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< Back to Who Really Invented the Alphabet Who Really Invented the Alphabet—Illiterate Miners or Educated Sophisticates? Talkback Add Your Comment
 Goldwasser’s Second Rebuttal:“The alphabet was not invented to be scratched on the walls of a cave” (Anson Rainey)
Can “Simple People” Make Great Inventions?—An Answer to Prof. Rainey
First, I would like to reiterate that Rainey’s main claim concerning the numerous lost papyri written in a “cursive” alphabet during the first part of the 2nd millennium is purely hypothetical. Not a single document, not a scrap of evidence for such script was ever found. Papyri of the Late Middle Kingdom and the Hyksos Period did survive in Egypt, but show only Egyptian texts written in good hieratic script. So regarding the current state of finds, Rainey’s theory is a mere assumption not based on a single document.
Second, Rainey disregards my detailed comparison of the alphabet letters in Sinai with specific Middle Egyptian hieroglyphs in Sinai, mainly from inscriptions by the mines and on the roads to the mines. Most conspicuous are the very unusual “square house” hieroglyphs from Sinai, unknown in other Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions from the Middle Kingdom.1
Rainey differs from my reconstruction in one main way. He believes the alphabet could have been invented only by an educated “agent.” He writes:
The inventor of the pictographic alphabet was most likely an agent from the Levant, probably from Byblos (cuneiform Gubla, Hebrew Gəăal). He was working in the Egyptian delta, perhaps at Avaris or even at Memphis...
So who did do the writing at Serabit el-Khadem? The inscriptions refer to persons with the rank of rabbunâqibânîma, “chief of the miners.” One person signs his name: Ŝim‘amur’u, “Shim‘a the squire.” A squire was not only the assistant to a chariot warrior, he also had military rank, probably that of a sergeant.
It would have been those educated officers who had come to Serabit with the group of mining experts or laborers. Just like their Egyptian counterparts, they would have kept their records (duty rosters, payrolls, etc.) on papyrus that did not survive. The alphabet was not invented to be scratched on the walls of a cave.
I believe that great minds may exist outside the institutional system and that it is possible that the alphabet was invented in Serabit, by illiterate Canaanite workers at the mines. Given the right timing and the right triggering situation, a genius, notwithstanding his social background, can make a great intellectual leap. I find the invention of the alphabet so important a case in the history of ideas, because it shows that being situated on the periphery of a society or a culture can be turned into an advantage, into a great intellectual triumph.2
A unique situation was created in Sinai where illiterates (surely not “primitive” or “less-advanced”) workers with strong Canaanite identity were put in unusual surroundings—extreme isolation for months, high remote mountain deserts, dangerous hard work. There was nothing around in the area to divert their attention besides hundreds of hieroglyphic pictures inscribed on the rocks. No town, no building, no roads, no distractions of civilization.
The Egyptian pictorial script was the necessary tool for the invention. The Egyptian signs presented the inventor with the “rough material” for his invention - the icons, the small pictures that he could easily recognize. Without this basic material, which he utilized in a completely innovative way, the invention would have probably not taken place.
Being illiterate was the necessary condition for the invention. If another solution were at hand, why go into this enormous intellectual effort? In this hypothesis, I differ from all other scholars. I believe that the fact that the inventor did not know any other script system, coupled with the strong religious urge to write, made the invention possible.
It is exactly the lack of any option, as well as the intellectual disposition to not be enchained by earlier solutions of “how to write,” that enabled the inventor to try to find a new, independent solution. He did not have to start completely from scratch. The hieroglyphs were around him. He chose a small group, but used it in a completely innovative way, hardly known before, acrophonically. He extracted the first sound of the Semitic name (his own language) of each picture he chose, a method practically unknown in the mainstream hieroglyphic system of the Middle Kingdom.
From this moment on, as a result of this intellectual breakthrough in the desert, the option to present the sounds of language in less than 30 signs and not by hundreds of signs, was introduced into the history of ideas. We call this system today “alphabet.”
