EASY AS ABC

THE INVENTION OF THE ALPHABET

We started this series with what literacy did to the brain, but we have not talked about what made writing possible.  Homo sapiens and our predecessors have been around for something like a million and a half years, but, as far as we have been able to determine, humans have only been recording with marks for about 70,000 of those.  The oldest known drawing that clearly represents an object is only 45,500 years old and was found on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi in the Sunda Islands of Indonesia.    

                                                   

Sulawesi Cave Painting

The gap between the indistinct picture of a warty pig and the Iliad was considerable and took several steps to cross. The first stage, pictograms such as the cave paintings, were symbols depicting objects. Ideograms, the next step up, were symbols that stood for objects or concepts but did not necessarily try to imitate what they represented.  Hieroglyphics, logograms or pictures that stood for specific words, were next.  The next advance was stunningly inventive.  In syllabary writing, the symbol is meant not to stand for an object or a word but for a sound—in this case a syllable.  The final step was a set of symbols that could uniquely stand for any sound in a language.  That step is more difficult than it might seem; there have been thousands of human languages, but only 106 have developed a system of writing good enough to produce literature.                                             

Clay tokens representing objects appeared in the Near East around 8500 BCE.  Not surprisingly that coincides with the development of agriculture since the markers mostly kept track of goods and property.  The tokens were found alongside hollow tennis ball-sized spheres that served as purses so the markers could be moved from ball to ball to keep track of transfers. 

Cuneiform Token

By around 3300 BCE, tokens had evolved into pictograms pressed into clay tablets but they were still used mostly to catalogue and count.  The tablets were too valuable to waste.  They were hardened in the sun rather than being fired so they could be washed, scraped, and reused.  Of the cuneiform examples that survive, about three out of four are administrative lists that do not reflect actual speech—“cows 5  donkeys 14  chairs 8  tables 2.”

Hieroglyphics

Egyptian hieroglyphics came about three centuries later and, since they were better representations of actual speech, served as records of events and not just lists of objects.  Both Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics were dauntingly complicated with more than 600 characters each, many of which had multiple meanings. That meant writing was restricted to specialists, usually government or religious officials.  Hammurabi (1792-1750 BCE) was the first ruler to use written records to keep up with not only the business of government but also its rules.  Over a thousand years went by before a Babylonian ruler, Ashurbanipal (668-626 BCE), accumulated his great library and laid claim to being the first king able to read and write.  

                                   

                      Linear B

Meanwhile, a quiet revolution was taking place on the island of Crete.  Around 1800 BCE Minoan Greeks developed their own writing system independent of cuneiform and hieroglyphics.  Linear A (called linear because lines were made using a stylus to inscribe a clay surface rather than pressing an image into it with a wedge) has not been deciphered, but its successor, Linear B, has been and what it reveals is fascinating.  The language has more than 100 ideograms, but it also has 87 characters that represent sounds.  The characters stand for syllables rather than pure sounds, but the use of phonemes had stunning potential.  If you think about it for a minute, a pictogram or an ideogram is just a reminder of something you already know.  It is a memory aid.  A logogram can introduce a whole new idea.  Linear B might have changed the course of western civilization save for one thing.  It was so complicated that it was only used in the royal court and a few temples.  The system was too difficult for general use, so, when the kingdom fell and the court and temples were destroyed, the language was lost.  For the next four hundred years, the Greeks were illiterate.           

        

        The Phoenician Alphabet                                      

As Linear B disappeared, a new system of writing emerged in the Middle East.  The oldest traces of Semitic writing were found on rock walls in Wadi el-Hol (Valley of Terror) on the west bank of the Nile near Luxor.  Although discovered in Egypt, the letters are probably related to Canaanite script that originated on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Syria. By around 1250 BCE Phoenicians had completely abandoned ideograms in favor of logograms—symbols that represented sounds rather than things—but  their twenty-two symbols lacked vowels.  A consonant has no sound of its own until it is paired with one of the ways breath can be pushed out of the mouth.  K is nothing until it is joined to a vowel—ka, ke, ki, ko, ku.  The Phoenician alphabet was ambiguous and only an expert who knew the context of the document in which it appeared could read it, and even he might not translate what was written the way the writer intended.  Nevertheless, all alphabets—Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Cyrillic, Arabic, and even Korean—derive from that Semitic original.

