posted
So claims the web page text below. It holds that at least 8 symbols of the modern English alphabet can be traced back to Egypt. The text appears at several places across the web but what is its validity?
The Modern English Alphabet’s Evolution from Egyptian Hieroglyphs
About eight symbols from the modern alphabet can be traced back in an unbroken line to Egyptian hieroglyphs. It is surmised that the other symbols were inspired by Egyptian glyphs or newly invented. Most symbols morphed to a greater or lesser degree as they went from alphabet to alphabet, confounded by writing and letters often having no fixed direction. A number of signs were dropped when the new people didn’t have a certain sound, and new signs were derived, or an old sign was employed to express a new sound.
The accompanying chart (click on the graphic) attempts to trace each letter as fully as possible. The following unfolding (really the chart’s annotation) is culled from articles, journals, popular books (noted below) and some of their references, which show that many of the theories are still quite contentious, and do change with continuous new archeological discoveries.
Egyptian ® proto-Sinaitic
In essence, the alphabet was invented by ‘Asiatics’ in Egypt around 1800 BC, by adopting some of the local hieroglyphs. The Asiatics were the various nomadic tribes occupying the present day Israel-Palestine-Jordan areas between the Babylonian, Hittite (present day Turkey), and Egyptian empires. They were present in Egypt variously as slaves, mercenaries, labour force, and resident aliens.
There were over 700 Egyptian hieroglyphs (at that time) but a subset of over 100 were glyphs that represented one, two, or three consonants. In this sense, the small one-consonant set was alphabetic. For instance, the horizontal zigzag line symbol represented net (water), and was therefore used for the letter n. And this is the idea they adopted � one symbol, one sound. It was expedient � learnable in days rather than the lifetime of study abode by Egyptian scribes. The Asiatic word for water was mayim. From the chart, we see they adopted the local glyph, and its meaning, but had that glyph represent the first letter in their own language. So the zigzag line glyph was now ‘m’ (which as the chart indicates pretty much maintained its shape and sound till today’s m).
Their alphabet spread back to their homelands (Sinai and further north). It had 24 glyphs (some think there were 27 total), which were written in arbitrary directions, and the glyphs were reversible.
Proto-Sinaitic ® Phoenician
The Asiatics’ alphabet was adopted by the Phoenicians, the earliest examples from around 1100 BC. Note that since the Phoenicians’ language was also Semitic the letter names still had meaning. The modern Hebrew alphabet (shown for reference) descends from Phoenician via the Aramaic, and Arabic is also based on this model. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 glyphs or letters, which were written right to left.
Phoenician ® Greek
The early Greek alphabet (8th century BC) is thought to have been first appropriated from the Phoenician letters by Greeks in Phoenicia (more or less the coastal zone of present day Lebanon), or Cypriots, which then spread over to Greece. They maintained most symbols, sounds, and names, but since the Greek language was different, the new Greek names had no meaning (e.g. alpha from ’aleph (ox head), beta from beth (house)). The Greeks were the first to represent vowels: ’aleph, he, yodh, and ‘ayin became the vowels a, e, i, and o, with waw splitting to become both w and the vowel u. It’s been noted that most vowel sounds result from the Greeks dropping (or not hearing) the unneeded initial guttural sound: (’)aleph®a, (h)e®e, (h)et®h, (‘)ayin®o. Other Greek sounds that Phoenicians didn’t have were added: f (f), c (ch), y (ps), and w (long o). digamma and qoppa were dropped, and four sounds (zai, semek, sade, sin) that should have become (san, sigma, zeta, xei) became (zeta, xei, san, sigma).
Greek was originally written right-to-left but later changed to left-to-right, with samples of boustrophedon during the intervening period. It has been noted that these changes coincided with the addition of vowels, and that consonantal alphabets are written from right-to-left, and syllabaries and alphabets (with vowels) are written left-to-right. I totted up about 130 scripts and found this to be about 90% true, with notable exceptions being Etruscan and Roman (initially).
