The Sinai Peninsula in Egypt is the bridge between Africa and Asia. Around 4,000 years ago, the Sinai plateau called Serabit el-Khadim was a center for mining turquoise and other minerals, which drew laborers from neighboring nations who could not read Egyptian hieroglyphs. In 1905, artifacts taken from a temple in Serabit el-Khadim included a small sphinx with strange markings, which have since been identified as an alphabet, and even translated.
“For me, it’s worth all the gold in Egypt,” the Israeli Egyptologist Orly Goldwasser said of this little sphinx when we viewed it at the British Museum in late 2018. She had come to London to be interviewed for a BBC documentary about the history of writing. In the high-ceilinged Egypt and Sudan study room lined with bookcases, separated from the crowds in the public galleries by locked doors and iron staircases, a curator brought the sphinx out of its basket and placed it on a table, where Goldwasser and I marveled at it. “Every word we read and write started with him and his friends.” She explained how miners on Sinai would have gone about transforming a hieroglyph into a letter: “Call the picture by name, pick up only the first sound and discard the picture from your mind.” Thus, the hieroglyph for an ox, aleph, helped give a shape to the letter “a,” while the alphabet’s inventors derived “b” from the hieroglyph for “house,” bêt. These first two signs came to form the name of the system itself: alphabet. Some letters were borrowed from hieroglyphs, others drawn from life, until all the sounds of the language they spoke could be represented in written form.
The concept of an alphabet profoundly changed the way we communicate. By turning sounds into symbols, speech could be recorded and deciphered in different languages, and new words can be constructed without previous written context. The theory that the idea was developed by itinerant laborers working together to overcome their illiteracy in a foreign country is an intriguing idea, which you can read about at Smithsonian.
(Image credit: British Museum)