphabet.
The functional advantage of the alphabet over other writing systems lies in
its minimalism. Unlike logographic systems, like ancient Egyptian or
Sumerian, in which a given symbol denotes a word, or syllabic writing, in
which a sign represents a syllable, alphabetic writing is economical. Its
graphic representation of phonemes, consonants or vowels drastically
decreases the number of signs to no more than 30. This would no doubt have
made the system easier to learn and master. The alphabetic system is based on
the minimally acrophonic principle in which a picture symbol of an object
represents phonetically the initial sound of the name of the object.
Alphabetic writing was simpler and easier to learn than the Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing or cuneiform scripts of the ancient Near East. This
particular form of human knowledge spread into regions and civilizations that
are different one from another. The intention of this paper is to try to
comprehend the manner in which the first alphabetic scripts arose in the
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Middle Bronze Age in the Near East (1900-1500 BCE) and to identify the
people who created the first alphabetic system.
2. Provenance of Alphabetic Writing
The emergence of the first alphabetic script is not directly documented and
remains shrouded in obscurity. Classical writers proposed various opinions
about the origin of the alphabet. Herodotus, the father of history, not
mentioning its origin, remarked simply that the Phoenicians, who came to
Greece with a man named Cadmus, introduced it with other arts (Herodotus,
History V 58-59). The letters are called kadmeia or phonikeia grammata.
Diodorus Siculus reported that the Syrians invented it. The Phoenicians were
intermediaries and Cadmus brought it to Greece (Diodorus Siculus,
Bibliotheca Historica I 69.5). Pliny the Elder held that the Assyrians invented
the alphabet (Pliny the Elder, Natural History VII 56). It was Tacitus who
insisted on the Egyptian origin. According to Tacitus, referring to the moment
when new letters were introduced to the Latin alphabet during the reign of
Claudius, the Phoenicians were simply intermediaries, with the ultimate origin
of this form of writing being linked to the Egyptians (Tacitus, Annals XI 14).
The earliest archaeological evidence for alphabetic writing comes from
the second millennium BCE in the Sinai and Egypt. The Early Bronze Age in
Egypt (3300-2100 BCE) came to an end before the close of the third
millennium BCE and Egypt endured the First Intermediate Period (c.
2180-2040 BCE). The new millennium saw the rebuilding of old cities and
founding of new ones. In the turmoil of international politics, there arose
kingdoms of Amorites and other groups of West Semitic speaking people,
very close to the wandering nomads, like the patriarchs in the Hebrew Bible
(Millard 1986: 391).
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Figure 1. Map of Serabit el-Khadem
The most spectacular discoveries came from this period. Proto-Sinaitic
inscriptions, first discovered by W. M. Flinders Petrie in 1905 (and
supplemented by additional finds in subsequent decades), consist of linear
pictographic symbols inscribed on statuettes, stone panels, and rock faces at
Serabit el-Khadem, an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine in the Sinai Peninsula
(Petrie 1906). More recently, in the mid-1990s, two single-line rock
inscriptions were discovered at the desert site of Wadi el-Hol, near Thebes in
Upper Egypt, in a script that strongly resembles the Proto-Sinaitic texts. Due
to the lack of stratified archaeological contexts for these finds, absolute dates
have proven difficult to establish, though some scholars place them as early as
the beginning of the second millennium BCE on the basis of associated
Egyptian material as well as historical considerations.
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Figure 2. Map of Wadi el-Hol
The hybrid nature of these earliest signs gives us clues regarding the
socio-historical context for the origins of the alphabet. On the one hand, most
if not all of these earliest pictographs have plausible connections to Egyptian
hieroglyphic (and perhaps hieratic) symbols, implying that the inventors were
influenced somehow by Egyptian writing. On the other hand, the phonemes
represented by these symbols are derived from the West Semitic (and not
Egyptian) words behind the pictographs. For instance, the sign for a hand is
used to denote the /m/ sound through the West Semitic word men for “water”,
a word that also comes to be the name of the letter. This association of the
letter name (mem) with its initial phoneme(/m/) is called the acrophonic
principle. It is based on this assumption that the Sinai inscriptions have been
partially deciphered.
