Hi ,
I’ve read many websites claiming that phoenicians did and didn’t invent the alphabet. Who’s right? Did they simply develop it as opposed to invent it?
I look forward to your feedback
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/User:Vuara/Who_really_invented_the_alphabet
davidmich
Last I heard it was the Canaanites, who developed it on the basis of Egyptian hieroglyphics (or other , simplified but closely related Egyptian writing systems such as demotic). As you probably know, Egyptian writing was a pictographic system, with each word represented by its own symbol. However, Egyptians sometimes had the need to write down foreign words, especially names, for which they had no hieroglyphic symbol. As a workaround they would use a sequence of established hieroglyphic symbols, where the first sounds of the words normally represented by the symbol spelled out (more of less, the foreign word). The Canaanites, who were just round the corner from Egypt in what is now Israel and Palestine, and so in close contact with Egyptian culture, trading with the Egyptians etc. (including, probably, getting enslaved by them sometimes) learned the Egyptian writing system, and adapted this technique to their own, very different language, simplifying the pictographic signs (which had now, in effect, become letter sign) along the way, and thus producing the first real alphabet. The Phoenicians, who lived in the area of what is now Lebanon, just a little further up the coast, learned the idea of alphabetic writing from the Canaanites, and adapted it to their own language, changing the alphabet along the way (as did the Jews, who later took over the Canaanite lands). The Greeks then got the idea of alphabetic writing from the Phoenicians (with whom they had trade relations), adapting it to their own language again, particularly by adding new signs for vowels, which had not been represented before.
Presumably the Phoenicians tended to get the credit for the original invention of the alphabet in the past, because the Greeks took the idea from them (with acknowledgment), and the Western world, for a long time, owed most of what it new about ancient history from classical Greek authors (who may not even have have known where the Phoenicians got eh idea from). Furthermore, Canaanite culture was more or less extirpated long ago, and the Old Testament painted them as bad guys, because the Jews had to conquer their lands to establish themselves. But more modern research has reveled them as the real inventors of the alphabet, and the Phoenicians moat important role was in transmitting the idea of an alphabet (and many, but not all, the basic letter forms) to the Greeks. From whence the idea passed to the Romans, and eventually to us.
I just saw “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” last weekend. Now, whenever I hear someone talking about Canaan or Canaanites, I hear it in a French accent. Raise your beret!
njtt has stated the basic facts. I would say that basically the alphabet was not invented. It evolved as the idea of writing migrated from place to place. First there were pictographs, then people started using simplified version of the pictographs alphabetically. If the word for ox began with a glottal stop then the word for ox (presumably something like aleph) adapted the pictograph to mean the glottal stop. The word (beth) for house started with a b sound and so the pictograph came to stand for b. Similarly for all the consonants. What about the vowels? At first they made no attempt to reproduce them. Ths wrkd prtt wll and was useful (so they say) because the Semitic languages inflected by changing the vowels, leaving the consonants alone. This means that even today, you can read Hebrew only by actually understanding the language. I assume it is the same with Arabic. For Hebrew at least, there is a system of vowel points, but I don’t think they are much used in practice. Then it was borrowed by Greek. There were several consonants that were useless to them. So they adapted them as vowels. I will use the modern Hebrew names because I know them, but the source was not Hebrew but a related Semitic language. The glottal and pharyngeal stops aleph and ayin became A and O, respectively. Two H sounds, hesh and hay became short and long e (epsilon and eta in Greek), the semivowel yod became I (and later also I, but that happened later) and another letter vav, sometimes a v sound and sometimes an oh or an oo, gave rise to U and V and, a long time after into F, W, and Y.
So who invented the alphabet? You could say that the first society that adapted pictographs to letters did; you could say that the Greeks did. Or somewhere in between. But truly, it evolved.
Did any other cultures discover the concept of “each glyph corresponds to a single sound”? There’s alphabets like Cherokee and Korean whose glyphs were independently created, but they got the concept from people who knew about “Phoenician”-derived alphabets.