The alphabet was the child of a spiritual need. What the miners wrote was no mere “scratching on a wall of a cave”. In their mind’s eyes, this “scratching” was everything. It created a bond of their names with their gods that would hopefully bless their work and protect their lives. It was a prayer. As Joseph Naveh puts it, “The vast majority of the ancient graffiti even those which contain only personal names, were actually prayers”3
The inventor was probably not close enough to the Egyptians (i.e. not important enough) to get the opportunity to learn from the Egyptian scribes to write his name. New archaeological research on the mountain conducted by Dominique Valbelle and Charles Bonnet uncovered the surrounding wall of the temple area. It is very possible that the average miner (besides the “bosses,” such as the “chief of miners”) had no access to the temple area, and did not stand in direct daily contact with too many Egyptians. And, indeed, almost all alphabetic inscriptions in Sinai were found in the mines, around the mines and on the roads leading to the mines. The distance between the mines area and the temple mound ranges from a few hundred meters to a few kilometers.
In the Ancient Near East, before the alphabet invention, there was no script system that was born without state backing. There was no script that was not a child of institutional needs. Rainey suggests here that groups of Canaanites caravaneers and miners used a script of their own during the Middle Bronze Age, in which they recorded their activities (only administration? also literature?). As far as we know they were not representative of any “Canaanite state.” Anyhow, in Canaan during this period, there was no such single state. Since the very beginning of history, the country was divided by many small, rival city-states. Scribes in those little states wrote in Akkadian cuneiform. Who organized and standardized the “papyrus”-script in the new alphabet in all the city-states? Who was interested in promoting this script? Were the letters of this alleged script pictorial? Or was there a kind of cursive version of the script, different from the letters we know? How come the alphabet letters in Sinai have so many detailed comparisons in local Middle Bronze Egyptian hieroglyphs?
Archaeology is like an endless treasure hunt. Maybe one day such inscriptions will surface. However, until then, the few scattered finds of the alphabet until the end of the second millennium fit best as a reconstructed picture of caravaneers and soldiers, wandering in the Levant with their “subversive” script for hundreds of years. The small corpus of inscriptions from the 2nd millennium is very similar to the Sinai corpus—personal names, gods’ names and, rarely, a record of a gift to a god. So rarely written, the script hardly changed during this long period. Nobody was really interested in this ugly, marginal system of “fringe people.”
Somewhere, sometime, in the 13th century B.C.E., the sophisticated scribes of Ugarit discover it.4 They recognize the genius of the idea. Yet the letters probably looked too unstable and non-standardized to them, as some were bad imitations of Egyptian hieroglyphs. They “translated” this to what they regarded as their better, civilized cuneiform-like sign system, as Rainey has so convincingly shown. It is possible that they were also the first to create the “alphabet order” we use.5 They listed all the signs borrowed from the crude caravaneer’s script, creating the “order” of the alphabet and then added at the end of the list their own additional letters (see Rainey above). They may have chosen the alpu
 (Hebrew aleph), the icon of the religiously loaded word “bull” (later to become the Greek alpha and Latin A) to be the first letter in the sequence of the alphabet. The bull was the sacred animal of the storm god, the champion Canaanite god. It might have been fitting in their eyes to choose this letter to be the first in the order of the alphabet.Yet, it is also possible that the “order” of the alphabet was already forged by its original carriers, the caravaneers, perhaps already accompanied by a rhyme (like today’s alphabet) to help the uninitiated to remember the letters.
Do we all start our alphabets today with the letters A and B because the descendants of the original inventors created this order? Or is it the result of a decision taken in the schools of Ugarit on the Lebanese coast, sometime in the 13th century B.C.E?
 Notes
1. In my article: Orly Goldwasser, “Canaanites Reading Hieroglyphs. Part I–Horus is Hathor? Part II–The Invention of the Alphabet in Sinai,” Ägypten und Levante XVI (2006) http://pluto.huji.ac.il/~orlygoldwasser/2006_AL_OGW.pdf at “Orly Goldwasser” (accessed November 23, 2010, Prof. Orly Goldwasser).
