The Leiden Egyptologist Ben Haring deciphered a text on a piece of stone from the fifteenth century BC. This stone was already found twenty years ago in an Ancient Egyptian tomb, but no one understood the text. Haring recognized the hieratic script in this, a quick variant of the elaborate hieroglyphs. Properties of our current alphabet can be found in this old script.
The earliest known alphabetical list of words, that is how the discovery of Leiden Egyptologist Ben Haring was presented at the beginning of this week. Moreover, a discovery that can provide us with important information about the origin of our alphabet. It is therefore not for nothing that many interested people came to the lecture that Ben Haring will give on this subject on Thursday afternoon. The Egyptology teacher still seems a bit dazed by the high turnout. The hall of the Witte Singel complex is only just big enough.
Drawings
It was a completely “unexpected result”, that's how Haring begins his story. Why this discovery is so important to the history of the alphabet will become clear later. The passionate researcher takes us on a rapid journey through the history of writing. It is fascinating to see how the very first writing system during the great civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotamia still consists of small drawings. Those drawings represent concepts and sounds.
The Egyptian hieroglyphs each stood for one or more consonants. Mesopotamian cuneiform in turn was a syllable script. It was only later that scripts arose that only had signs for individual consonants; these were the first alphabets. The Greeks would adopt this system and add vowels, creating a writing system that already resembles our current alphabet (the name 'alphabet' comes from the Greek names for the first two letters alfa and beta ).
The shape of the Greek letters goes back to Phoenician, used by a people who lived in present-day Lebanon from about 1000 BC. They were a trading people that left their mark throughout the Mediterranean.
Origin
In Phoenician, most letters from the Greek alphabet are already present, but in a slightly different form. For example, the letter A was more on its side and was indicated with alef which meant "bovine". With a little imagination you can discover another bovine head in the tilted A.
In other words, the signs were a picture of an object or being for which the word began with that sound. Although the name alphabet deriving from Greek, the principle of an alphabet – where each character stands for one sound – was therefore already present in Phoenician. Does this mean that the beginning of the alphabet is in Phoenician?
Probably even earlier, says Haring, and several other Egyptologists with him. Inscriptions found in the Sinai desert and southern Egypt contain characters inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics. But they seem to represent sounds from a Semitic language related to later Phoenician and Hebrew. These still poorly understood inscriptions may date from the 12th Dynasty of Egypt, suggesting a date around 1800 BC. Some of the marks found there are also on the piece of stone now deciphered by Haring.
Monkey-Nut-Mies
The piece of stone described, also called an ostracon, had been discovered 20 years earlier in an Ancient Egyptian tomb near the Egyptian city of Luxor. The stone was found in the tomb of Senneferi, who was treasurer during the 18th Dynasty of Egypt. The researcher considers the possibility that the stone ended up in the tomb later, and therefore dates from a different time, very small. The writing is very similar to other material known from the 18th Dynasty.
The text on the stone runs from the front to the back. It is an incomplete list of words in hieratic:a kind of shorthand, or a quick way to represent hieroglyphs. To the left of the hieratic words are hieroglyphic characters, pictures that seem to correspond to the initial sound of the hieratic word. A kind of ABC, as we still know it from the reading board.
Transitional script
Only these initial letters do not form ABC, but HLHM (pronounced:Halaham). It is an order known from Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Arabic and Ethiopian texts. Both the ABC sequence and HLHM were common in the Syria area in the thirteenth century BC. Cuneiform writing on clay tablets of the time found in the western Syrian city of Ugarit shows both orders. In later Phoenician there is a preference for ABC, which also persists in the Greek and later the Latin alphabet.
All in all, although this small piece of stone from Egypt is inscribed with hieratic and hieroglyphic characters, it points to the development of an alphabet as we know it today.