Maybe thisis what njtt was referring to but Egyptian grammar has always had glyphs that were used as single consonants. And these weren’t just used in special circumstances. Egyptian often used a combination of symbols that were single consonants, syllabic and pictographic, the last, IIRC tended to be class identifiers.
The Canaanites and the Phoenicians were essentially the same people - as were the Israelites, with a few later tweaks to their religion.
I am not sure, but would it not be more accurate to say that Phoenicians and Israelites were two successor cultures that evolved out of the original Canaanite culture? The point being that Canaanites had developed an alphabet before they differentiated into Phoenicians and Israelites (who each, by then, had their own version of it), and perhaps other cultures too.
Of course that is not how the Old Testament has it. That pretty clearly has the Israelites arriving from elsewhere (Egypt, via Sinai) , and conquering the Canaanite natives. That may not be real history, but it may contain traces of what really went on. It is very plausible that there were Canaanite slaves in Egypt, and maybe some of them eventually got back to Canaan. However, it is unlikely that all or even most of the interaction between Egyptians and Canaanites was through enslavement.
Its going to be hard to ever pin the invention on one culture…
Right next door, the Minoans had been a stable culture for longer, producing Linear A, B and C… which are (or contain) alphabets.
But the reason to have an alphabet may have been to write Phoenician language in Minoan writing. Or the other way around ? it may be the mixing of the cultures which created the alphabet… See what I am saying ?
Well, except the Hebrew alphabet seems to have developed off of Phoenician. So you have:
Proto-Sinaitic (maybe an alphabet)----->Phonecian------Proto-Hebrew.
There’s a hypothesized proto-Canaanite language that then split into the various Canaanite languages, but it’s hard to pin it down.
f y cn rd ths, y mght lk t tr t lrn hbrw r rbc. Y’d b ntrl.
Egyptian is the same way. We don’t really know how to pronounce most ancient Egyptian words. That’s why you tend to see a lot of e’s in translations. They’re stuffed in where we think a vowel probably went but we’re not really sure and can’t make an educated guess for which vowel.
Don’t forget that Abram/Abraham, patriarch of the Israelites, came from Ur, in Mesopotamia before settling in Canaan. So he probably brought with him whatever form of writing was in use in Mesopotamia at the time (I can’t recall the timeline offhand - would Mesopotamians have been still using cuneiform during that period?).
It definitely would have been cuneiform, but the dominant civilization at the time of Abraham I’m guessing would have been either the Akkadiansor Sumerians.
It’s not just the alphabet - the language spoken by the Phoenicians (and the later Carthaginians) was very similar to the language spoken by the Israelites, something that’s even obvious to a modern Hebrew speaker like me. For instance, the Carthaginian name Hannibal and the Hebrew name Hannanel are essentially the same word, with one nation’s god (Baal) replacing that of the other (El).
There’s no evidence in the Bible that Abraham, Isaac or Jacob were literate. As far as I can know, the first writing mentioned in Genesis was that of the Egyptians.
I think the general rule is:
“Anything you think you know, well, it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.”
No doubt, the general rule applies to the general rule as well.
There’s no evidence in the Bible that any of them were not literate. There’s a lot in the Bible that is only vaguely described. The Bible states that Peter’s father was a fisherman. Did he usually wear a hat while fishing? If so, what color was it?
Except other characters - Moses, David - are portrayed as reading and writing things. It’s an integral part of their stories. The Patriarchs aren’t - and as nomadic herdsman, it’s unlikely they knew how. Literacy was hardly common in the Bronze Age.
There’s also the methods available to record written text. In Mesopotamia it was mainly clay tablets. That’s why cuneiform was used since IIRC you used the triangular edge of a stick to make impressions in wet clay and then let it dry. In Egypt it was papyrus reed. But making paper from reeds is labor intensive plus the reeds, while plentiful in Egypt I don’t think are very common elsewhere.