2. It is well known phenomenon in the history of ideas that “marginality” may be a general premise in the formation of a new type of thought.
3. Joseph Naveh, “Graffiti and Dedications,” Bulletin of the American School of Oriental Research (2009) pp.27–30 (reprinted recently in Joseph Naveh, Studies in West-Semitic Epigraphy [Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979]).
4. For the latest discussion of the date of the Ugaritic script, see Dennis Pardee, “The Ugaritic Alphabetic Cuneiform Writing System in the Context of the Other Alphabetic Systems” in Cynthia L. Miller, ed., Studies in Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics Presented to Gene B. Gragg (Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2007), pp. 181–200. Another “competing” alphabetic order existed in these early days.
5. The word “alphabet” is made of the names of the two first letters of this order in Hebrew—aleph and bet.
MidrashDr de Loa, that's one smokin' midrash. I'm a gonna steal it, and give Dr Rainey the credit, just to keep things confused! • • • • • • • Alphabet"Given the right timing and the right triggering situation, a genius" A genius would not be 'illiterate'. I cannot buy into Miss Goldwasser's opinion because it doesn't make sense and depends upon random chance, along with a sole participant. Why couldn't a committee sit down and discuss how symbols are to be used to represent their language? The ancients were far more intelligent than modern scholars give them credit. • • • • • • • The accidental inventor of the alphabet & his father #5I do mine rescue medical exams, and most of the miners I see are burly guys with no shortage of testosterone. Men think like men, now, 4000 year ago, 4000 years in the future. So, the non-hieroglyph based curled character is not a "recurve bow", but is likely anatomic as are the head, foot, eye, forearm, & mouth glyphs. This glyph which appears as a miniscula omega represent "shadayim." That wasn't politically correct, and so the character became known later as "sheen" or teeth. • • • • • • • The accidental inventor of the alphabet & his father #4Laughing the scribe said, "Shml, Shml, Shml, you need a wife!" What did he draw Avi, the boy said? "Well, um, ah, open your mouth," he said. Then he touched the boys first two adult teeth, his incisors, and said "he drew teeth Beni, teeth." And laughed again. In Caananite, "sheen." The boy finished spelling "Shml" for his uncl, who said "I've got to show this to the guys at the mine tomorrow." And the rest is, .... • • • • • • • The accidental inventor of the alphabet & his father #3The scribe said to his son "What is this?" as he read out the Egyptian words of the glyphs, then read them in Egyptian phonetics. His son said "No, not Egyptian. My tongue." Then pointed at each character, then to each glyph & read "Avi, Emi, Aniy, Ben" His uncle saw it, and said can you draw my name, "Shml"? I don't know a picture for "S". As his sister-in-law began to nurse the baby, he said "I know" and drew two half circles, like two bowls touching. The scribe laughed, saying, .... • • • • • • • The accidental inventor of the alphabet & his father #2The problem was in remembering the Egyptian names for the hieroglyphs he was learning to draw, since his mother and everyone at home only spoke Caananite. Only his Avi could speak Egyptian. Even seeing his own name drawn out with hieroglyphs didn't help him remember the names of the glyphs. He got the concept though. One day his Avi came home to see a drawing of a big man, a woman, a little man and a babe, with glyphs grouped at each. They made no sense as Egyptian words or sounds .... more • • • • • • • The accidental inventor of the alphabet & his fatherI suspect that both Orly Goldwasser & the late Anson Rainey are both right about who the inventor of the aleph-bet was. The inventor of the alef-bet was a literate Caananite translator & scribe working in Serabit. he might have been lucky enough to have his family with him, and they helped. A scribe's son learns to be a scribe. He was surely taught that a string of heiroglyphs could hold the sounds of an Egyptian name. There was a problem though .... (cont) • • • • • • • Invention of AlphabetMy questions would be why would a culture invent paper before it needed record keeping and how could it have record keeping without first inventing an alphabet? Wouldn't that alphabet be first recorded on the same substrate already in use for pictogram idols