The First Alphabet

Writing systems have been invented by humans independently at least 3 times, probably 4. We know this because they arose in locations that did not have contact with each other geographically (China, Mesoamerica, and either Egypt or Sumeria). It’s likely that the Egyptian and Sumerian writing systems are independent of each other based on their differences, even though there was probably communication between the regions. These writing systems were a mix of pictural (called ideograms where the character represents a word or idea), or phonetic (where the character represents a sound). Other groups develop writing systems after exposure to one of these systems for their own purposes. Sometimes they adopted the system wholesale, particularly if their languages were related, or they were close enough. Sometimes they used the characters to inspire their own values to write their own language. These new systems were almost always what we call syllabaries. A syllabary uses one character to represent a single syllable in your language. Many languages have restrictions on how a syllable can be formed (ending in a vowel, or a restricted number of constants), and additional restrictions on what kind of constants can start a word (for instance, in english, we never start a syllable with the ‘ng’ sound). These restrictions mean you can often express your whole language using a syllabary of only about 40 or 50 characters. We see examples of these in Japanese and Korean scripts.

The first alphabet

Sometime in the 19th or 18th centuries BCE Canaanite speaking people did something remarkable with Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead of taking those characters and forming a syllabary or ideograms (which most Egyptian hieroglyphs are), they instead took a subset of those representing objects, and used their own names for them. So the Egyptian symbol for ox () became alp, or ‘ox’ in cannanite, the symbol for house () became bayt, and so forth. But instead of the symbols representing the full sound alp or the meaning of ‘ox’, they represented the same sound as the first sound of the Canaanite word. The Canaanites only represented the constants of a word^[1]. This system is easy to teach to others as there were only some 26 characters and they each can be remembered as mnemonic of their sound by what they represent. Scholars describe this system as proto-Sinaitic, since the first examples we see are in Sinai. Over the next 8-9 centuries the use of this alphabet spread throughout the Levant (what makes up modern day Israel), which the symbols becoming more abstract, but easier to produce over time. Since the people of those regions spoke related languages, the system could be easily adopted everywhere. Only the constants were represented. The vowels were implied.

Examples of the proto-Sinaitic script as proposed to the Unicode consortium for inclusion in the alphabet.

Character	Name	Meaning	Sound
	ʾalp	ox head	ʾ
	bayt	house	b
	gaml	throwing stick	g
	dalt	door	d
	ḥe	fence	ḥ
	ho	man calling	h
	hll	jubilate	h
	wāw	hook	w
	ḏayp	eyebrow	ḏ
	ziq	fetter/ anke chain	z
	ḥaṣir	mansion	ḥ
	ḫayt	thread	ḫ
	ṭab	good	ṭ
	ẓil	shade	ẓ
	yad	hand	y
	kap	palm	k
	lamd	goad/cattle prod	l
	maym	water	m
	naḥš	snake	n
	samk	fish (?)	s
	digg	fish	d
	ʿayn	eye	ʿ
	piʾt	corner	p
[	pu	mouth	p
	ʿayn	eye	ʿ
	ṣad	plant	ṣ
	qop	monkey	q
	ṣirar	bag	ṣ
	qaw	cord/line	q
	raš	head	r
	šamš	sun	š
	ṯad	breast	ṯ
	ṯann	composite bow	ṯ
	taw	owner’s mark	t
	ġinab	grape	ġ
	ṯa ?	?	ṯ?
	?	?	?
	šin ?	>	š?

As you can see from the table, not all symbols are fully decoded. Scholars think that the actual alphabet has 26 characters, with some characters changing over time to produce the 30 in this table.

By the end of the 10th century BCE, early Hebrew and Phonician formalized the script, consistently writing from left to right, and reducing the characters used to 22.

Even though Mesopotamia had its own writing system, cuneiform, which was highly optimized for their writing material (clay tablets), there are instances of the Mesopotamian languages being written in this alphabetic script. This isn’t surprising since their languages were highly related to those in the Levant.

