Introduction: Issues in studying early alphabets (original) (raw)
Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets
2019
University of Cambridge. Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets is the first volume in this series, bringing together ten experts on ancient writing, languages and archaeology to present a set of diverse studies on the early development of alphabetic writing systems and their spread across the Levant and Mediterranean during the second and first millennia BC. By taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it sheds new light on alphabetic writing not just as a tool for recording language but also as an element of culture. Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS) is a project funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 677758), and based in the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge. This book is published under a CC BY licence. This excludes illustrations and other material owned by third parties, which remain the copyright of their original owners.
The Spread of Alphabetic Scripts (c. 1700--500 BCE)
Diogenes, 2008
This article considers the origins of alphabetic writing, tracing its probable source to ancient Egypt, southern Levant or the Sinai during the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (17th century BCE). It supports the view that the earliest scripts were acrophonic representations of a West-Semitic language, whose use developed under the rule of the Hyksos in Egypt but was arrested there with the expulsion of this foreign dynasty at the end of the 16th century BCE. The development is then traced through the Levant, with particular attention given to the emergence of cuneiform alphabetic scripts in Ugarit (c. 1300 BCE). This form of writing disappeared with the fall of Ugarit, but linear alphabetic scripts were preserved in a variety of Near-Eastern languages, notably Aramaic and Phoenician. These two languages, by becoming linguae francae respectively of the Syria-northern Mesopotamia and the Anatolia-Eastern Mediterranean regions, brought about the spread of alphabetic writing up until the 8th ce...
Although writing has independently arisen multiple times in different regions of the world (e.g., Egypt, Sumer, China, and Mexico), the alphabet holds a unique position in the history of writing. Possibly all known alphabets can be traced back to a single source, of which the earliest documented evidence can be dated to 1900–1850 BC, somewhere between Egypt and Phoenicia. To a certain extent, scholars can answer the question of how the alphabet came about. It remains much more difficult to understand the motivation for its origin: Why did it come about? In February 2013, Polis – The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities invited some of the leading experts on the origins of the alphabet to an interdisciplinary debate in Jerusalem on this topic. Even if the birth of the alphabet has many times been the subject of international conferences and symposia, studies offering a linguistic, sociological, or psychological perspective on the development of writing can be counted on the fingers of a single hand. Although interdisciplinary dialogue is always necessary, specialists from the relevant disciplines rarely engage in dialogue with each other. Gone are the years when scholars in the humanities could maintain a general outlook on disciplines related to theirs and seek out opportunities for synthesis of traditional issues. This paper is an introduction to the proceedings of the conference.
Excerpt from Catalogue Signs before the Alphabet - Part 3 Variety of texts, languages and scripts
2017
1. Variety of texts, languages and scripts ……….………………….…... 2 2. Accounting and administrative texts; juridical texts ……………… 3 3. Lexical lists …………………………………………………………………….. 4 4. Texts of historiographic intent ………………………………………… 4 5. Diffusion of the Cuneiform system: Anatolia, Elam, Urartu ……… 5 5.1 Anatolia ……………………………………………………………….. 5 5.2 Elam ……………………………………………………………….….. 5 5.3 Urartu …………………………………………………………….…… 7 5.4 Akkadian as international language of the late Bronze Age ………….…. 8 5.5 The Ugaritic alphabet; the Phoenician/Aramaic/Hebrew alphabet ..….…. 9 6. The Garshana and Irisagrig Archives (David. I. Owen) …………….….. 9
A Reconstruction of the Invention and Introduction of the Alphabet
The ancient Egyptians, as we have seen, had an “Alphabet” of 24 signs nearly 5000 years ago, but chose not to use it. Champollion's table of hieroglyphic phonetic characters with their demotic and Greek equivalents, is documented in the Lettre à M. Dacier, (1822). In the dialogue Phaedrus the author Plato describes (~370 BC) the gift of writing from the Egyptian inventor Theuth (original: “Djehuty”) to the divine king Thamus (Amun), who was to disperse Theuth's gifts to the people of Egypt. Before the reign of the pharaoh Thutmose (“Thot is born” or "Born of the god Thoth") around 1500 BCE a revolutionary Egyptian alphabet may have been founded on the 5 Places of articulation (tongue, lips, palate, glottis, teeth). This essay reconstructs the invention of the alphabet in the Plato's Phaedrus 274e–275b, the discovery of the hieroglyphs and the Egyptian alphabet and the the analysis of the 5 letters of the inventor's name Theuth (original in Egyptian spelling: “Djehuty”).