and stories? So if these artifacts haven't been found, to date, do they exist? If not then which came first the paper or the alphabet? • • • • • • • The Invention of the AlphabetIt is obvious, as Rainey states, that most alphabetic inscriptions, were written on perishable materials such as papyrus. That is why so little has survived of ancient writings of the Palestine area aside from the Hebrew Bible and other texts that happily survived to be known as the "Dead Sea Scrolls." • • • • • • • VereNote both Goldwasser and Rainey may be correct if the managers of the mine who introduce the alphabet are 'educated sophisticates' but the miners who adapt it are 'illiterates'. In any case, with regard to the smell test, I find Goldwasser persuasive. Some of the best evolutions in language happen because illiterates cant keep track of the rarified arcane nonsense. Look at the history of the English language and how illiterates streamlined/mangled English. Thanks for the efficiency. • • • • • • • Who Really Invented the Alphabet -- Rainey's poor engagementWhile I will not comment upon the data at hand to either support or undermine Ms. Goldwasser's thesis I will comment upon the character of Mr. Rainey's response. Mr. Rainey's response was, in my opinion, disengaged and disrespectful of Ms. Goldwasser's article and follow-up. He did not engage her assertions directly but merely reiterated the standard theory. I was expecting better from Mr. Rainey. His response smacked entirely of dogmatic orthodoxy, not open-minded engagement. • • • • • • • Origins of AlphabetIf the alphabet was invented in the Sinai by a semitic people about 1300 BC, I wonder who those people could have been? Hmm... who could have there writing there at that time? Didn't something else happen there around that same time? And what is the oldest alphabetic literature anyway? Hint: it is the world's all-time best selling book which was faithrully copied on parchment for thousands of years. BTW: Phoenecians = Canaanites • • • • • • • Ugaritic AlphabetI am a complete novice. From my layman's point of view, though, I have to ask - what purpose did an alphabet serve for the scribes of Ugarit? What new "users" were they targeting with their version of the "Miner's Invention", apparently borrowed from far away in time and distance. • • • • • • • origin of alphabetI must agree with Goldwasser. Rainey seems to be one trapped in elitism. Evolution explains the changes from Goldwasser's symbols to the present day. Look at the various European countries' letters. • • • • • • • talkback - origin of alphabetIn some of the postings and Prof. Rainey's response, there appears to be a prejudice that only 'educated people' can invent anything of value. Intelligence has nothing to do with one's station in life. The discussion of the invention of the barcode that came from the work of miners in the USA illustrates my point. We need to be open to all posibilities, even unlikely ones. • • • • • • • Origins of an AlphabetIt seems Professor Goldwasser relies on facts while Professor Rainey relies on assumptions. Goldwasser's thesis is most appealing. • • • • • • • Who Really Invented the Alphabet?Professeur Orly Goldwasser, Je vous félicite par votre recherche et co-partage de votre conviction. Je fais une recherche dans ce sujet depuis 1996 et je suis arrivée à la même conclusion que vous, au travers de l’historie du peuple de la Mesopothamie, et aussi, pour la comparasion des alphabets là. Cette recherche est très important par reveler un passé encore incertain. Merci beaucoup par votre attention. • • • • • • • Illiterate Contributions to Western CivilizationProf Goldwasser's thesis that illiterates (Mine workers) made the single most impt contribution to the development of Western Civilization, reminds me of the caution given to our Urban Econ class at the New School. Cornell distinguished visiting Prof Tom Vietorez cautioned that an economist noticed that census reports showed population increases corresponding to increased production of pig iron. Conclusion: increase pig iron to increase population. Innovation Disruption is equally misapplied. • • • • • • • Name in this articleThe author of The Origins of the West Semitic Alphabet in Egyptian Scripts is Gordon J. Hamilton, not Gordon H. Hamilton. • • • • • • • Scholarly EtiquetteI wonder why Prof. Rainey referred Prof. Goldwasser as "Orly." I trust this breach of scholarly etiquette was inadvertant, and not related to Prof. Goldwasser's