What if there was a technology that allowed us to teleport
the contents of our minds across time and space directly
into someone else's brain...
..that worked across huge distances, that could send our thoughts
into the future,
yet was so simple a child could use it?
Such a marvel, of course, already exists.
It's not the internet or mobile phones, but an ancient technology,
one that's at least 5,000 years old -
the technology of writing.
Writing is something that most of us do every day
without stopping to think about it.
But if you do stop and think about it, you realise
that what you are doing is quite magical.
You are taking the thoughts from inside your head and putting
them out into the world in a form where another human mind
can understand them, even if they are thousands of miles away -
or perhaps centuries in the future.
In this series, I want to explore this transformative technology,
the different scripts that can turn spoken language into visual form,
the varying methods we have used to put words on a page and the way
that changing the way we write has changed the course of history.
And the first question is about the origin of writing.
Did it develop in different times, in different places?
Or do all the scripts we see around us share a single common root?
And, if that is the case, then where and how did it all begin?
And who began it?
Egypt, the Saqqara funerary complex near Cairo.
In 2300 BC, what today looks like a hill of sand was the pyramid
tomb of Pharaoh Teti.
Inside the tomb, Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly took me
to see something extraordinary.
Oh, wow!
- Yeah, they're pretty impressive, aren't they?
- They really are. - Yeah.
- The walls of Teti's tomb were carved
with thousands of stylised pictures...
..but this was not decoration.
- This is the earliest known complete text,
ancient Egyptian text.
- Just beautiful.
These pictures are hieroglyphs - a writing system older
than the pyramids themselves.
And what do they say? - They are spells that help resurrect the King
in the afterlife.
- If you know how to read them,
you can find the King's name repeated again and again
in every incantation.
- Oh! Oh! Rise up, O Teti!
Take your head,
collect your bones, gather your limbs,
shake the earth from your flesh.
Take your bread that rots not,
your beer that sours not,
stand at the gates that bar the common people.
Rise up, O Teti, you shall not die!
- Wow! Oh, there's so much writing. - Yes.
These are all magic spells, designed to resurrect the King
so he could live forever in the afterlife.
The fact that his name is still there
made him, in a sense, immortal.
We're speaking about him right now, and the ancient Egyptians realised that, they realised
that the written word had so much power and that,
by writing your name,
you became immortal, you immortalised yourself.
- Hieroglyphs are indeed magic.
They may not raise the dead, but, like all writing,
they allow them to speak.
- Writing is one of the few things that all societies do.
Everybody uses a pen or a brush
and, with that, we can express all of our thoughts, record
all of our information,
study the stars and compose poems and write letters to each other.
So writing binds humanity together practically
more than any other activity.
- Today, we take it for granted,
but the creation of writing is the event which gave
humanity a history.
- When you scrutinise what happened, it is actually very dramatic
in one important sense - what we like to call
in our department the giant leap for mankind.
- Writing always starts with pictures
and then it becomes a little bit more complicated, and that's
how you develop into a purely alphabetic system later on.
- How did our ancestors conceive of writing?
How did they learn to make pictures speak?
And how did those pictures
eventually become the letters we use today?
As I discovered, the answer to those questions can only be found
in an archaeology of the human mind.
Writing is a recent innovation.
Our species has existed for about 300,000 years
and, for all but the last 5,000 of them, people had to record
and transmit vital knowledge without the aid of writing.
Some cultures still do.
HE VOCALISES
In the Northern Territory of Australia,
Yidumduma Bill Harney, an elder of the Wardaman people, is singing
an ancient song about the creation of the world.
HE SINGS
- All the songline trail that they made it,
happening all the way right back from beginning of everything,
to people to people to people all the way,
billion years, to million years,
and come down and 100 years and now,
now come back to right up to us.
And we know all the song now.
That's why we're never sure that creating song away,
we still got it here today.
- What kind of knowledge is in those songs?
- In a songline trail,
the knowledge that is given you from the old people,
you know what they call songline trail,
naming all the different sights,
the plants, trees, mountain, water hole, and all that.
- And so it's like a map?
- Like a map. It is a map, in your mind, but all links up.
- So break it here? - Yeah, like this,
you've got to put your fingernail on it. - Yeah?
Meeting Bill,
I was impressed by the richness and complexity of Aboriginal culture
handed down orally for probably tens of thousands of years
without the need to write anything down.
That's amazing!
And that raised a fundamental question about writing.
