While the concept of writing was independently invented several times, the use of an alphabet as a method of writing seems to have evolved only once and then diffused to many different areas where it was modified to reflect the characteristics of different languages. An alphabet is simply a system of signs for single sounds of speech. The alphabet was developed as a medium of writing during the Middle Bronze Age (2000-1525 BCE) and came into increasing use in the Late Bronze Age (1525-1200 BCE).
In his book Prehistory: The Making of the Modern Mind, archaeologist Colin Renfrew summarizes the origin and diffusion of the alphabet this way:
“The alphabet seems to have a single origin, in southwest Asia (Arabia or the Levant) in the second millennium B.C.E. It was used by the Phoenicians, and under their influence was adopted in Greece and in Italy (in slightly different versions) during the first millennium B.C.E. Phoenician is a Semitic language, and versions of the original alphabet were taken up by Hebrew and Aramaic.”
For some scholars, the first actual alphabet was the Greek alphabet and they deny the existence of alphabets prior to this. They argue that the earlier Phoenician script did not include vowels, nor did the Hebrew and Arabic scripts and therefore these should not be considered alphabets. However, the majority of scholars today regard Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Arabic scripts as alphabets.
With regards to the origins of the alphabet, Andrew Robinson, in his book Writing and Script: A Very Short Introduction, reports:
“If the emergence of writing is full of riddles, the enigma of the first alphabet is even more perplexing. That the alphabet reached the modern world via the ancient Greeks is generally known, given that ‘alphabet’ derives from the first two of the Greek letters, alpha and beta.”
The Greek alphabet seems to have been inspired by or diffused from the earlier Phoenician writing system. To form their alphabet, however, the Greeks added letters for the vowels. In his book The Complete Illustrated History of Ancient Greece, Nigel Rodgers writes:
“Around 700BC, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, adding vowel symbols to the consonant signs adequate for Phoenician. In doing so they created a simple, flexible way of writing that was to help make mass literacy possible.”
While it was once thought that Greeks could only read with their lips moving, current research suggests that at least some could read silently. Nigel Rodgers writes:
“By 500BC most Greeks, at least in the major cities, were half-literate i.e. they could read if not always write.”
Regarding the origins of the alphabet, M. O’Connor, in an entry on the alphabetic script in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, writes:
“The process by which the alphabet came into being is obscure. On the one hand, there can be no doubt that speakers of West Semitic languages were exposed to a variety of writing systems and were influenced in particular by the model of Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
Andrew Robinson asks a number of questions about the origins of the concept of an alphabet:
“Did the alphabetic principle somehow evolve from the syllabic, logosyllabic, and logoconsonantal scripts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and Crete—or did it strike a single unknown individual in a ‘flash’? And why was an alphabet thought necessary? Was it the result of commercial imperatives, as seems most likely?”
While the Greek alphabet is often cited as an example of one of the earliest alphabets, at present the earliest definite alphabet is the cuneiform alphabet from Ugarit which has been dated to the fourteenth-century BCE. Ugarit was a city in what is now Syria where an extinct Amorite language was spoken. Andrew Robinson reports:
“Ugarit and its cuneiform alphabet seem to have been wiped out around 1200 BC by the influx of the Sea Peoples.”
Regarding the Ugarit cuneiform alphabet, M. O’Connor reports:
“The scribes of Ugarit also adapted it to record vowels in a limited way. Wedge-alphabet writing, unlike most other Semitic forms of the alphabet, was oriented from left to right.”
The Ugarit alphabet dates to around 1500 BCE. There are, however, earlier alphabetic inscriptions at the site of Serabit al-Khadim in Sinai. With regard to these inscriptions, Denise Schmandt-Besserat, in an entry in The Oxford Companion to Archaeology, reports:
“Dated about 1700 B.C., they encode a western Semitic language, which suggests that the alphabet was invented along the Mediterranean coast of the Levant. The proto-Canaanite, or proto Sinaitic, alphabet simplified writing by assigning an individual letter to represent each of the consonantal sounds of the language.”
This proto-Canaanite script, which is found in conjunction with Egyptian turquoise mines, appears to have been influenced by a form of cursive Egyptian writing known as hieratic.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat writes that
“…the proto-Canaanite script is held to be the direct antecedent of the three main alphabetic families: South Arabian, Phoenician, and Greek.”
M. O’Connor puts it this way:
“All alphabets can be traced to a single original script, invented in the Near East, probably in Syria-Palestine, early in the second millennium B.C. to notate the West Semitic languages.”
Phoenician is a West Semitic language and the Phoenician script which formed the basis for the Greek alphabet seems to have originated in the eleventh century BCE in the ancient city of Byblos located in what is now Lebanon. The script seems to have been developed from the proto-Canaanite script and was influenced by cuneiform. The Phoenicians were traders who travelled throughout the Mediterranean and the European Atlantic coast. The Phoenician city-states flourished from about 1550 BCE until about 332 BCE. According to Timmy Gambin and Lucy Woods, in an article in Current World Archaeology:
“From what we can tell the Phoenicians were a confederation of maritime traders rather than a defined country. They occupied the mountainous, narrow strip of land that stretched across the coast of the Levant and south-western Syria.”
Many scholars feel that the Phoenicians were probably the greatest sailors in the ancient world. According to some accounts, they may have even sailed around Africa and into Asia some 2,000 years prior to the Portuguese explorers. Timmy Gambin and Lucy Woods report:
“Indeed, it has been suggested that they may have sailed as far as ancient Britain seeking tin from the Cornish mines.”
Thus, it is not surprising that the Phoenician script formed the basis for other alphabets.
With regard to the diffusion of the Phoenician script into the Greek alphabet, Andrew Robinson reports:
“Every scholar agrees that the Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but most now think this occurred among Greeks living in Phoenicia (a region of Canaan), from where it spread to the mother country.”
There is some debate as to when the Greeks first developed their alphabet: the earliest known Greek alphabetic inscription dates to about 730 BCE, but some scholars feel that the Greeks knew about alphabetic writing prior to this, perhaps as early as 1100 BCE. Andrew Robinson explains the reasoning for an earlier date:
“…the direction of early Greek inscriptions is unstable: sometimes they run from right to left, sometimes from left to right, sometime boustrophedon. But the direction of Phoenician writing, itself unstable prior to about 1050 BC, was stable, from right to left, probably by 800 BC. So, the argument goes, the Greeks must have borrowed the Phoenician script in the earlier phase of its development, not after it settled down.”
More Human Origins
Human Origins: Domesticating Fire
Human Origins: Menopause
Human Origins: The Great Chain of Being
Human Origins: The Mind
Human Origins: Signed Languages
Human Origins: Symbolism
Human Origins: Rock Art as Proto-Writing
Human Origins: The Large Brain