Speakers of an early Semitic language who adapted Egyptian signs; names unknown
Plate 012
c. 1900–1050 BCE
Egypt, Sinai and the Levant
No photograph is shown for this exhibition. The museum displays an image only where it can show the object honestly.
About this date
Early alphabetic inscriptions in Egypt and Sinai are dated by style and context. The Phoenician alphabet is usually dated to around 1050 BCE.
About credit
No single creator is known. The earliest letters appear to be adapted from Egyptian hieroglyphs by Semitic speakers; the Greeks later added signs for vowels.
Chapter II
The world before
Life before the Alphabet
Writing systems such as cuneiform and hieroglyphs required learning many hundreds of signs. Reading and writing stayed with a small trained class.
II
The human achievement
How it came about
Inscriptions found in Sinai and at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt use simple signs derived from Egyptian pictures to write a Semitic language. By about 1050 BCE a standard set of twenty-two consonant letters, the Phoenician alphabet, was in use along the Levantine coast. Greek speakers adopted it and, around the 8th century BCE, used some signs for vowels.
III
Understanding the invention
How it works
The Alphabet, explained in two steps.
01
Step 01 of 02
One sign, one sound
Each letter stands for a single sound, so any word can be spelled from a short list instead of memorised as its own symbol.
One sign, one sound
Adding vowels
IV
The transformation
What changed for humanity
Education
A far shorter route to literacy widened who could read and write.
Trade
Merchants could keep their own accounts and letters.
Learning to read no longer took years of scribal training. Literacy could reach merchants, farmers and eventually most of a population.
V
Before and after
Life before and after The Alphabet
Before
Years of scribal training in hundreds of signs.
After
A few dozen letters, learnable in a season.
On larger screens, drag the divider (or use the arrow keys) to give more room to the world before or after.
Digital text reduces every alphabet to numbered symbols.
VII
Human stories
The people and the moments
An idea carried by ships
The alphabet’s spread is usually linked to Phoenician traders, though inscriptions show it was adopted and adapted in many places by many different hands.
Where accounts differ, this museum follows the documented record and says so.