Why did our ancestors feel the need for it?
What prompted them to start recording things,
not for the ear, but for the eye?
Images are important, indeed sacred in Aboriginal culture
and, before I was allowed to see them,
Bill needed to introduce me to the ancestors.
HE VOCALISES
Thank you.
- I said hi to the spiritual people,
call out I brought this stranger to welcome them.
I've got a young lady here, told them it's a lady,
and he's happy.
- Thank you.
This is Gandawag-ya, the Moon Rock.
As we talked, it quickly became clear that Bill's way of thinking
about images was quite different to mine.
- While we're standing here now,
this one what I call Moon dream inside.
And that's...that's half Moon.
- Yeah. - That's it in there.
- Yeah. - When he was a human, he was called Yiwalyarri.
He's up in the sky. - Yeah.
Now he's here, in the rock. - In the rock. - Yeah.
In the Wardaman creation story,
all the plants and animals of the world were once people,
the Wardamans' ancestors,
wandering across a formless, muddy land
until the creation dog let out a mighty howl.
- When he's "hooo", like this, the dog and the sound he made,
everything changed.
He changed our world.
And this country now,
where, from the soft mud, man become a rock,
and all these people become a tree, and changed all the different
animals, kangaroos, dingoes,
whatever you can make, lizards, snakes and all.
- As the mud hardened, some of the ancestors passed
into the rock, leaving traces of that moment of creation.
- They were the mud, and people come along and put their foot there.
See? And that's what it is there.
He was in the mud, now he's in the rock.
The humans there, there's a dog here.
All over, as I said.
And that shatter off to the Moon,
then one day all of the rock as well,
during the creation.
- When I see an image, I naturally think of it as a representation,
a picture of something.
But, to Bill, these are not pictures of the ancestors -
these ARE the ancestors gone into the rock.
Bill's song about the ancestors is also addressed to them...
..but he has to rely on memory.
These images, powerful as they are,
cannot tell him which words to use.
In order for images to do that,
they would have to gain a new power -
the power of representation.
- And write a big songline from west to east.
- Cairo's Egyptian museum is crammed with thousands of objects excavated
from the tombs of ancient Egypt.
One of the very oldest was discovered by Gunter Dreyer
in the 1990s, at a dig in the city of Abydos.
It's a clay vase, which predates the first pharaoh by many centuries.
It was made 5,700 years ago
and it seems to use imagery in a new way.
Gunter believes that the vase is decorated
with a stylised representation
of the distinctive geography of the Nile Valley.
Egyptians have always lived on the land immediately adjacent
to the Nile, where irrigation ditches can bring river water
to the fields.
Ancient Egyptian life was largely confined
to this narrow strip of green.
The desert highlands on either side was where the dead were buried.
So these lines represent something, something that is not present.
It's a conceptual revolution in the meaning of a picture.
And if a picture can represent a thing, it can represent a word.
But what was it that made people want to represent words
in visual form?
5,000 years ago, Egypt lay at one end of a zone of cultivation
called the Fertile Crescent.
At the other end lay Mesopotamia, modern day Iraq.
In both places, people had learned how to irrigate the land
to increase food production,
that meant that not everyone had to work the land
and a more complex society could develop.
Irving Finkel from the British Museum is an expert on Mesopotamia
and the region's first civilisation, Sumer.
- To set the scene,
it's important to understand that, in Mesopotamia, the Sumerians
had what we call city-states, independent walled entities
with a large population of farmers all around, administrators,
a central temple and so forth.
And it is in those enclaves of so-called civilisation
that the need was, I think, first felt for some kind
of record keeping.
What we've got in front of us is a very small handful of pieces
of clay with writing on called cuneiform writing.
- Yes. - And we have in our department a huge collection of 130,000 or so.
I thought, if they were all here, you'd become giddy and dizzy
and perhaps even fall asleep.
- Overwhelmed anyway. - Exactly.
So we start with this.
- So that's the oldest of these ones.
- It is.
- Do you have an approximate date?
- It's probably about 2,900 BC, something like that.
- Wow, so 5,000 years old. - Something like that.
And the thing about it is you can see it's a very orderly piece
of work because it's ruled into columns and these round things
and half round things are numerals,
and at the back there's a big total, where all the numbers are added up.
And this is a sign for barley,
which indicates that it's some kind of...
You can see, that this is an ear of barley,
in a pictographic kind of form.