The chart shows Classical Greek (5th century BC) and modern, for reference. (Cyrillic is derived from Classical Greek but without the y and w.) Greek ® Etruscan
The Etruscans (who referred to themselves as rasna) were familiar with both the Phoenician and Greek alphabets. In 775 BC Greeks, from their largest island Euboea, settled in Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples. It is their alphabet, a variant of early Greek, that the Etruscans adopted, but dropped the b, d, g, and o. They used the g sign, which looked like C, for the k sound, giving them three ways to write k: the C before e and i (ce, ci), the k before a (ka), and the q before u (qu). They later added the f, which looked like an 8, for a total of 24 letters, which were written right-to-left. Etruscan ® Roman
The Romans in their rise to power made use of the Etruscan alphabet. They added back the g sound, using the C sign marked with a stroke, forming a G sign. They dropped f (ph), q (th), x (ks), c (kh), y (ps), w (long o), and added the f sound back, but used the digamma symbol. They also dropped the Y and Z, but added them back again, which is why they’re at the end. This resulted in 23 letters � all the same as our 26 minus J, U, and W � which were written left-to-right. Roman ® modern
The Anglo-Saxons originally wrote Old English in runes but adopted the prestigious Roman script causing runes to fade away by the Norman conquest. To make up for four sounds not present in Latin, they used the wynn rune w (looks like an angular p) for their w, which was replaced by uu, and later w, in Middle English. They used the thorn rune þ for the th in theta and later added eth ð for the th in this, both of which were replaced by th in Middle English, and they used æ for the a in cat, named ash after the same sound in runes, but it also faded away. v became u and v, and i became i and j, though the full difference wasn’t accepted until the 17-19th century. Note that yogh ʒ (like a low 3 with a stretched out lower part), which appears in Middle English where we�d now find a y or gh, was until very recently used by some in their handwriting to write z, though probably it was just a version of zeta z.
References
alpha beta by John Man 2000 Wiley. The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson 1999 Thames & Hudson. Lost Languages by Andrew Robinson 2002 McGraw-Hill. The Egyptian Origin of the Semitic Alphabet Alan H. Gardiner 1911 Journal of Egyptian Archeology, Vol III. A History of Writing by Albertine Gaur 1997 Abbeville Press. The usual random collection of web sites
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Ebony Allen: No, I believe it derives from the Phoenician alphabet.
I don't care what you believe; you can believe in the tooth fairy, Santa Clause, the Easter bunny...provide evidence that the English alphabet derived from the Phoenician...
Posts: 3344 | From: Berkeley | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
wally talking about the tooth fairy is indeed comical. this guy comes on here and just makes things up without a single scrap of real scholarship to back up his wild racist ideas.
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posted
Let's work from the present back like a geneaologist would:
The English alphabet is a one-to-one "borrowing" of the Middle Ages Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet was brought to them by Phoenicians and appended with vowels.
The Phoenician aleph-beth derives from the Sinaitic aleph-beth.
The Sinaitic aleph-beth may be a minutely narrow simplification from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The Wadi el-Hol grafitti precedes proto-Sinaitic by ~300 years .
PROTO-SINAITIC BECOMES CANAANITIC
CANAANITIC BECOMES GREEK
.
Refresh the page to see any animation from start to finish.
Animations by Adjunct Professor of Classics Robert Fradkin, University of Maryland
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The Darnells' unorthodox conviction that the Egyptians and their contemporaries traveled by any route other than the Nile River had been radical enough when they advanced it in the early 1990s. But at the Wadi el-Hol, which is roughly 300 miles south of Cairo on what appears to be an old pony express route, the researchers also happened upon a series of cliffs and rocks that challenged a far more powerful tenet of archeological orthodoxy.
Carved into soft limestone were scores of graffiti. Most of them were written in the formal pictographic script called hieroglyphics, or in its everyday cursive form, hieratic. The difference between this system and a modern alphabet is that in hieroglyphics, each word is represented by an image, whereas modern writing uses words assembled from standardized symbols, or letters. Most of what the Darnells found posed scant challenge to such skilled translators. But then they came upon an inscription they couldn't crack.
What immediately intrigued the pair was the script's resemblance to Proto-Sinaitic, the letter-forms that had long been thought to represent the first alphabet. Despite intensive scrutiny, the inscriptions still can't be deciphered with certainty. But a subsequent discovery the Darnells made only last year gave them an important clue about why an alphabet would have been so useful an invention at that particular time. During a return trip to Wadi el-Hol, the researchers found an inscription from a somewhat earlier period that was written in hieratic and refers to "Bebi, the general of the Asiatics."
About 4,000 years ago, Egypt underwent a lengthy period of internal insurrection. In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these "Asiatics." There would also have been, says Darnell, a communications gap. "There was no such thing as a POW camp in ancient Egypt," he explains. "When you were captured, you were simply put to work doing your old job, but for the other side, and so these 'Asiatic' troops, who were probably already quite Egyptianized, had to find a way to talk to their new comrades." They also had to deal with civil servants, all of whom could read and write hieratic. And somewhere out there in the desert, suggests Darnell, inventive scribes, to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information, apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand.
