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I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Sun Jan 10, 2021 4:44 pm
by Minimalist
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ ... c5NjgzNgS2
Who Invented the Alphabet?
New scholarship points to a paradox of historic scope: Our writing system was devised by people who couldn’t read
Centuries before Moses wandered in the “great and terrible wilderness” of the Sinai Peninsula, this triangle of desert wedged between Africa and Asia attracted speculators, drawn by rich mineral deposits hidden in the rocks. And it was on one of these expeditions, around 4,000 years ago, that some mysterious person or group took a bold step that, in retrospect, was truly revolutionary. Scratched on the wall of a mine is the very first attempt at something we use every day: the alphabet.
Of course the assumption is that the hieroglyphs and the later Canaanite scripts are contemporaneous. Yet we know from the Amarna Library that the Egyptians conducted their diplomatic affairs in Akkadian while still using hieroglyphs themselves. Akkadian was lingua franca for 500 years before the Phoenician alphabet displaced it.
Still, interesting idea.
Re: I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 11:32 am
by circumspice
I saw that article. It seems to me that they're not really asking the question of WHO invented the first alphabet, but WHERE & WHEN it was done. Most epigraphers agree that there was a proto alphabet developed by a semitic speaking people, possibly Canaanites, who were the innovators & that the Phoenicians further developed & refined it. It seems like they are actually looking for ground zero & the inspiration. It sounds odd to make a statement that an illiterate people developed the first true alphabet. It's almost an oxymoron. I doubt that the people who developed the first alphabet were illiterate. Why would an illiterate people develop an entirely new written form of communication? Why not just adapt an existing writing system to their own language? I believe that the existing forms of written languages somehow didn't fulfill a need in their own language. Or maybe the other writing systems were too cumbersome or too foreign for common use. They probably had an informal system of signs already in place that was considered traditional & familiar. Who knows?
Re: I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Mon Jan 11, 2021 12:39 pm
by Minimalist
Certainly no one would ever suggest that cuneiform was not cumbersome.
Re: I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Wed Jan 13, 2021 4:57 pm
by Simon21
Seems suspiciously definitive. "So far" might be a useful corollary. And why do people who write about the ME do so in weird language - "the land of Canaan", just Canaan. Archaeologists from the land of Britain, came to the land of Egypt along with others from the land of France, the land of Italy etc.
Re: I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Thu Jan 14, 2021 10:38 pm
by Minimalist
In Donald Redford's book "Egypt, Canaan, and Israel in Ancient Times" he mentions that the Egyptians called Canaan "the land beyond the sand."
Certainly not as catchy a phrase.
Re: I Don't Know About This One
Posted: Fri Jan 15, 2021 3:26 am
by Simon21
Must have had a lot of time on their hands. I believe they called Egypt "the black land". On a wider note it is of course interesting to consider how ancient entities saw themselves. We all think defining a country is fairly easy, but in the ancient world it was a lot more fluid bit more like how Native Americans, Koories etc defined their areas.