- Yes. - And originally the writing began in the pictographic form,
what we call pictographic form, which means that people produce
the scribes, produce little drawings of whatever
they were talking about, the animals and plants and things like this.
So it's a very primitive level of writing, but it's very ancient.
And it actually exemplifies probably why writing came into existence
in the first place, because it's a document
which is concerned with wages. - Yes.
- And people argue that this script came out of the requirement
for complicated administration of this kind
where written records became necessary.
But anybody who works with the Inland Revenue will be proud
to feel that that was their striking contribution
to the progress of mankind.
- So what I was holding in my hands was the distant ancestor
of today's spreadsheet,
a grid of boxes with symbols that represent numbers
and pictures that represent commodities.
But the language of accountancy is limited.
Eventually, the distinctive wedge-shaped writing
called cuneiform that developed in Mesopotamia
would be capable of representing
the full richness of Sumerian
and the other languages of the region.
It would be used to write great epics,
recount ghost stories and tell jokes.
But as Irving explained, to make pictographic signs speak in this way
would take another great conceptual leap.
- You could go quite a long way with these simple signs,
but the giant leap came when somebody conceived
of this matter, that you could draw a picture
which represented something that someone could recognise.
But, at the same time, that sign could be used just for the sound
of the thing it looked like,
so that the sound became drawn out of or separated from the picture.
So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley.
Now the word for barley in Sumerian is pronounced like "she".
So your Sumerian sees this and says, "She, barley."
But, at the same time, this scribe or a fellow scribe,
in writing a totally different kind of document,
could use this sign not to mean barley, but just to write
the sound of "she".
And this giant leap is something rather simple, and it's something
which could have occurred to a child, but, nevertheless,
it is of great lasting significance.
- Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called
the rebus principle
and it makes it possible to spell out words using pictures.
- To give a really clear example,
there's a word "shega" in Sumerian,
which means beautiful or pretty or nice or something like that
and so a scribe would write it syllabically - "she-ga."
So he would use this sign, the barley sign, for the "she" bit.
And then he'd have to write "ga" for the second bit.
As it happens, "ga" means milk.
So he would draw the picture which represented milk,
and barley and milk together would spell shega,
which had nothing to do with either barley or milk.
So this is a kind of rebus writing.
Rebus is a smart word for it, it's really a pun in some sense.
It's a kind of pun
that you get another meeting out of a sign.
- At the other end of the Fertile Crescent,
Egyptians, too, started to make rebus puns.
Compelling evidence of this comes
from an extraordinary object in Cairo's Egyptian Museum,
the Narmer Palette, carved in 3,000 BC.
By conquering the Nile Delta, Narmer took control of the river
all the way to the sea, becoming the first pharaoh
of a unified Egyptian state.
The Palette tells the story entirely through pictures.
But next to the main characters in this grisly tale
are seemingly random pairs of images,
such as a catfish and a chisel.
They only make sense in light of the rebus principle.
The Egyptian word for catfish is "nar", a chisel is "mer".
When combined, they sound out Narmer,
the name of the first of the pharaohs.
Next to his defeated enemy is the symbol for a harpoon -
"war" in Egyptian.
Below it is a rectangle similar to the ones on the Abydos vase.
The next step was to extend the rebus principle,
which on the Palette is used to spell names,
to the full vocabulary of the Egyptian language.
The script the Egyptians created in this way rivals cuneiform
for the prize of being the world's first true
writing system, hieroglyphs.
Orly Goldwasser has made them a lifetime study.
Hello. Lovely to see you.
How are you?
- Great. When I'm here, it's great.
- What have we got here then?
- What do you think it is?
- Well, it's certainly a text.
I don't know which way to read it. - How do you know it's a text?
It's all pictures. - Stylised.
- Yeah, what else? - With repetitions.
- Yeah.
- There's obviously a certain ordering.
The sizes. - Oh, sizes is very important.
You see everything is actually on the same size -
people, birds, houses, snakes, hands.
The hand of a person and the whole person
is of the same size,
so this gives your mind immediately an order.
The idea you are not in picture reading,
but in script reading. - Mm.
- This is the greatest experiment ever conducted to write language
in pictures only. Only pictures.
It's an enormous cognitive effort to read it or to write it,
but it's fantastic.
- What makes hieroglyphs so difficult is that the scribes use thousands
of symbols and the rebus means that most of them have
at least two quite distinct meanings.
- If we are talking about a duck, as you see it here,
it can be a representation of a duck
and this is fine. This is easy.