"It makes sense that the alphabet originated in Egypt, a place that was highly literate and had already developed a system of pictorial writing, rather than in the illiterate Sinai area," says Darnell. In fact, given the timing, it now appears likely that the alphabet in fact did not originate in Palestine, but was imported to the area from Egypt, and took on such a vigorous life of its own that historians have been persuaded ever since that it was born there.[/B]
posted
wally is one of these afroloons who uses strange logic. He would give some african in 40,000 BC credit for the invention of the guided missile because he threw a spear at a deer.
english speaking ntions are world leaders with high standards of living. African speaking ations are **** holes who are riddled with ignorance, corruption, and poverty.
As usual, wally makes no sense.
Posts: 2036 | From: Texas | Registered: Sep 2009
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posted
"It makes sense that the alphabet originated in Egypt, a place that was highly literate and had already developed a system of pictorial writing, rather than in the illiterate Sinai area," says Darnell. In fact, given the timing, it now appears likely that the alphabet in fact did not originate in Palestine, but was imported to the area from Egypt, and took on such a vigorous life of its own that historians have been persuaded ever since that it was born there.
If the above is correct, along with Takuri's data, then the Jews alphabet came out of Egypt and was inspired in part at least by Egyptian writing systems.
------------------------------------------------------------ from the Yale article:
It's now also clear that travelers and traders alike had been using these routes since well before the time of the first pharaohs. On various limestone outcroppings and boulders along the roadsides, the Darnells have found carvings showing stylized views of animals, such as hippos, crocodiles, and giraffes.
Surprisingly, however, these do not appear to be paintings of the local wildlife. Although the desert had, on occasion, been a more environmentally hospitable place, the actual creatures carved into the rock were not found where they were depicted. Instead, says Debby Darnell, the animals might be read as metaphorical symbols—the precursors of hieroglyphics. "We believe what we're seeing is evidence that these early, pre-dynastic people were already thinking like the later Egyptians," she explains.
The appearance of various kinds of pottery along the roads shows that material goods and cultural influences were clearly flowing into and out of the area that would become Egypt, and at a place called the Wadi el-Hol, the "Gulch of Terror," the Darnells discovered a burial cave that housed the remains of more than a dozen Tasians, a desert people who may have imported both their culture and genes into Egypt.
The Darnells' unorthodox conviction that the Egyptians and their contemporaries traveled by any route other than the Nile River had been radical enough when they advanced it in the early 1990s. But at the Wadi el-Hol, which is roughly 300 miles south of Cairo on what appears to be an old pony express route, the researchers also happened upon a series of cliffs and rocks that challenged a far more powerful tenet of archeological orthodoxy.
Carved into soft limestone were scores of graffiti. Most of them were written in the formal pictographic script called hieroglyphics, or in its everyday cursive form, hieratic. The difference between this system and a modern alphabet is that in hieroglyphics, each word is represented by an image, whereas modern writing uses words assembled from standardized symbols, or letters. Most of what the Darnells found posed scant challenge to such skilled translators. But then they came upon an inscription they couldn't crack.
What immediately intrigued the pair was the script's resemblance to Proto-Sinaitic, the letter-forms that had long been thought to represent the first alphabet. Despite intensive scrutiny, the inscriptions still can't be deciphered with certainty. But a subsequent discovery the Darnells made only last year gave them an important clue about why an alphabet would have been so useful an invention at that particular time. During a return trip to Wadi el-Hol, the researchers found an inscription from a somewhat earlier period that was written in hieratic and refers to "Bebi, the general of the Asiatics."
About 4,000 years ago, Egypt underwent a lengthy period of internal insurrection. In the course of reunifying his fragmented realm, the reigning pharaoh attempted to pacify and employ roving bands of mercenaries who had come from outside Egypt to fight in the civil wars. The Egyptians were the quintessential bureaucrats, and under Bebi's command, there must have been a small army of scribes in the military whose job it was to keep track of these "Asiatics." There would also have been, says Darnell, a communications gap.
"There was no such thing as a POW camp in ancient Egypt," he explains. "When you were captured, you were simply put to work doing your old job, but for the other side, and so these 'Asiatic' troops, who were probably already quite Egyptianized, had to find a way to talk to their new comrades."