The presence of Egyptian inscriptions in the vicinity of either Serabit
el-Khadem or Wadi el-Hol would have provided sufficient impetus for such an
invention to occur. These places in fact are strong candidates for the ultimate
place of origin. Though the paucity of the evidence prevents us from being too
dogmatic about this, it suggests confidently that the alphabet was invented
among Semitic speakers in the Egyptian realm, inspired iconographically by
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hieroglyphic writing but not phonetically. The presence of Asiatics in Egypt as
various kinds of workers (e.g., builders, miners, mercenaries, etc.) in the
Middle Kingdom is well documented and would furnish the broader
socio-historical backdrop for this remarkable innovation.
Another collection of data coming from the second millennium is the
Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, an umbrella term for a diverse and fragmentary
group of texts (inscribed on pottery and other objects). Though the
archaeological evidence overall is spotty and inconclusive, tentative reasons
can be adduced for placing these later than the inscriptions from Serabit
el-Khadem and Wadi el-Hol. Within the Proto-Canaanite texts, one can
observe a gradual abstraction and stylization of forms. Furthermore, their
forms presumed the previous alphabetic scripts.
The problem which remains unsolved is that of the location and date of
this first alphabetic script. Various hypotheses regarding the original site have
been put forward which most often are based around the geographical locality
where the oldest alphabetic inscriptions have been found. The following areas
have been proposed during the Middle Bronze Age:(a) The Sinai, more
particularly the turquoise mines of Serabit el-Khadem, where 45 non-Egyptian
‘proto-Sinaitic’ inscriptions have been discovered. They are generally agreed
to be alphabetic, even if it has not been possible to decipher them with any
certainty;(b) The recent discovery of an apparently alphabetic piece of graffiti
on a rock in the Wadi el-Hol (Upper Egypt) has led to the suggestion that the
first alphabetic writing might have been located here, created by Asian
mercenaries in the service of the Egyptians (Darnell 2005).
3. Early Alphabetic Writings in the Middle Bronze Age
(ca. 1900-1550 BCE)
Amenemhat III (1860-1814 BCE) and Amenemhat IV (1815-1806 BCE)
began to build up the Delta and strengthen Egypt’s relations with the
Canaanites. Expensive royal gifts were sent to Byblos, and the mining and
building projects in the Sinai reached a new peak. It was at this time that
Asiatics began to settle at the site of what would later be Avaris in greater
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numbers. Far from the Delta, bustling activity in the Sinai brought together a
multitude of ranks and files from Palestine. From the relatively transparent
texts from the temple area and the mines, mostly dating from the late Middle
Kingdom, we learn of many Asiatics of different ranks that took part in this
activity. In the center of the mining area, the Egyptians erected a temple that
was constantly rebuilt and enlarged by the Egyptian official administration and
was adorned by royal and private stele of all sorts. The temple area preserves
hundreds of good quality hieroglyphic inscriptions, many of them showing
finely executed hieroglyphs, made by professional scribes trained in
hieroglyphic writing. Yet some private inscriptions were probably written by
lesser scribes or by individuals with limited scribal education, as some
“mixed” inscriptions testify.
1) Serabit el-Khadem Inscriptions
Figure 3. Serabit el-Khadem statue
When Petrie found the alphabetic inscriptions in Serabit el-Khadem in
1905, he himself seems never to have regarded them as more than “a local
barbarism” (McCarter 1974: 57). This script consisted of pictures but these
pictographs numbered fewer than thirty. It was soon suggested that it was an
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alphabetic script in spite of its pictographic appearance. It was Sir Alan
Gardiner who first recognized the genuine significance of the system and its
essential character (Gardiner 1916). Most of the inscriptions in this alphabet
were discovered in or near the turquoise mines at Serabit el-Khadem in the
Sinai and date to a few hundred years after the initial invention. The Sinai
version of this alphabet is called Proto-Sinaitic and is identical to
Proto-Canaanite. Gardiner went on to suggest that the first alphabet was
pictographic in design and acrophonic in operative principle and that it might
have been adopted under Egyptian influence since hieroglyphs showed similar
characteristics.
Gardiner pointed out that a series of pictures recurs several times: ox
goad-house-eye-ox goad-cross (Naveh 1982: 23). He suggested that
pictographic letters have the acrophonic value of the equivalent Canaanite
words lamd-bet-‘ayin-lamd-taw. Each picture symbolizes not the depicted
image but the initial sound of each image. Gardiner proposed l-b‘lt’ for
Baalat’. He inferred this reading on the basis of two facts: a) these signs
resembled the figures from which Phoenician letters were presumably
derived; and b) the locus of this writing was in a temple of Hathor, an
Egyptian goddess who was equated with the Semitic Baalat, the female
counterpart of the Biblical Baal (Driver 1976: 97).