But in many other cases, he is not a duck at all.
He's just the sound of the duck - so.
For example, the word daughter is sot,
or something like that.
We don't know exactly how to pronounce it.
So, for the so, we have our duck.
And afterwards we put another sign, something that looks like
a small half French bread.
You see it, cut French bread, which gives the meaning - t.
So sot.
- The rebus principle was the key that unlocked writing
for the peoples of the Fertile Crescent.
With pictures that spoke, rulers could write
the history of their reigns,
draw up legal codes,
administer far flung empires
and build monuments that still impress us today.
The rebus is among the most consequential intellectual
innovations of all time.
So who discovered it?
- True writing starts when the sounds of a language are represented
and that, I think, was first developed in Egypt.
- And, of course, there's a bit of a squabble between
Egyptologists and Assyriologists about who invented writing
and, of course, we did - important thing to clarify.
- So, was the rebus born in Egypt,
or Mesopotamia,
or somewhere else entirely?
The National Library of China.
I came here to see examples of another ancient script
used more than 3,000 years ago
at the court of the Shang Emperors.
Wonderful. Thank you.
Oh, that's extraordinary.
It's such a complete example.
I was looking at the shoulder blade of an ox -
dated around 1200 BC.
Incised on it are characters in a clearly pictographic script.
This is an oracle bone
used in pyromancy, or divination by fire.
Thousands of them have been unearthed
and each is inscribed with one or more questions.
And these could range enormously
from "Is the Emperor's toothache due to an angry ancestor?"
to "Will it rain next week?"
or perhaps, "Is this a good day to invade our neighbours?"
Once the question had been written on the bone,
you turned it around and made a small pit.
A hot poker was then inserted into the pit and the bone would crack,
and the answer to your question lay in the form of the crack.
And, in fact, this one has been deciphered.
It's asking whether the emperor should muster his army,
that much is clear,
but because we've lost the art of this particular form of divination,
we don't know what the answer was.
The reason the inscriptions are often readable
is that oracle bone script is clearly the precursor
of modern Chinese writing.
In the Beijing Huijia Private School,
Sophia is teaching her six-year-old pupils to read and write.
Sophia's main task is to help her pupils memorise
hundreds of Chinese characters.
To do so, she often starts with the way a character was written
3,000 years ago on oracle bones,
where the pictographic nature of Chinese writing is easier to see.
At root, like hieroglyphs,
Chinese characters are stylised pictures,
but the similarities with Ancient Egyptian writing do not end there.
Professor Yeung Shin Chen is a philologist
who has studied both writing systems.
- Egyptian and the Chinese writing are very comparable.
When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphics,
I could feel that there are so many similarities.
Firstly, the ancient people think to use pictures,
but they found pictograms are not enough
because there are many abstract concepts
and abstract words in language.
If you want to record the language fully
pictograms will never succeed,
so the...
Think of the method of rebus, rebus principle.
- The rebus principle is particularly useful in Chinese
because the spoken language has many homophones -
words that sound the same but have different meanings.
For example, "mu" means "tree"
but it also means "to wash oneself"
and so the stylised picture of a tree can represent the word tree,
and it can also be used as a so-called phonogram
to represent the sound "mu", to wash,
but that, of course, could be confusing.
- Sometimes we don't know
what the phonograms indicate -
the meaning or the sound...
..so they use a determinative.
- A determinative is a symbol which classifies words into categories
and so gives a clue as to the correct way to read a character.
These three strokes indicate that the character being written
has something to do with water.
They can be used to distinguish mu - tree,
from mu - to wash,
and so clarify the ambiguity inherent in rebus writing.
There are 214 classifier signs
and the majority of Chinese characters are formed using one.
Egyptian scribes, too, divided words into categories
and, as well as representing words or sounds,
many hieroglyphs can also be used as classifiers.
- For example, you have a duck
after all the names of birds.
You can say "a falcon" and then you will have a duck,
which means that the falcon belongs to the category of birds.
- The phonogram classifier combination is a very good way
to represent a word.
Both Egyptian people and Chinese people believed
that's like a perfect method.
- Cuneiform - the writing system of Mesopotamia -
also made use of classifiers...
..as did the last great picture-based writing system
to be developed in the new world around 600 BC.
Mayan glyphs also depend on the rebus principle
to spell out sounds
and use classifiers to sort out the consequent ambiguities.
The similarities are striking.
