The Road of the Alphabet

In the turquoise mines of Sinai, almost four thousand years ago, someone carved a small sandstone sphinx for the goddess of the place. One side carries Egyptian hieroglyphs. The other carries a few strange signs, borrowed from those hieroglyphs but used in a new way: each one stands for a single sound.

Writing was invented at least three times, and probably four: in Mesopotamia, whose clay tablets filled the library of Ashurbanipal, in China, in Mesoamerica, and perhaps separately in Egypt. The alphabet is different. It was invented once, on that Egyptian frontier, and almost every alphabet in use today descends from it. Korean Hangul, devised in the 15th century, is the best-known exception. The alphabet is the one invention of writing that travelled: west to Greece and Rome, north to the Slavs, and east across Asia to the Mongols.

Who invented the alphabet?

Not a king or a scholar, but people at the edge of Egyptian learning. Egypt sent expeditions to Serabit el-Khadim, in Sinai, to mine turquoise, and Semitic-speaking workers and soldiers went with them. They took Egyptian pictures and gave each one the first sound of its name in their own language. The picture of a house, bayt, became the letter b.

The Egyptologist Alan Gardiner worked this out in 1916, reading a name on the sphinx as the goddess Baalat. About sixty such inscriptions are known today, most of them from Sinai. Two more were found in 1993 at Wadi el-Hol, on a desert road west of Thebes, in Egypt itself. They are about as old as the Sinai texts, and neither place can be shown to come first.

How old is that? Most specialists now date the first letters to around 1850 BC. Some scholars, notably Benjamin Sass, argue for a date several centuries later, so the question is still open. Nor were the inventors slaves or Hebrews, as is sometimes said: nothing ties them to Israel, which appears centuries later. A find in Syria claimed to be older still cannot be read, and the claim is under debate.

Did the Phoenicians invent the alphabet?

No, but they gave it the form that spread. By around 1000 BC the cities of the Levant coast wrote an alphabet of 22 letters, all consonants, read from right to left. Its oldest long text is cut on the stone coffin of Ahiram, a king of Byblos, found in 1923. Most scholars date the inscription to about 1000 BC, though a few put it earlier or later.

In 2005 a UN news report, marking a UNESCO listing of the Phoenician alphabet, called the coffin the earliest alphabetic writing. It is not: the Sinai letters are some eight centuries older. What the Phoenicians did was carry their letters across the Mediterranean as they traded.

How did the Greeks get the alphabet?

From Phoenicians, somewhere the two peoples traded together. Where that was, nobody knows. A trading post at Al Mina in Syria, Methone in the northern Aegean, Euboea and Crete have all been proposed. The date is argued too, but most scholars say the Greeks were writing by the 8th century BC.

The Greeks changed one thing that mattered. Phoenician had letters for consonants Greek did not use, and the Greeks turned five of them into the vowels a, e, i, o and u. Theirs was the first alphabet to write every vowel with a letter of its own, and that step seems to have happened only once. Some of the oldest Greek writing is scratched on drinking cups offered to Apollo at Eretria, a city of seafaring Euboeans.

The Greeks remembered where the letters came from. They called them “Phoenician letters”. The historian Herodotus told how they arrived with Cadmus, a Phoenician hero who settled in Greece, but he wrote some three centuries after the event and the story is legend. The name is the real evidence.

How did the alphabet reach Rome?

On Greek ships to Italy. Euboeans set up a trading post at Pithekoussai, on the island of Ischia. Around 725 BC someone there scratched three lines on a cup, two of them a verse joke about the cup of Nestor in the Iliad. They are among the earliest written lines of Greek verse.

The Etruscans of central Italy took this western, Euboean form of the Greek alphabet. Around 670 BC a noble at Marsiliana was buried with an ivory writing tablet edged with all 26 letters, in the order learners copied them. It is the oldest complete Etruscan alphabet known.

The Romans learned their letters from the Etruscans before 600 BC, with some Greek influence, not straight from Greek. In the 6th century BC a sacred law was cut on a stone post in the Forum, its lines running back and forth. It is one of the oldest Latin inscriptions, in the ancestors of the letters on this page.

Did Cyril invent Cyrillic?

No. In 862 Rastislav, prince of Great Moravia, asked the emperor in Constantinople for teachers. The emperor sent two brothers from Thessalonica, Constantine and Methodius, who began their work in 863 with church services in Slavonic. For them Constantine, later known as Cyril, made a new alphabet, Glagolitic. Its letters look unlike Greek ones, though they stand for much the same sounds as Cyrillic would.

The Moravian mission did not last. Its disciples moved south to the First Bulgarian Empire, and around 900 a second Slavonic script took shape there, with the capital, Preslav, as its centre. This one used the Greek capital letters of Byzantium and added new letters for Slavic sounds. It was named Cyrillic after a man who had made a different alphabet. Glagolitic held on longest in Croatia, where it was still used into the 20th century.

How did the alphabet travel east?

With the paperwork of empires. In Syria, in the 10th and 9th centuries BC, the alphabet took a new form, Aramaic. The Assyrians, then the Persians, made Aramaic the common written language of their empires, from Egypt and Asia Minor to Afghanistan.

At Persepolis, around 500 BC, the clerks of the Persian king Darius kept accounts on clay tablets. Most are in Elamite cuneiform, but hundreds are in Aramaic letters. That government script reached Sogdiana, the country around Samarkand, then a Persian province, and became the Sogdian alphabet. Whether the scripts of India also descend from Aramaic is still argued.

Where does the Arabic script come from?

From Aramaic as well, by another branch. The Nabataeans, whose cities included Petra and Hegra, wrote their own form of Aramaic letters. In 267 a tomb at Hegra was inscribed in those letters with Arabic words among the Aramaic ones. Over the next three centuries, Arabic speakers who used the script turned it into the Arabic alphabet, the one that would fill the paper of Baghdad’s offices.

Where does the alphabet meet paper?

At Dunhuang, on the old Chinese frontier. Around 313, Sogdian merchants living in China wrote letters home on paper, in an alphabet descended from Aramaic. The bag was lost at a watchtower west of the town and found in 1907.

The Sogdians had both things at once: paper, which came from China and which they would carry west, and an alphabet, which came from the west and which they would hand on east. The alphabet did not reach China, though. The letters were written by foreigners, and Chinese writing did not change. The Road of Paper follows the other traveller, and a map of both routes together shows where else they cross.

How did the Mongols get their script?

Through the Uyghurs. In the 8th or 9th century the joined-up, cursive form of Sogdian was adapted for the Uyghurs’ Turkic language. Sogdian had begun to be written in vertical columns in the late 5th century, perhaps under Chinese influence, and the new script kept the columns. After 840 the Uyghurs built a kingdom around Turfan, with its capital at Qocho, and their script was used in the region for centuries.

According to the official history of the Yuan dynasty, compiled some 165 years later, Genghis Khan captured a Uyghur official, Tata-tonga, and ordered him to teach the princes to write Mongolian in Uyghur letters. He taught the script; he did not invent it. The oldest surviving inscription in Mongolian is a granite stele of around 1225, found near the Khirkhira river in Transbaikalia. It records how far the Khan’s nephew shot an arrow. In 1599 the Manchus adapted the same script for their own language.

The script is still written in Inner Mongolia, in China. In Mongolia, a language law of 2015 requires government business to be kept in both Cyrillic and the traditional script from 2025. Letters first drawn in Sinai nearly four thousand years ago are coming back into official use on the steppe.