Development of the Alphabet

She presents evidence thatsimple tokens (e.g., spheres, disks, cones) indicating quantities of stored grain appearedwith the development of agriculture in 8000–7500 B.C.E. More complex tokens representing manufactured goods appeared with elaborate markings at the time when cities and organized states developed, around 3500–3000 B.C.E. The earliest full-fledged writing systems then grew out of methods for representing these tokens in a linear form on tablets.

The early writing systems of Sumeria, Egypt, and neighboring countries werecomplex and difficult to learn. There were hundreds of distinct signs, or pictographs, to learn, each with multiple meanings. As a result, only a few scribes could read and write; literacy was essentially a monopoly of the rich and powerful. One might compare these systems to the Chinese writing, which originally developed around 1500 B.C.E. and now has thousands of characters.

It was once thought that the transition to alphabetic writing, to the forerunner of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic,
and Latin alphabets that are in use today, occurred around 1700 B.C.E. in the Levant region, or what is now Syria, Lebanon, and Israel. However, in 1993 and 1994, John Darnell and Deborah Darnell made a discovery that changed previous thoughts. They were exploring in southern Egypt at a place called Wadi el-Hol (Gulch of Terror) when they discovered limestone inscriptions that appeared to be alphabetic.Returning in the summer of 1999, with early writing experts, they were able to show that the earliest known alphabet was probably invented around 1900–1800 B.C.E. by Semitic-speaking slaves who were working in Egypt. By reducing the set of symbols to a manageable thirty and by using these to represent consonants that appeared in the spoken language, the slaves had developed a system that anyone could learn relatively easily. This expanded greatly the possibilities for accumulating knowledge,manipulating it, preserving it, transmitting it to succeeding generations, and sharing it with others.

The Semitic alphabet then spread in various forms. Of most significance was its adoption by the Greeks (around 1000 B.C.E.), who eventually added symbols to the alphabet in order to represent vowels that appeared in their spoken language and to distinguish different words that might otherwise be represented by the same set of consonant symbols. Not long afterwards, this alphabet moved from the Etruscans (with 3 influences from the Greek) to Rome, leading to the development of the Latin alphabet,which spread rapidly throughout the Western world.