- If you know a bit about cuneiform and Mayan script
and Egyptian script and Chinese script, for example, the main four,
you have an inescapable feeling that even though they look
completely unrelated,
nevertheless they have many things in common,
and this forces you to consider
the whole question of origin and spread.
- So could there be a common origin of all writing,
a single time and place
where the secret of turning pictures into words was first discovered?
- The way I look at it is this - these writing systems have in common
the rebus principle.
The rebus writing is the written version
of the pun in speech
and everybody makes puns and puns are a natural human form of humour,
and once you start with the idea of reducing speech
to any kind of symbol from which language can be retrieved,
then the rebus thing hits you in the face
because when you're casting around for the way to do it,
it's obvious. It's just obvious.
- In other words, the similarities between ancient writing systems
reflect not a common origin,
but what all people throughout history have always had in common -
the human mind.
- In other words, any load of human beings, in any context,
who have to invent writing will come up with rebus writings -
it's inevitable.
- At the Medieval Round Church in Cambridge,
I went to see an event organised by my friend,
the calligraphic artist Brody Neuenschwander.
He calls it A Brush With Silence
and it celebrates the diversity of scripts in use around the world.
- Brush With Silence brings calligraphers
from about 20 different cultures together.
They sit in silence and they write their own scripts.
It is a meditation in ink.
- But A Brush With Silence presented me with a puzzle.
While the Japanese and Chinese calligraphers
drew Chinese characters,
whose connection with the origin of writing I could see,
at every other table, the calligraphers were using scripts
which look very different.
Instead of thousands of pictograms,
they employ just a few dozen simple shapes.
These are the world's alphabets.
At first glance, alphabets don't seem to have anything to do
with the rebus principle,
so what was the connection between the way writing began
and the way most people write today?
In search of an answer to those questions,
I came to the Sinai Desert in Egypt
with archaeologist Pierre Tallet.
Pierre was returning to the plateau of Serabit el-Khadim
in the company of old friends.
THEY EXCHANGE GREETINGS
With our guide Saleem, we set out to climb 400 metres
to the plateau above.
We were following a path trod 4,000 years ago
by expeditions sent here by the pharaohs of Egypt
to mine the gemstone turquoise.
- This is the real entrance for the place of Serabit el-Khadim.
You have the main access to the plateau
and you can see, on this big face of rock,
plenty of inscriptions and drawings that have been left
by many people trying to commemorate their venue in this place.
- Arriving in here into the place, yeah. - Yeah, yeah.
And, for example, here you have a very skilled inscription
with very nice hieroglyphs,
but, of course, everybody was not able
to write his name.
And you have here other means to commemorate
the arrival of somebody.
They could leave signs, very crude signs, like this star,
that you can see here.
You even have an hashtag on...a kind of hashtag, of course,
on the big rock that you have behind us.
- These people are trying to find their own sign
to identify themselves. - Yeah, of course.
And you have, in fact, literate and illiterate people
that are all involved in the same operations.
And it's probably the combination of those illiterate
and literate people that would produce a new script.
- We were also following in the footsteps
of a famous husband and wife team of archaeologists,
William and Hilda Flinders Petrie,
who first came here in 1905.
At the edge of the plateau, the Petries came across the ruins
of an Ancient Egyptian temple
dominated by dozens of large stone markers called stelae.
The stelae were covered in hieroglyphs
that revealed to the Petries why a temple had been built
in this remote spot so far from the Nile Valley.
- This one is one of the best stelae that we have in this temple,
and it is the biography of an official.
He complains at the beginning because he is sent to Sinai
not in the good period, because it's during the summer
and the weather was too hot, but at the end it's a perfect story
because he is getting more turquoise than everybody before him,
and everybody goes safe and sound back to the Nile Valley.
- So this is a common type of monument?
- Yes, we have several monuments of that type.
- So we have a huge amount of information about individuals.
- About individuals, and we have, in fact,
one stele for every mission that was made to Sinai.
- The turquoise those missions came here to find
was an important ingredient in the magic
that raised a dead pharaoh to eternal life.
And the temple, the Petries learned, was dedicated to Hathor,
the goddess of turquoise,
so that the miners could invoke her aid,
but it was in the mine workings themselves
that the Petries made their most surprising discovery.
- Hilda stepped on a stone
and she picked up the stone and told Petrie,
"There is something here."
And this stone in the mine
was the first inscription in something very strange
that nobody saw ever before.