2) Wadi el-Hol Inscriptions
The Egyptologists John C. and Deborah Darnell discovered two short but
complete early alphabetic texts along with several hundred Egyptian ones
inscribed on a rock wall at Wadi el-Hol in southern Egypt (Darnell 2005). The
site comprised a stopover point on a road that ran to Thebes.
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Figure 4. Wadi el-Hol Inscription 1
All of the inscriptions on that wall at Wadi el-Hol can be classified as
graffiti or “informal writings”. The initial editors were hesitant in offering a
translation of most of these two short texts: “Aside from rb/rab/ ‘chief’ at the
beginning of the horizontal inscription and perhaps 'l/'il(u)/ ‘god, El’ (either as
an independent noun or as a theophoric element in a name) in the vertical
inscription, no other sequence of signs is transparently decipherable; and thus
our reluctance to speculate more specifically on possible decipherments at this
time (Darnell 2005: 85-86; Wimmer 2001: 107-12; Altschuler 2002: 201-204).
They dated these inscriptions to the Middle Bronze Age, probably ca.
1850-1700 BCE, based on three factors: (a) the locations of these two texts on
some of the better surfaces of the rock wall at Wadi el-Hol, most of whose
Egyptian inscriptions dated to late in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom or Second
Intermediate Period; (b) the presence of West Semitic-speaking troupes of
soldiers (and their families) at the site of Wadi el-Hol documented in two
Egyptian inscriptions from late in the Middle Kingdom; and (c) the relatively
undeveloped state of the forms of the letter of these two early alphabetic texts
compared to their Egyptian prototypes (Hamilton 2009). The two early
alphabetic texts provide strong evidence that West Semites borrowed both
hieroglyphic and hieratic forms of a limited number of Egyptian signs to use
as the letters of their consonantal alphabet.
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Figure 5. Wadi el-Hol Inscription 2
The Wadi el-Hol alphabetic inscriptions redefined the date of alphabetic
invention to the beginning of the second millennium. The paleographic forms
from which these inscriptions stem almost determine the date of its invention
to the first half of the second millennium BCE. These inscriptions provide
paleographic evidence from the mimicking and recreating of alphabetic signs
from the Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic forms. They are the first specimen
of alphabetic writing (Darnell 2005; Sass 1988; Hamilton 1985).
They also suggest strongly the provenance of alphabetic writing. Until the
discovery of the Wadi el-Hol alphabetic inscriptions, scholars traced the
original habitat of alphabet to Palestine or the Sinai, although they were aware
that the inventors of alphabetic writing drew hints from specific Egyptian
writing habits, including uniconsonantal signs, the acrophonic principle, and
the graphic form of each alphabetic character.
4. Inventors of the Alphabetic System
The presence of Asiatics, apparently as foreign workers, is well
documented. Already in Middle Kingdom times, Egyptian hieroglyphic texts
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from Serabit el-Khadem and Sinaitic sites listed workers specifically from
Syria and Palestine (McCarter 1974: 58).
On the basis of critical study on the Serabit el-Khadem inscriptions,
Goldwasser argues that the Egyptian turquoise expeditions to Serabit el-Khadem
brought together high officials, scribes, priests, architects, physicians, magicians,
scorpion charmers, interpreters, caravan leaders, donkey drivers, miners,
builders, soldiers, and sailors (Goldwasser 2010: 39). She also states that some
high officials who left inscriptions at the Serabit el-Khadem temple present
themselves as Egyptians, yet they also mention that they are Asiatic in origin,
or have an Asiatic mother. In addition, she notes that the expedition lists at
Serabit el-Khadem also contain the names of many interpreters (Goldwasser
2010: 40). She affirms that there were surely many more Canaanites at Serabit
el-Khadem and even argues that we may even know the names of these
inventors of the alphabet: they apparently emerged from among the circle of
one Khebeded. Khebeded was involved with Egyptian expeditions to Serabit
el-Khadem for more than a decade and 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. Hieroglyphic signs are of
different sizes and crammed next to each other, and vacant spaces appear at
the end of the line.
Goldwasser insists that they were illiterate Canaanites (Goldwasser 2010:
44). She says that the letters in the Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are very crude.