They also had to deal with civil servants, all of whom could read and write hieratic. And somewhere out there in the desert, suggests Darnell, inventive scribes, to enable the captured troops to record their names and other basic information, apparently came up with a kind of easy-to-learn Egyptian shorthand.
"It makes sense that the alphabet originated in Egypt, a place that was highly literate and had already developed a system of pictorial writing, rather than in the illiterate Sinai area," says Darnell. In fact, given the timing, it now appears likely that the alphabet in fact did not originate in Palestine, but was imported to the area from Egypt, and took on such a vigorous life of its own that historians have been persuaded ever since that it was born there.
Perhaps appropriately, such dramatic findings did not come easily. The investigation of the area around Wadi el-Hol was not only time-consuming; it could also be dangerous. "At times," says Debby Darnell, "we had to practice combat archeology. Excavating the Tasian caves, we were covered with bat guano, dust, and human remains, and we had to work fast, because we knew there were thieves in the area."
-------------------- Note: I am not an "Egyptologist" as claimed by some still bitter, defeated, trolls creating fake profiles and posts elsewhere. Hapless losers, you still fail. My output of hard data debunking racist nonsense has actually INCREASED since you began.. Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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quote:Originally posted by alTakruri: Let's work from the present back like a geneaologist would:
The English alphabet is a one-to-one "borrowing" of the Middle Ages Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet.
The Greek alphabet was brought to them by Phoenicians and appended with vowels.
The Phoenician aleph-beth derives from the Sinaitic aleph-beth.
The Sinaitic aleph-beth may be a minutely narrow simplification from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The Wadi el-Hol grafitti precedes proto-Sinaitic by ~300 years .
PROTO-SINAITIC BECOMES CANAANITIC
CANAANITIC BECOMES GREEK
.
Refresh the page to see any animation from start to finish.
Animations by Adjunct Professor of Classics Robert Fradkin, University of Maryland
^It appears then that what needs to be added by the designers of the above graphic is the Egyptian connection based on the data posted so far.
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
DATA FROM THE BOOK "LANGUAGE VISIBLE" confirms Prophet and Takuri's info above.
[quote]
"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took their cur from the Canaanite evidence. Your local library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around 1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors were looking at imported Egyptian scrolls and artwork...
By 1998, Darnell and others had reached a couple of dramatic conclusions. First, the two inscriptions are probably the oldest alphabetic writing yet discovered, certainly the oldest that can be dated confidently: They were carved in about 1800 B.C., give or take a century. More important, the inscriptions can be viewed as signposts that point directly back to the alphabet's invention. On the basis of the Wadi el-Hol evidence, that invention is now assigned to around 2000 B.C. in Egypt - about three centuries earlier (and in a different country) than previously thought. "Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era.: announced the front-page New York Times headline of a November 1999 piece reporting on the work.
The evidence is in the letter shapes, Darnell explains. Study has confirmed that every letter of the two inscriptions is copied from some preexisting symbol in Egyptian rock-writing and/or hieroglyphics. This is where the inventors and early users of the alphabet found their letter shapes. Certain Wadi el-Hol letter shapes suggest a particular moment in time when that copying occurred. We know enough about Egyptian rock writing to track the evolution of its symbols, and several Wadi el-Hol letters clearly reflect Egyptian symbol forms of the early, Middle Kingdom, around 2000 B.C. Yet the Wadi el-Hol writing preserves letter shapes bequeathed from the alphabet's invention, around 2000 B.C."
"Who were the inventors? Darnell believes they may have been in the Egyptian army: Semitic mercenaries or similar, whom the Egyptians would have called Amu (Asiatics). These peoples were illiterate originally. But the army that they joined happened to have a vigorous writing method for themselves. Perhaps the inventors were junior officers among the Amu, individuals who had learned some standard Egyptian rock-writing and were able to work from there. Perhaps, Darnell theorizes, they got help from Egyptian army scribes, who sought to improve the foreigner's organization with the gift of literacy. As to who might have carved the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, same answer as above. Not the inventors themselves, of course, but their great-great-great-grandnephews, serving in Egypt's camel corps. It was the army that did most of the writing along desert roads."
--David Sacks (2003). Language visible: unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z. Random House. pp. 34-37
"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took their cur from the Caanite evidence. Your local library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around 1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors were looking at imported Egytian scrolls and artwork...
