November 13, 1999
Discovery of Egyptian Inscriptions Indicates an Earlier Date for Origin of the Alphabet
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By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
n the track of an ancient road in
the desert west of the Nile, where
soldiers, couriers and traders once
traveled from Thebes to Abydos,
Egyptologists have found limestone
inscriptions that they say are the
earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.
Their discovery is expected to help
fix the time and place for the origin
of the alphabet, one of the foremost
innovations of civilization.
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The New York Times |
The limestone walls at Wadi el-Hol told a story of early writing.
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Carved in the cliffs of soft stone,
the writing, in a Semitic script with
Egyptian influences, has been dated
to somewhere between 1900 and 1800
B.C., two or three centuries earlier
than previously recognized uses of a
nascent alphabet. The first experiments with alphabet thus appeared
to be the work of Semitic people
living deep in Egypt, not in their
homelands in the Syria-Palestine region, as had been thought.
Although the two inscriptions have
yet to be translated, other evidence
at the discovery site supports the
idea of the alphabet as an invention
by workaday people that simplified
and democratized writing, freeing it
from the elite hands of official
scribes. As such, alphabetic writing
was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing
press much later.
Alphabetic writing emerged as a
kind of shorthand by which fewer
than 30 symbols, each one representing a single sound, could be combined to form words for a wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually replaced writing systems like
Egyptian hieroglyphics in which hundreds of pictographs, or idea pictures, had to be mastered.
"These are the earliest alphabetic
inscriptions, considerably earlier
than anyone had thought likely," Dr.
John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale University, said last
week in an interview about the discovery.
"They seem to provide us with
evidence to tell us when the alphabet
itself was invented, and just how."
Dr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah,
a Ph.D. student in Egyptology, made
the find while conducting a survey of
ancient travel routes in the desert of
southern Egypt, across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the
pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the
Kings. In the 1993-94 season, they
came upon walls of limestone
marked with graffiti at the forlorn
Wadi el-Hol, roughly translated as
Gulch of Terror.
Last summer, the Darnells returned to the wadi with several specialists in early writing. A report on
their findings will be given in Boston
on Nov. 22 at a meeting of the Society
of Biblical Literature.
Working in the baking June heat
"about as far out in the middle of
nowhere as I ever want to be," Dr.
Bruce Zuckerman, director of the
West Semitic Research Project at
the University of Southern California, assisted the investigation by taking detailed pictures of the inscriptions for analysis using computerized photointerpretation techniques.
"This is fresh meat for the alphabet
people," he said.
"Because of the early date of the
two inscriptions and the place they
were found," said Dr. P. Kyle McCarter Jr., a professor of Near Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University. "it forces us to reconsider a lot
of questions having to do with the
early history of the alphabet. Things
I wrote only two years ago I now
consider out of date."
Dr. Frank M. Cross, an emeritus
professor of Near Eastern languages
and culture at Harvard University,
who was not a member of the research team but who has examined
the evidence, judged the inscriptions
"clearly the oldest of alphabetic
writing and very important." He said
that enough of the symbols in the
inscriptions were identical or similar
to later Semitic alphabetic writing to
conclude that "this belongs to a single evolution of the alphabet."
The previously oldest evidence for
an alphabet, dated about 1600 B.C.,
was found near or in Semitic-speaking territory, in the Sinai Peninsula
and farther north in the Syria-Palestine region occupied by the ancient
Canaanites. These examples, known
as Proto-Sinaitic and Proto-Canaanite alphabetic inscriptions, were the
basis for scholars' assuming that
Semites developed the alphabet by
borrowing and simplifying Egyptian
hieroglyphs, but doing this in their
own lands and not in Egypt itself.
From other, nonalphabetic writing
at the site, the Egyptologists determined that the inscriptions were
made during Egypt's Middle Kingdom in the first two centuries of the
second millennium B.C. And another
discovery in June by the Darnells
seemed to establish the presence of
Semitic people at the wadi at the
time of the inscriptions.
Surveying a few hundred yards
from the site, the Darnells found an
inscription in nonalphabetic Egyptian that started with the name of a
certain Bebi, who called himself
"general of the Asiatics." This was a
term used for nearly all foreigners,
most of whom were Semites, and
many of them served as mercenary
soldiers for Egyptian rulers at a time
of raging civil strife or came as
miners and merchants. Another reference to this Bebi has been found in
papyrus records.
"This gives us 99.9 percent certainty," Dr. Darnell said of the conclusion that early alphabetic writing
was developed by Semitic-speaking
people in an Egyptian context. He
surmised that scribes in the troops of
mercenaries probably developed the
simplified writing along the lines of a
semicursive form of Egyptian commonly used in the Middle Kingdom in
graffiti. Working with Semitic speakers, the scribes simplified the pictographs of formal writing and modified the symbols into an early form
of alphabet.
"It was the accidental genius of
these Semitic people who were at
first illiterate, living in a very literate society," Dr. McCarter said, interpreting how the alphabet may
have arisen. "Only a scribe trained
over a lifetime could handle the
many different types of signs in the
formal writing. So these people
adopted a crude system of writing
within the Egyptian system, something they could learn in hours, instead of a lifetime. It was a utilitarian invention for soldiers, traders,
merchants."
The scholars who have examined
the short Wadi el-Hol inscriptions
are having trouble deciphering the
messages, though they think they are
close to understanding some letters
and words. "A few of these signs just
jump out at you, at anyone familiar
with proto-Sinaitic material," said
Dr. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp, who teaches at the Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey and is a specialist in the languages and history of the
Middle East. "They look just like one
would expect."
The symbol for M in the inscriptions, for example, is a wavy line
derived from the hieroglyphic sign
for water and almost identical to the
symbol for M in later Semitic writing. The meaning of some signs is
less certain. The figure of a stick
man, with arms raised, appears to
have developed into an H in the alphabet, for reasons unknown.
Scholars said they could identify
shapes of letters that eventually
evolved from the image of an ox
head into A and from a house, which
looks more like a 9 here, into the
Semitic B, or bayt. The origins and
transitions of A and B are particularly interesting because the Egyptian-influenced Semitic alphabet as further developed by the Phoenicians,
latter-day Canaanites, was passed to
the Greeks, probably as early as the
12th century B.C. and certainly by
the 9th century B.C. From the
Greeks the simplified writing system
entered Western culture by the name
alphabet, a combination word for the
Greek A and B, alpha and beta.
The only words in the inscriptions
the researchers think they understand are, reading right to left, the
title for a chief in the beginning and a
reference to a god at the end.
If the early date for the inscriptions is correct, this puts the origins
of alphabetic writing well before the
probable time of the biblical story of
Joseph being delivered by his brothers into Egyptian bondage, the scholars said. The Semites involved in the
alphabet invention would have been
part of an earlier population of alien
workers in Egypt.
Although it is still possible that the
Semites took the alphabet idea with
them to Egypt, Dr. McCarter of
Johns Hopkins said that the considerable evidence of Egyptian symbols
and the absence of any contemporary writing of a similar nature anywhere in the Syria-Palestine lands
made this unlikely.
The other earliest primitive writing, the cuneiform developed by Sumerians in the Tigris and Euphrates
Valley of present-day Iraq, remained
entirely pictographic until about 1400
B.C. The Sumerians are generally
credited with the first invention of
writing, around 3200 B.C., but some
recent findings at Abydos in Egypt
suggest a possibly earlier origin
there. The issue is still controversial.
For Dr. Darnell, though, it is exciting enough to learn that in a forsaken
place like Wadi el-Hol, along an old
desert road, people showed they had
taken a major step in written communication. He is returning to the
site next month for further exploration.