They are not the same size and not written in a single direction. This suggests
that the writers had mastered neither Egyptian Hieroglyphic nor any other
complex, rule-governed script. An additional piece of her argument is that the
Canaanite inventors of the alphabet unwittingly conflated two Egyptian signs
for snakes into a single alphabetic sign for /n/ (Semitic: nahash, i.e., snake)
and this confirms their ignorance of the meaning of the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
Close study of Wadi el-Hol inscriptions with contemporary Egyptian
hieroglyphs and hieratic forms reveals that the inventors showed a fairly high
degree of knowledge of Egyptian scripts. These inscriptions presume that
Semitic-speaking Asiatics adopted and adapted certain characteristics for their
new writing system. The Egyptian authority employed Asiatics, who included
even scribes, which would suggest the possibility that Canaanite language
speakers could have learned and adapted the Egyptian writing system.
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(Darnell et al. 2005: 91). Given the paucity of early alphabetic specimens, we
cannot speculate on the exact context in which they first emerged.
Hamilton suggested the origin of alphabetic writing on the basis of critical
study of the Serabit el-Khadem texts and the other early inscriptions found in
Palestine. He concluded that the inventors consulted not only Egyptian
hieroglyphic but also hieratic prototypes. It has been generally accepted that
alphabetic writing derived solely from hieroglyphs (Gardiner 1916; Sass 1988:
106). Although previous scholarship suggested a derivation of the Semitic
alphabet from hieratic (Taylor 1930a; de Rougé 1874), their theories were not
persuasive. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions persuasively show the crucial nexus
that proves the derivation of early alphabetic signs from both hieratic and
hieroglyphic Egyptian writing (Darnell et al. 2005: 91). It was well-known
that hieratic was the first script that an ancient Egyptian student would have
learned (Williams 1972: 214-21).
The employment of a West Semitic alphabet in the mainland of Egypt,
such as Wadi el-Hol or an Egyptian mining community in the Sinai came
about naturally through a continuous influx of Asiatic foreign workers in the
Middle Bronze Age. The presence of Canaanites in those working crews is
well documented. During the Middle Kingdom period Egyptian hieroglyphic
as well as hieratic texts together with Proto-Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions
from Serabit el-Khadem and Wadi–el-Hor recorded foreign workers from
Syria and Palestine. Asiatic workers in Egypt were responsible for the
invention of the first alphabetic system. At the beginning of its creation, the
alphabetic system must have been viewed as an alternative device for
recording with a completely practical expediency.
5. Conclusion
Canaanites would have learned Egyptian scripts, hieratic and hieroglyphic
Egyptian scripts, informally during the late Middle Bronze Age in Sinai and
Egypt. Yet they could reconstruct and remember the general form of the letters
they had learned through the meaning of the names. Although historians
unanimously praise the appearance of the alphabet as a remarkable
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advancement in civilization, outdating the clumsy writing systems of the Near
East, the great merit of alphabetic system is its economy. At the time of
creation, it was a practical expedient to counter the lack of a native writing
system among Canaanites. This new contrivance was never regarded as an
improvement or replacement for the sophisticated systems of Egypt or
Mesopotamia. The immediate advantage of the alphabet’s economy was
accessibility (McCarter 1974: 58). As the art of writing was necessarily confined
to professional scribes with long years of hard training, the opportunity for
literacy was out of the “golden cage” and open to anyone who wanted to learn.
It was too good to ignore for anyone who wished to express oneself. The first
alphabet would have been the ad hoc device of an anonymous genius.
Historians unequivocally praise the emergence of the alphabet as a
singular advance in civilization, replacing the clumsy excesses of older
systems (Millard 1986: 394). In Egypt or Mesopotamia the craft and art of
literacy was naturally confined to a closed circle of professional scribes with
extensive training. There is no reason to believe that those elite groups would
have regarded the new contrivance as an improvement over their sophisticated
systems. This analysis, which was vindicated by the passage of time, is mostly
anachronistic. Dominant writing systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics or
Mesopotamian tend to ignore this ‘innovation’ because the traditional
institutions, tied to the royal chancery, were powerful. Although it took almost
a millennium to gain popularity in Near East, it survived and is still one of the
most powerful tools for human expression.
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Date for submitting article: 2012.10.21
Date for final review: 2012.11.20
Date for confirming publication: 2012.12.07