The alphabet goes west

In the west, Phonecian traders brought this script to the Mediterranean. There the Greeks adopted it. Unlike the Semitic languages of the Levant and Mesopotamia, the character names didn’t have a meaning for the Greeks. They took the Phonecian names for the letters, modified the sounds to fit their sound system, and treated them as abstract names for their letters. So the proto-Sinaitic alp became alef in Phonecian and alpha in Greek. For the Greeks, these letters only represented the sounds. When the Greeks adopted the alphabet, they added vowel sounds by repurposing some of the characters that represented consonants that were not in Greek. Greek had a lot more ambiguity between words when the vowels were removed, for instance you couldn’t tell the difference between the word for ‘we/us’ and ‘you (plural)’. They also added a few new letters (you can tell because the name was fully Greek like omicron or omega - little-o and big-o respectively). The Romans took the Greek letters and adapted them for their language. These gave rise to the Latin alphabet, used by most of Western Europe, and often adopted by those who in modern times wish to create a new written version of their language (aided first by the proliferation of the Latin movable print systems, making printing easier, and later by typewriters and computers). The Greek alphabet was also used by the Byzantine monk Cyril in the 9th century CE to write Slavic languages, which gave rise to Cyrillic.

The alphabet goes east

The original Canaanite script continued to spread eastward as well. Modern Arabic derived from it, as well as most Indian scripts, Burmese, Thai, and Khmer. In these scripts, the essential ‘constant only’ nature of the script was preserved and vowels were handled either by ‘double duty’ of some of the ‘vowel-like consonants’ (alef for ‘a’, yod for the latin ‘i’, w for ‘o’ - much like english will sometimes use ‘y’ and ‘w’ as vowels), or more commonly, by diacritics around the consonants (pointing in Hebrew or Arabic, characters before, behind, above or below in Thai).

Use in the Hebrew Bible

Today, the Hebrew Bible is written in a Modern Hebrew square script. This script comes from Babylon, and is more stylized than the early old Hebrew script. In its modern version it is written with full vowel pointing, so the correct pronunciation is no longer ambiguous. The original Hebrew writings, however, at least those written before the Exile, were written in the paleo-Hebrew script, or its ancestor the proto-Semitic alphabet. They were available for the earliest part of the written Hebrew scriptures. We have an example from the 6th century of the Biblical blessing of Yahweh written on a metal scroll (see below). This blessing is written in the old Hebrew script. Other archaeological inscriptions from the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age are in this form. After the return, the Babylonian script became the predominant form for both religious and administrative texts. The old script did not die out completely. During the Maccabees, when Judah was briefly independent from the Hellenistic kingdoms, the old Hebrew script saw a resurgence. We have some examples of text in the script from the Dead Sea scrolls. There is indication that the text used in some of the Septuigint translations (the pre-Christian translations of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek) were translated from a text written in the paleo-Hebrew script (some of the translation errors were best explained by the confusion of similar paleo-Hebrew letters which were not similar in the Babylonian Square script). The Samaritans, even today, use the pelo-Hebrew script when writing their copies of the Hebrew Torah.

 

One of the most remarkable instances is the Ketef Hinnom scrolls, two small silver  dating from the 6th Century BCE and contains a blessing of Yahweh found in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Numbers.

Today the Samaritans* still copy their scriptures in paleo-Hebrew.

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The Ketef Hinnom 2 scroll with the image on the right, a rendition with the paleo-Hebrew script in the middle and the modern square Hebrew on the left.

Image from Tamar Hayardeni, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons

The first alphabet today

Today, the unicode consortium includes code points for most of the daughter alphabets that is descended from proto-Sinaitic, as well as code points for its parent, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but proto-Sinaitic is not yet included as code points in the standard. A proposal written in 2019 to include the script. The table I concluded in this article comes directly from this proposal.

The invention of the script was a clever way to create a written language that could be taught in a matter of minutes as was easily remembered. As the script spread and was stylized, and particularly when it was picked up be other language groups, the easy identification of the character to is sound was lost, but the ability to express your language in something closer to 20 characters than 50 was a big win and it was adopted by many groups, eventually becoming the dominant way of expressing written language in the world today.

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[1] The first sound of alp is the glottal stop, the sound that the apostrophe represents if you pronounce Hawai’i as a native Hawaiian would. We don’t have that sound in our sound system in English, but we unconsciously make it whenever a work begins with a vowel.