"For the rest of the 20th century, at least through the year 1999, books and articles on the early alphabet took their cur from the Canaanite evidence. Your local library has a whole shelf of books containing the theory that the alphabet was invented in the Levant, around 1700B.C. Yes, it was inspired partly by Egyptian hieroglyphics (the theory allows), but the inventors were looking at imported Egyptian scrolls and artwork...
By 1998, Darnell and others had reached a couple of dramatic conclusions. First, the two inscriptions are probably the oldest alphabetic writing yet discovered, certainly the oldest that can be dated confidently: They were carved in about 1800 B.C., give or take a century. More important, the inscriptions can be viewed as signposts that point directly back to the alphabet's invention. On the basis of the Wadi el-Hol evidence, that invention is now assigned to around 2000 B.C. in Egypt - about three centuries earlier (and in a different country) than previously thought. "Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet in Earlier Era.: announced the front-page New York Times headline of a November 1999 piece reporting on the work.
The evidence is in the letter shapes, Darnell explains. Study has confirmed that every letter of the two inscriptions is copied from some preexisting symbol in Egyptian rock-writing and/or hieroglyphics. This is where the inventors and early users of the alphabet found their letter shapes.
Certain Wadi el-Hol letter shapes suggest a particular moment in time when that copying occurred. We know enough about Egyptian rock writing to track the evolution of its symbols, and several Wadi el-Hol letters clearly reflect Egyptian symbol forms of the early, Middle Kingdom, around 2000 B.C. Yet the Wadi el-Hol writing preserves letter shapes bequeathed from the alphabet's invention, around 2000 B.C."
"Who were the inventors? Darnell believes they may have been in the Egyptian army: Semitic mercenaries or similar, whom the Egyptians would have called Amu (Asiatics). These peoples were illiterate originally. But the army that they joined happened to have a vigorous writing method for themselves. Perhaps the inventors were junior officers among the Amu, individuals who had learned some standard Egyptian rock-writing and were able to work from there. Perhaps, Darnell theorizes, they got help from Egyptian army scribes, who sought to improve the foreigner's organization with the gift of literacy.
As to who might have carved the two Wadi el-Hol inscriptions, same answer as above. Not the inventors themselves, of course, but their great-great-great-grandnephews, serving in Egypt's camel corps. It was the army that did most of the writing along desert roads."
--David Sacks (2003). Language visible: unraveling the mystery of the alphabet from A to Z. Random House. pp. 34-37
Finds in Egypt Date Alphabet In Earlier Era By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Published: November 14, 1999
On the track of an ancient road in the desert west of the Nile, where soldiers, couriers and traders once traveled from Thebes to Abydos, Egyptologists have found limestone inscriptions that they say are the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.
Their discovery is expected to help fix the time and place for the origin of the alphabet, one of the foremost innovations of civilization.
Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 B.C., two or three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of a nascent alphabet. The first experiments with alphabet thus appeared to be the work of Semitic people living deep in Egypt, not in their homelands in the Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought.
Although the two inscriptions have yet to be translated, other evidence at the discovery site supports the idea of the alphabet as an invention by workaday people that simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the elite hands of official scribes. As such, alphabetic writing was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press much later.
Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand by which fewer than 30 symbols, each one representing a single sound, could be combined to form words for a wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually replaced writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics in which hundreds of pictographs, or idea pictures, had to be mastered.
''These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, considerably earlier than anyone had thought likely,'' Dr. John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said last week in an interview about the discovery.
''They seem to provide us with evidence to tell us when the alphabet itself was invented, and just how.''
Dr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah, a Ph.D. student in Egyptology, made the find while conducting a survey of ancient travel routes in the desert of southern Egypt, across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings. In the 1993-94 season, they came upon walls of limestone marked with graffiti at the forlorn Wadi el-Hol, roughly translated as Gulch of Terror.
Last summer, the Darnells returned to the wadi with several specialists in early writing. A report on their findings will be given in Boston on Nov. 22 at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.
Working in the baking June heat ''about as far out in the middle of nowhere as I ever want to be,'' Dr. Bruce Zuckerman, director of the West Semitic Research Project at the University of Southern California, assisted the investigation by taking detailed pictures of the inscriptions for analysis using computerized photointerpretation techniques. ''This is fresh meat for the alphabet people,'' he said.
''Because of the early date of the two inscriptions and the place they were found,'' said Dr. P. Kyle McCarter Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University. ''it forces us to reconsider a lot of questions having to do with the early history of the alphabet. Things I wrote only two years ago I now consider out of date.''