And Petrie looked on it, and he said,
"This is not Egyptian.
"It looks like ugly, very ugly hieroglyphics,
"but it's not Egyptian.
"There are too few signs here.
"This should be an alphabet."
And this was the boom.
- If Petrie was right, these would be by far
the oldest alphabetic inscriptions ever found.
Could this be the first alphabet?
And if so, who was responsible for it?
Pierre showed me a fascinating clue among the stelae.
This individual clearly participated in more than one expedition
because he's pictured on another stela,
where the hieroglyphs give us his name.
Retjenu was an Egyptian name for the biblical land of Canaan
and Canaanite migrant workers may have been a familiar sight in Egypt.
These wall paintings decorate a tomb above the Nile in upper Egypt.
They date from the same period as the stela at Serabit.
And one panel shows travellers,
in the distinctive patterned robes of Canaan,
which contrast with the simple white loincloths
of the Egyptians.
The hieroglyphic inscription explains that 37 foreigners came
to make offerings to the local ruler,
perhaps hoping to be given work.
Something similar happened at Serabit, but, on the plateau,
the cultural exchange between Canaanites and Egyptians seems
to have had momentous consequences.
It seemed that the inscriptions in the mines were related
to the hieroglyphs in the temple - but how?
Then another Egyptologist examined an object that Petrie had brought
back from Serabit to the British Museum.
- Thank you, Mark. Really, thank you.
Last time that I saw him, he was in a box. - Yeah.
- He moved now into a basket. - Into a basket, yeah.
- For me, it's worth all the gold of Egypt,
this little piece that stays here, in the basket.
He has a small inscription in Egyptian and a parallel
inscription in the strange signs below.
So here you have an option to break the code.
This is why I call him the Rosetta Stone of the alphabet.
- The code-breaker was Sir Alan Gardiner.
- Gardiner looks on it and it's very easy for him to read
the Egyptian part.
It's a repetitive formula,
hundreds of times. It says, "The beloved of the goddess Hathor."
And then he looks on the strange signs below.
- Gardiner guessed that they must spell out a similar dedication
in the Canaanite language to a Canaanite goddess.
- A Canaanite wouldn't call this goddess Hathor.
So he wants a name, he wants the name of the goddess
because, if his theory is correct, he has the beloved.
Beloved of whom?
- On the other side of the sphinx was what looked like a complete
inscription and Gardiner was struck by the last symbol.
It looked like the letter T in the ancient Paleo-Hebrew alphabet
and that reminded him of a Canaanite goddess known from scripture.
- In the Bible, we know the God Ba'al
and he had a consort.
The consort in Canaanite is
always with a T ending of the female - and she is Ba'alat.
- So Gardiner guessed that this was what
the last four symbols spelled out.
- The complete name of the Canaanite goddess,
that he presumed should play the role of Hathor, here,
Ba'alat.
- The name of the goddess was the key to understanding
the mysterious Serabit script.
The first letter, this rectangle, was clearly based on the Egyptian
hieroglyph for house, Pr.
Egyptian scribes used this symbol in three ways -
to write the word "house" to represent the sound "Pr",
and, finally, as a classifier attached to any word to do
with buildings in general.
But the Canaanites ignored all these complexities.
- The great trick, the genius trick, was to take a picture,
to read it in its Canaanite name.
The house is "beit" in a Canaanite dialect
and then you take only the first sound, the "ba".
And whenever you will need the "ba",
you draw this house.
- This is the familiar Rebus principle,
but applied in a radically new way.
The characters do not stand for the sound of the whole word,
but only for the sound at the beginning of the word.
- And this is the great invention.
This is the alphabet in around 30 pictures, 25 to 30 pictures.
You can write everything because you are after single sounds
that you need, and to write something in this Canaanite dialect
you needed around 30 sounds, that's all.
And this was the huge...the fantastic invention.
Here it is.
- This is it. - Yeah, this is it.
And maybe you have in front of you one of the first As
of history, just followed by one of the first Bs of history, also.
- Literally alphabet. - Literally alphabet.
- And it is working as an alphabet.
- It is an alphabet. They are using hieroglyphic signs,
but in a much simpler way.
- The first B we have.
- The first B from the whole history.
- It was truly astonishing to see, scratched nearly 4,000 years ago,
a symbol which is the origin of a letter I use every single day.
The journey from the minds of Serabit to the pages of my diary
began when Hebded and his followers took their new script back
to Canaan, where it was adopted
by another Canaanite people - the Phoenicians.
