麻豆传媒

AMENEMHAT III is one of Egypt鈥檚 lesser-known pharaohs. He made pyramids, but not on the scale of Khufu鈥檚 at Giza. He commissioned many artworks, but none that survive match the opulence of Tutankhamun鈥檚 gold mask. He mounted military expeditions, but not with the success of Thutmose III, who built a vast empire. Still, Amenemhat has one claim to fame. Under his rule, a technology emerged that is more impressive, valuable and pervasive than any of these legacies: the alphabet.

The alphabet was a revolutionary way of recording information. But it is more than just a writing system. In a recent book, Philippa Steele and Philip Boyes at the University of Cambridge describe it as an 鈥�. Today it is so central to education in most countries that children can often recite it long before they have learned to read or write. Beyond the familiar ABC, a variety of alphabets are used to write in many languages, from Russian to Arabic. But all trace back to one common ancestor.

The story of that first alphabet has long been a mystery, but over the past 25 years we have made enormous progress towards pinpointing when and where it was invented. Most astonishing, the consensus today is that the alphabet didn鈥檛 emerge from a state-sponsored initiative as was long believed. Instead, its originators were probably far removed from the ancient world鈥檚 elites. Paradoxically, they may even have been illiterate. 鈥淣o trained Egyptian scribe would write in the way these geniuses wrote,鈥� says Orly Goldwasser at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. 鈥淗e would be ashamed to do so.鈥�

By 3800 years ago, when Amenemhat III ruled, writing had already been around for more than 1000 years. Two systems had become particularly influential: cuneiform, originating in Mesopotamia in south-west Asia, and Egyptian hieroglyphics. It was the latter that inspired the inventors of the alphabet, which still carries faint echoes of its hieroglyphic heritage. Our letter M, for instance, has the crests and trough of a water wave, the hieroglyphic sign from which it emerged. Although most of the letters of the alphabet weren鈥檛 exactly new, the way they were repurposed certainly was.

Egyptian hieroglyphs generally represented syllables or full words. The alphabet uses a different approach. All letters represent phonemes, the indivisible elementary particles from which spoken languages are built. The word 鈥減en鈥�, for example, is just one syllable but contains three distinct phonemes, each represented by one letter. There were some phonemic elements in earlier writing systems, but the alphabet was entirely phoneme based. That was revolutionary.

It may seem like a small distinction, but it makes a huge difference to the way the alphabet worked compared with hieroglyphics. The Egyptians needed hundreds of distinct hieroglyphs to represent individual words. Most languages comprise just a few dozen phonemes, however. As a consequence, all of the use the same 20 or so symbols, or letters (see 鈥�The first alphabet鈥�).

As far as we know, this original alphabet wasn鈥檛 used to write Egyptian words, but the words of one or more Semitic languages, a group of languages spoken, at that time, by various populations living in the Middle East and Turkey. This suggests the alphabet was a cross-cultural invention. 鈥淚t makes sense to see this coming out of a close association of Egyptian and Semitic speakers,鈥� says John Darnell at Yale University. But in what context the two groups came together to invent the alphabet 鈥� and exactly when 鈥� wasn鈥檛 clear for most of the 20th century. Archaeologists first unearthed examples of the early alphabet in 1905, but so little else was found in the following decades that people lost interest in the alphabet鈥檚 origins. Then, in 1995, Darnell made a discovery that rekindled the flame.

鈥淕ood inventions tend to take root fast, so why did the alphabet seem to languish for 600 years?鈥�

While working at the desert site of Wadi el-H么l, a few tens of kilometres north-west of Luxor (the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes), Darnell鈥檚 team analysed two alphabetic inscriptions carved into rock. Although still indecipherable, the style of the letters suggests many emerged from a very particular type of Egyptian hieroglyphics called hieratic. This was a significant discovery. Formal hieroglyphics altered little as time passed, but hieratic did change. And the inscriptions looked like a style of hieratic used 3800 years ago. 鈥淚t鈥檚 pretty incontrovertible that the inscriptions date to the end of the 12th dynasty, during the reign of Amenemhat III,鈥� says Darnell. That makes them among the oldest alphabetic inscriptions found.

听

Most scholars agree that this is currently our best guess for when the alphabet was invented. The Wadi el-H么l carvings also hint at how it was invented. The site was frequented by the Egyptian army, and military recruits were a cosmopolitan bunch. 鈥淵ou鈥檇 have had all sorts of people: Nubians, Egyptians, people from what we鈥檇 refer to as Libya, people from south-west Asia 鈥� it was a real melting pot of people and languages,鈥� says Darnell. Military expeditions also required scribes to read and write dispatches, so he imagines a scenario in which those professional scribes sat down with their military colleagues from south-west Asia and helped them invent the alphabet. 鈥淚鈥檇 say it has to come out of some interaction,鈥� he says. 鈥淎nd whoever came up with those signs was probably literate in Egyptian hieratic.鈥�

Darnell and his colleagues . Although widely accepted as landmark work, it wasn鈥檛 the end of the story. For a start, it highlighted a real puzzle. As far as we can tell, the alphabet wasn鈥檛 embraced for state business until 3200 years ago. , so why did the alphabet seem to languish for 600 years?