Dr. Frank M. Cross, an emeritus professor of Near Eastern languages and culture at Harvard University, who was not a member of the research team but who has examined the evidence, judged the inscriptions ''clearly the oldest of alphabetic writing and very important.'' He said that enough of the symbols in the inscriptions were identical or similar to later Semitic alphabetic writing to conclude that ''this belongs to a single evolution of the alphabet.''
The previously oldest evidence for an alphabet, dated about 1600 B.C., was found near or in Semitic-speaking territory, in the Sinai Peninsula and farther north in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the ancient Canaanites. These examples, known as Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions, were the basis for scholars' assuming that Semites developed the alphabet by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs, but doing this in their own lands and not in Egypt itself.
From other, nonalphabetic writing at the site, the Egyptologists determined that the inscriptions were made during Egypt's Middle Kingdom in the first two centuries of the second millennium B.C. And another discovery in June by the Darnells seemed to establish the presence of Semitic people at the wadi at the time of the inscriptions.
Surveying a few hundred yards from the site, the Darnells found an inscription in nonalphabetic Egyptian that started with the name of a certain Bebi, who called himself ''general of the Asiatics.'' This was a term used for nearly all foreigners, most of whom were Semites, and many of them served as mercenary soldiers for Egyptian rulers at a time of raging civil strife or came as miners and merchants. Another reference to this Bebi has been found in papyrus records.
''This gives us 99.9 percent certainty,'' Dr. Darnell said of the conclusion that early alphabetic writing was developed by Semitic-speaking people in an Egyptian context. He surmised that scribes in the troops of mercenaries probably developed the simplified writing along the lines of a semicursive form of Egyptian commonly used in the Middle Kingdom in graffiti. Working with Semitic speakers, the scribes simplified the pictographs of formal writing and modified the symbols into an early form of alphabet.
''It was the accidental genius of these Semitic people who were at first illiterate, living in a very literate society,'' Dr. McCarter said, interpreting how the alphabet may have arisen. ''Only a scribe trained over a lifetime could handle the many different types of signs in the formal writing. So these people adopted a crude system of writing within the Egyptian system, something they could learn in hours, instead of a lifetime. It was a utilitarian invention for soldiers, traders, merchants.''
The scholars who have examined the short Wadi el-Hol inscriptions are having trouble deciphering the messages, though they think they are close to understanding some letters and words. ''A few of these signs just jump out at you, at anyone familiar with proto-Sinaitic material,'' said Dr. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and history of the Middle East. ''They look just like one would expect.''
The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line derived from the hieroglyphic sign for water and almost identical to the symbol for M in later Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is less certain. The figure of a stick man, with arms raised, appears to have developed into an H in the alphabet, for reasons unknown.
Scholars said they could identify shapes of letters that eventually evolved from the image of an ox head into A and from a house, which looks more like a 9 here, into the Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and transitions of A and B are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further developed by the Phoenicians, latter-day Canaanites, was passed to the Greeks, probably as early as the 12th century B.C. and certainly by the 9th century B.C. From the Greeks the simplified writing system entered Western culture by the name alphabet, a combination word for the Greek A and B, alpha and beta.
The only words in the inscriptions the researchers think they understand are, reading right to left, the title for a chief in the beginning and a reference to a god at the end.
If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins of alphabetic writing well before the probable time of the biblical story of Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars said. The Semites involved in the alphabet invention would have been part of an earlier population of alien workers in Egypt.
Although it is still possible that the Semites took the alphabet idea with them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of Egyptian symbols and the absence of any contemporary writing of a similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands made this unlikely.
The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates Valley of present-day Iraq, remained entirely pictographic until about 1400 B.C. The Sumerians are generally credited with the first invention of writing, around 3200 B.C., but some recent findings at Abydos in Egypt suggest a possibly earlier origin there. The issue is still controversial.
For Dr. Darnell, though, it is exciting enough to learn that in a forsaken place like Wadi el-Hol, along an old desert road, people showed they had taken a major step in written communication. He is returning to the site next month for further exploration.
Posts: 5905 | From: The Hammer | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
In addition to writing Fradkin for an Egyptic to Wadi el-Hol/proto-Sinaitic to Canaanitic gif one of our own with the necessary skill should make.
Your initial chart has the Egyptian hieroglyphic phonemes that supplied the Wadi el~Hol "scribes" with their basic model. The AEs may've thought it undignified to reduce their writing system to only phonemic characters but the Aamu got the ball and ran with it.
posted
Does anyone have a complete list of the proto-hieroglyphs and their meanings?
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