Traders and seafarers,
they spread the alphabet across the Middle East
and the Mediterranean, where it was taken up by Greeks
and then Romans.
We asked Orly Goldwasser to join calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander
to explore the steps that gradually transformed hieroglyphs at Serabit
into the letters we use today.
- The Canaanites took the hieroglyphs
that were meaningful for them
and then they saw the head of the bull.
They could immediately relate to it
because this was the head of their own God, Ba'al.
- Ah-ha. OK.
- But, in in their Semitic dialect, the animal was called "aluf",
or "alph" or "aleph."
- So they looked at this bull, but they would say "aluf" instead
of the Egyptian word.
- Yeah, they said it in their own language. What did they care?
And then they decided this will stand for "A".
- So they would make it much simpler than that, I suppose,
just in a couple of strokes of the brush, really? - Right.
Many hundreds of years later, scribes in Phoenicia adopt this...
..this drawing of the bull.
They just turn it around because they don't care about the image
and then the Romans just changed the direction.
And you reach your A in English and in Latin,
and what you have here is actually the ancient Egyptian hieroglyph
of the bull sleeping forever in the letter A,
because this is just the bull turned on his horns.
Do you see?
- Almost all the letters of the Latin alphabet are ultimately derived
from the hieroglyphs that the Canaanites of Serabit chose
to represent the sounds of their tongue.
The broken rectangle that was the Egyptian sign for "house"
was abbreviated by the Greeks...
..flipped by the Romans, to create the Latin B.
The Egyptian hieroglyph for "water",
"mayim" in the Canaanite tongue...
..became the Greek Mu
and then the Latin M.
There were two Egyptian signs which represented snakes.
These became the Greek Nu and our N.
- So what was the Egyptian word for head?
- We don't know exactly, but something like "teptup",
but it is of no interest for the Canaanite.
- What is their word for head?
- Very different. "Rosh." - Rosh. With an R?
- Yes, with an R at the beginning, and here they will reach the R.
- So this is the Canaanite... - This is the Canaanites. - ..head.
- Yeah.
Then the Greeks make a rather more
abstract representation of the head here,
even though you can see the general idea of head.
- The Romans turned everything the other way, systematically.
Everything is in the leading direction.
But it's been centuries
and centuries since we've seen any kind of image in this,
and I don't think anybody would know that behind that letter is actually
a profile of a head. - Yes.
Again, the Egyptian hieroglyph is hiding in the R. - Right.
- They're always hiding.
- But it's not just Latin and Greek letters that derive from Serabit.
Almost all the world's alphabet share this same root.
Scripts like Hebrew...
..Armenian...
..Cyrillic...
..Tibetan...
..Devanagari...
..Gujarati.
Sometimes the connection is far from obvious,
but it's still there.
- This document is a leaf from a
seventh century Koran dated to 675 CE,
the first Islamic century.
It represents one of the earliest examples of writing Arabic
in a calligraphic style.
But when I look at it, I see in these archaic letter shapes
the echoes of the alphabet at Serabit.
So, for example, if you see this letter here,
it looks like a line with a small tail,
this is the alif, the first letter, the A.
It originally looked a little like a bull, like this,
and it gets stylised in Phoenician, simplified, simply this.
Now the connection between that and our A in English
is quite obvious.
Now, one more step takes us to Nabatiye and Aramaic.
Another simplification, it looks simply like a six.
And then in the Koran fragment that we looked at,
we can see that the loop has almost completely disappeared and we simply
have this little tail.
And then the modern Arabic script, a straight line.
So that straight line through these stages goes all the way back
to that bull, even though at different ends
they look nothing alike.
So the modern Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we use
to write English are our cousins,
they belong to the same family.
All the alphabets of Arabia, of the Mediterranean,
of the Middle East, all of the alphabet scripts seem to go
back to one original prototype.
It seems that the alphabet, the concept of writing each phoneme
with a separate glyph, that idea, as simple as it is,
was only invented once.
- What Hebded and his followers did in the mines of Serabit
changed the world.
They were not scribes or scholars, but, when they adapted the
rebus principle, which was the basis of all ancient scripts, to make
the first letters, they created a form of communication
which would eventually sweep the globe.
We owe to those illiterate migrant workers
the invention of the alphabet...
..a simple script which gave the gift of writing
to countless cultures, uniting the peoples of the world
across space and time.