Then a breathtaking advance came from Greece, and it is the kind of invention that quite possibly came from the mind of one man.  It is mistakenly claimed that the Greeks merely tweaked the Phoenician alphabet, and it is true that many of the names of Greek letters and even their shapes mimic the Semitic model. But, as we have seen, symbols in the Semitic alphabet stood for syllables and were complex and ambiguous.  The Greek alphabet was a stunning improvement.  It included vowels, those non-sounds that, when added to consonants, make speech.  With the combination of vowels and consonants, the alphabet turned combinations of letters into a code that forced the reader to take in exactly what the writer intended.  One no longer had to be a scholar to be literate; ceramic images dating to 490 BCE even show Greek children learning to read and write.      

                     

Nestor’s Cup

One of the older examples of the Greek alphabet was found in a tomb on Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples and dates to around 720 BCE.  The inscription reads (right to left as was the custom in early Greek) “I am the cup of Nestor good for drinking.  Whoever drinks from this cup desire for beautiful crowned Aphrodite will seize him instantly.”  I cannot help but wonder what Nestor had in the cup.

Humans can make a wide range of sounds, but only about forty-five of those are needed to make a language.  For an alphabet to work, it must include enough symbols to code every phoneme in its language with a maximum of twenty to thirty shapes each of which has a unique, fixed function.  The letters can either be used alone or be combined to make the requisite number of sounds  such as ou, ch, tr, or pl. 

As with any seismic change, writing was controversial.  By the time Plato was born in 427 BCE, the Greek alphabet was ubiquitous, and the average Athenian could read and write.  Education was no longer restricted to a small elite; a literate student might even know things his teacher did not.  Professional scholars and philosophers were teaching anyone capable of paying for an education, and Plato was certain that was a mistake.  Common people could not be trusted to differentiate truth from opinions formed from unsupervised reading.

 In the end, Plato lost that argument, and Greece became a global power and Greek became the first global language.  After Alexander, Greek was spoken from Italy to Afghanistan;  Babylonians knew Homer, and Sophocles was read in what is now Pakistan and Iran. That dominance was not a matter of genetics.  It was the direct result of the inspired invention of the alphabet.

Before we go, we need a word about Asia where a large part of humanity was ruled by cultures that did not abandon ideograms, those symbols that represent not sounds but whole words. Minimal literacy in Chinese requires memorizing at least 3,000 characters, and mastery necessitates almost 50,000.  Historically, only 1-2 percent of Chinese were truly literate.  Alphabetic script had been known to the Chinese for centuries, but until recently there was a conscious decision not to use it for reasons that Plato would have recognized. Reading by common people was thought so dangerous that, around 213 BCE, the emperor Shihuangdi had every manuscript in his kingdom that did not deal with medicine, agriculture, or prophecy burned.

It has been claimed that the Chinese mastered printing before Gutenberg.  It is true they had wood blocks capable of reproducing characters, but they generated images, not letters.  Without an alphabet, mass production of printed matter never happened. 

Meanwhile in the west the alphabet changed how societies operated, how knowledge was created, and how the brain worked.  But the Greek alphabet may have a shelf life.  In posts to come we will look at the possible effects of changing “I am happy to see you” to “I’m 😊 2 C U”.

REFERENCES  (should you want more detail)

Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982.  Ong is the recognized expert on the evolution from oral to literate thinking and this book has an excellent discussion of the development of written language.

Havelock, Eric, The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1982.  Perhaps the best discussion of the evolution from Linear B to the Greek alphabet.

Vallejo, Irene, Papyrus: The Invention of Books in the Ancient World. Translated by Charlotte Wittle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.  In spite of occasional factual errors and personal asides, this is a quite readable account.  The prose is delightful even in translation from the original Spanish.

I appreciate you all taking the time to read these posts.  Please feel free to comment and to tap the share button and pass this along to whomever you wish.  The next entry will come after the New Year.  Have a great holiday.