How did Egyptian hieroglyphs give birth to the alphabet?
Even in these ancient times, Egyptian monuments have been sitting and weathering for thousands
of years. On their great murals and pillars, you find rows of little pictures. Sorry, not
pictures. Hieroglyphs. Sacred symbols. But, despite appearances, this isn’t some mysterious
Pharaonic picture writing.
It’s consonants. One consonant signs! Two consonant signs! Three consonant signs!
A wall of consonants!! Plus a sprinkle of logographs for determinatives. It’s not that Egyptian
was a harsh, vowelless desert of a tongue. It simply did not write its vowels. Imagine
if you wrote this way. Would that work? And then imagine if you could add in logographs
to make sure you really got your point across?
Imagine you wrote like that, and you’re thinking with hieroglyphs.
Too difficult? Fine, off to the caves with you, where you toil away with with ancient
miners on the Sinai peninsula. You and your fellow miners would find it handy to leave
messages for one another. But there’s no time for deep studies of rows of fancy hieroglyphs
in here. You need to keep it simple if you want another “Major Moments in the History of Writing"!
Your characters look like scratchy, rushed versions of those glamorous Egyptian symbols,
but their meaning doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing but consonants. And the same symbol
for the same consonant every time. Take this character. In Egyptian, it means “house”.
These Semitic miners are calling a house a “bet”. Acrophony, or “top sounds”,
suggests that you can just take the first letter of a word, like the Egyptians had already
been doing with much of their consonant writing. You end up with a letter for your sound “b”.
Do the same thing with “water”, which the Semitic speakers are calling “mem”,
and you now have an “m” sound. With a couple dozen elegant simplifications, you
create a simple, reliable list of consonants. An alphabet! And you’ve given generations
of future children the joy of reciting their ABC’s. Actually, at this point in history,
their a-b-g-d’s, sometimes called an abjad or abgad, because who needs that wishy-washy
C when you can just use an S or a K!
After a long hard day of mining and etching, you turn to find that someone’s been watching
you this whole time. She’s a trader. A Phoenician merchant who knows a good thing when she sees
it. She’s already made major cash in the paper business, where they turn tufty, stalky,
swampy Egyptian papyrus into flat, inkable sheets of paper. She rushes back home to Phoenicia
and smirks. Think of the advantage she has... keeping track of whatever anyone else tells
her just by remembering about as many characters as she has fingers and toes. Old kings can
keep their obtuse hieroglyphs and their stone monuments. The future of the Mediterranean
will belong to alphabets and paper. Writing is going portable.
She uses this newfound alphabetic leverage to turn a huge profit across the entire Eastern
Mediterranean, leaving people inspired to adopt and adapt her alphabet wherever she
goes. All this and she doesn’t even write you a thank you card! How hard could it be?
Writing is easier than ever!
It feels universal, like writing’s here to stay, for everyone. But there’s a peculiar
quirk that’s easier to spot in hindsight. You and your mining crew were communicating
in a Semitic language. Phoenician’s a Semitic language. All of these friendly shades of
the Phoenician alphabet were being used for languages that sounded similar and worked
much the same way. Even Egyptian, though no Semitic language itself, is at least a distant
relative of the Semitic languages, with a similar personality. This consonant alphabet
is being tested in easy waters. But history’s shaking things up. Your merchant friend comes
back for your help. She needs you to deliver your alphabet to a very different people
living along her trade route.
What will happen when the alphabet gets leaked outside of the family?