One surprising suggestion is that the literati didn鈥檛 consider it to be superior to their traditional scripts. 鈥淲e鈥檙e conditioned to thinking about writing in terms of efficiency,鈥� says Boyes. From this perspective, cuneiform and hieroglyphics must be poor systems because they employed hundreds of signs, each potentially having multiple meanings. But scribes valued this complexity, in part because 鈥� enabling them to make visual puns, for instance. 鈥淵ou can switch things around to show how clever you are,鈥� he says. At the same time, ancient writing systems were crystal clear in their meaning. The earliest versions of the alphabet were less so. For instance, most didn鈥檛 fully represent the vowels of the spoken language.

Hidden history

However, another possibility is emerging: the alphabet didn鈥檛 fail to take off, its early history has simply been hidden, until now. In 2015, Ben Haring at Leiden University in the Netherlands unearthed a few decades ago in a tomb near Thebes. He soon realised the text was unusual. The Egyptian hieratic and hieroglyphic writing looked like 鈥� or memory aids 鈥� spelling out the first few letters of the alphabet in alphabetical order. A modern version might read 鈥淎lbert Bought Custard Doughnuts鈥�. Aaron Koller at Yeshiva University, New York, argues that . Thebes was Egypt鈥檚 capital at that time, he says. And this fragment of pottery suggests that scribes in the metropolis wanted to learn the writing system apparently invented by their provincial military colleagues 350 years earlier. That might seem like quite a lag, but although Wadi el-H么l was close to Thebes, in cultural terms it was a world away, visited rarely by Egypt鈥檚 elites.

Even if the alphabet was catching on, the Egyptian state didn鈥檛 abandon hieroglyphics. Koller thinks he knows why. The clue, he believes, lies in documenting formal state business in southern Mesopotamia, more than 1000 kilometres east of Egypt. The text is in cuneiform, but when Stephanie Dalley at the University of Oxford examined the tablets, she discovered something intriguing. On the edge of four of them were short alphabetic inscriptions. Mesopotamian scribes stored cuneiform tablets on shelves in rows, like books in a modern library, says Koller. That makes text on the edges important because it is all that is visible to anyone navigating the archive. Like their counterparts in Egypt, he thinks, Mesopotamian scribes were compelled by tradition to use the ancient writing systems to document official business. But for unofficial, private work 鈥� like writing these 鈥渟pine notes鈥� 鈥� they chose to use the alphabet because they found it quicker to write and read.

Dalley is sceptical about Koller鈥檚 idea, however. 鈥淚 do not think the evidence bears the weight of his deductions,鈥� she says. Christopher Rollston at George Washington University in Washington DC also advocates caution because the tablets lack provenance, so it is unclear whether they were archived with the alphabetic inscriptions exposed. In fact, he doubts that scribes used the alphabet widely in its first 600 years. Professional writers typically standardise their writing systems, he says, but there is before 3200 years ago. Some read right to left, others left to right, and yet others top to bottom. Even the orientation of letters within words wasn鈥檛 fixed. 鈥淚f scribes were using this fairly widely for their own purposes, we would expect a modicum more standardisation,鈥� he says.

Goldwasser goes even further. She thinks one reason scribes failed to adopt the alphabet is that they . In fact, she believes it originated not at Wadi el-H么l, but at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai peninsula of north-east Egypt, where alphabetic inscriptions found a century ago have now been .

Serabit el-Khadim was once a centre of turquoise mining, employing Semitic-speaking Canaanites from the Middle East to extract the gemstone. Goldwasser鈥檚 idea is that these illiterate miners saw Egyptians writing dedications to the gods and wanted in on the action. Given their lowly status, they were never going to persuade Egyptian scribes to teach them hieroglyphics. So they improvised. They assigned new meanings to signs in the hieroglyphic texts so they could record their Semitic language phonetically 鈥� and created the alphabet. The Serabit el-Khadim alphabetic inscriptions are crudely executed, with letters of different sizes, Goldwasser notes, suggesting they were written by people with no formal training. Egyptian scribes would never be so clumsy in their work, she says.

Koller concedes that the writing is crude, but still thinks it makes more sense to see the alphabet as an invention from within Egypt鈥檚 literate elite. However, he also notes that early alphabetic texts are presented in an unbroken stream, whereas hieroglyphic writing incorporated signs to indicate where words end. 鈥淪o, if the inventors of the alphabet knew Egyptian, they consciously omitted something that鈥檚 clearly useful,鈥� he says.

Rollston thinks it possible that Canaanitic miners played a key role in the alphabet鈥檚 invention. But he questions whether they were completely illiterate. Goldwasser herself has found evidence that some Canaanites used Egyptian hieroglyphics in the traditional way, although their writing is littered with basic errors. However, she argues that these literate Canaanites were tribal leaders who wouldn鈥檛 have mingled with the illiterate miners.

Whoever invented the alphabet, they never lived to realise the importance of their creation (see 鈥�How we write today鈥�). Indeed, it is still a mystery exactly why the alphabet ultimately replaced other writing systems. It is tempting to link it with a region-wide collapse of civilisations 3200 years ago, the cause of which is still unknown. But the alphabet was beginning to rise to dominance along parts of the eastern Mediterranean coast before that. 鈥淭o be honest, I think that it鈥檚 more of an accident than anything,鈥� says Steele.

Whatever the reason, the alphabet did become more common as the Bronze Age ended around 3200 years ago. In a very literal sense, written history had changed forever.