Earliest Known Use of Alphabet Established

In the 115-degree heat of the southern Egyptian desert, with scorpions and pit vipers lurking about and Egyptian soldiers and policemen marshaled to protect them from potential terrorists, USC researchers have photographed the earliest known characters of the alphabet.

Scrawled by Semitic soldiers on a cliff wall on the Wadi el hol (“Gulch of Terrors”), the inscription is the ancient equivalent of “Kilroy was here.” But its discovery extends the origins of the alphabet back by at least 200 years to perhaps the 19th century BC, and indicates that alphabetic writing--which brought literacy to the common man--was most likely invented in Egypt and not on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean as many archeologists had previously believed.

All of today’s alphabets, including the English, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek alphabets, are descended from these original characters.

The creation of the alphabet had revolutionary implications for humanity, said archeologist P. Kyle McCarter Jr. of Johns Hopkins University, because it extended the ability to read and write beyond the purview of scribes and rulers, who had the time to memorize the multiple meanings of hundreds of symbols, and made it accessible to the shopkeeper, the farmer and the soldier.

The development of the alphabet “not only speeded literacy, but ultimately democratized the culture of the Near East,” said Frank M. Cross, a professor emeritus of Near Eastern languages and culture at Harvard University who is the leading authority on the early alphabet. “This is an important discovery filling in a blank at the beginning of the alphabet. . . . Its simplicity is breathtaking, compared to the writing systems of the time.”

The accomplishments of Greece, Rome, the Hebrews and many other societies of the first millennium BC were all contingent on the ability of the everyday man to read and write using the system of common characters invented more than 1,000 years earlier. The only other development in writing that was as revolutionary in scope and had such widespread impact was the invention of the printing press more than 3,500 years later.

The ancient Sumerians are generally credited with the development of the first system of writing, in cuneiform, about 3200 BC, although scientists have recently concluded that writing in hieroglyphics may have begun independently in Egypt about the same time. Both systems are called pictographic because they began with little pictures representing the objects or ideas being written about.

Because each hieroglyph represented a single word or idea, a literate person had to learn literally hundreds of them--although a single document might not contain more than about 200, Cross said. Literacy was thus extremely rare.

“We have a letter from one of the Assyrian kings bragging that he could write,” Cross added. That suggests how rare the ability was.

The alphabetic writing system, in contrast, is called acrophonic. The symbols are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, but shortened and streamlined.

The Semitic word for house, for example, began with a B sound and a stripped-down drawing of a house came to represent that B sound. Waves, the symbol for water, came to stand for M, the first letter of the Semitic word for water: “mayim.”

“The Egyptians wanted to confine literacy to the tribal elite,” McCarter said. “It was the accidental genius of these Semitic people . . . to make an easy-to-use, utilitarian device. One sound represented one word. There were fewer than 30 sounds . . . and pretty much anybody can learn 30 signs, so it made literacy much wider spread.”

The earliest previous examples of the alphabet had been found in the Levant--what is now called Syria, Lebanon and Israel--where the Semitic-speaking peoples were from. Researchers had believed that alphabetic writing was invented there as well. Those previous discoveries dated from about 1500 BC.

The new inscriptions were found in the summer of 1998 by Egyptologist John Coleman Darnell of Yale University. A dashing figure who favors pith helmets over the baseball caps of his contemporaries, Darnell is “a throwback to 19th century archeologists,” said Bruce Zuckerman of USC. “John is the only person I think I would ever describe as intrepid.”

Darnell travels southern Egypt with his wife, Deborah, a graduate student, mapping out early roads. Scholars had once assumed that most traffic in ancient Egypt followed waterways, but Darnell has mapped out a complex system of trade routes--often by studying pottery and other artifacts left along the way.

One of those roads, a military route from Thebes to Abydos, passes through Wadi el Hol. For centuries, soldiers and merchants scribbled graffiti on the walls of the gulch as they passed through. Most of it is in hieroglyphics, but on that memorable day last year, Darnell found two inscriptions unlike any he had seen before.

Darnell brought pictures back to F.W. “Chip” Dobbs-Allsopp of Princeton Theological Seminary, who studies the writings of the Iron Age--ancient biblical times dating from the second millennium BC. Dobbs-Allsopp suspected that they were an early form of the alphabet and brought in his former mentor McCarter, who has spent much of his career tracking down the origins of the alphabet.

The group enlisted Zuckerman and Marilyn Lundberg of USC, who specialize in photographing ancient documents and inscriptions to preserve them and to make them available to other scholars. Zuckerman and Lundberg spent three days with Darnell and Dobbs-Allsopp at Wadi el Hol in June photographing the inscriptions.

“We’re used to working in fairly difficult conditions, but that is about as extreme as we would ever like,” Lundberg said.

The team was able to work only in the mornings before the shade ran out about 11:30 and after about 4 or 5 in the afternoon when it wasn’t quite so hot, she said.

They did not encounter any dangerous desert denizens themselves, she added, but one of their protectors was bitten on the ear by a scorpion.

Despite the glaring sun, they used battery-powered strobes and lights to produce the proper shadows for recording the letters gouged into the limestone. An old-fashioned bellows camera and four types of film allowed them to capture all the details.

“Other inscriptions in the area have been defaced by vandals, and we wanted to be sure we have an accurate record of these,” Lundberg said.

The pictures and the researchers’ interpretations were presented last week at a conference of the American Oriental Society. The texts have not yet been deciphered, but they include at least one man’s name and, perhaps, a reference to God.

“None of us [in the archeological community] expected archaic alphabetic inscriptions to be found in southern Egypt,” McCarter said. “The fact that they have been found there, and are older than the ones in the Sinai, shows that the alphabet was being used all over Egypt at an earlier date than we thought.”

Certain features of the alphetic characters and of their Egyptian predecessors suggest that the alphabet was invented about 2000 BC. “I like to call it the minus Y2K problem,” McCarter said.