being a woman. • • • • • • • More problems with Proto-Sinatic being the first alphabetAs Goldwasser's comparison table plainly shows, the Proto-Sinaitic characters don't look like letters in later alphabets. Moreover, her sound values require some pretty inspired guesswork: She has the square "b" character take on the first sound of a similar glyph meaning "house" ("bet"), rather than an identical phonetic symbol for the "p" sound. Imagine if a script developed from English had a character B with the "ay" sound--just because it looks like an 8, which starts with an "ay" sound! • • • • • • • BellEach Proto-Sinaitic inscription is so short that the content is almost certainly names and titles. Names were (basically) spelled alphabetically in hieroglyphs. The crucial innovation was not spelling names alphabetically; it was spelling full sentences alphabetically. There's no evidence that that happened with Proto-Sinaitic. Goldwasser's claim that Proto-Sinaitic evolved into the modern alphabet rests on her comparison table between Proto-Sinaitic and later alphabets. See Below. • • • • • • • BellRainey is almost certainly right when he says that the record of the development of the alphabet is probably lost because all of it was written on perishable materials. Engraving in stone is hard, and doing it well enough that it lasts for three millennia is even harder. If you were experimenting with a new form of writing, you'd almost certainly do it on the easiest material. But he makes one flaw--he still believes that Proto-Sinaitic represents the first alphabet. It doesn't. See below. • • • • • • • LyonsHow wonderful for Rainey's critique to prompt more marvelous insights in Goldwasser's rebuttal. Since the epiphany of the first article I have been boring people silly with the history of the alphabet, or more appropriately the "ox-house script". Thanks and eager for more. Signing off with the 4000 year old greeting, Maahab Baalat! • • • • • • • Who made the AlphabetI had always thought that all Mediterranean cultures shared a common source for the alphabet since all seem to be similar. I had also suspected the possibility of it being a gift from the Hebrew Israelites since they date back to Moses 1500 BC, which precedes nearly any alphabetic script. The problem is the lack of evidence going back that far. Goldwasser makes an excellent case for (apparent) Canaanites/Hebrews. • • • • • • • Who authored the first alphabet?I think it makes perfect sense that illiterate Canaanite miners invented the alphabet! Did you know that miners in Minnesota, USA were responsible for inventing the bar-codes that are used so widely today? One of the miners got tired of counting the number of ore cars (trains) that came out of the mines daily, so he began marking them with slashes. Those slashes evolved into the barcodes we use today. Yes, I do believe it was illiterate miners who were responsible for inventing the alphapbet! • • • • • • • alphabetprof Anson Rainey, emeritus professor of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures and Semitic Languages at Tel Aviv University, offers no substance or proof of his statements or acknowledge any information that doesn't derive from his sphere of influence, most things that exist were not brought about by so called sophisticated minds,History has proven most inventions in the history of man i.e. light bulb, auto, aircraft lst goes for ever, have been idea's of working class • • • • • • • Who Invented the AlphabetI find Professor Goldwasser's argument convincing. In the absence of any direct evidence to the contrary any other assumptions a very speculative. Disruptive innovation is so pervasive in our technology driven lives I wonder why any other possiblity is contemplated. • • • • • • • scholars-study/alphabetIt seems to me that by the definition of illiterate that we in the western world use, any of the ancient peoples who created their alphabet were not scribes. The scribes were the ones who gathered the various symbols from various people and sources and created a way of communication first. Then the organization of symbols and marks could be made into some coherent thought... Then the alphabet could be created over time. It may have a similar process in China, Egypt, Near East, the Americas etc. • • • • • • • How about Phaenius FarsaidhIn the study of my Irish ancestry, I discovered that the current Irish link their beginnings to a Scythian prince over the land of Canaan who developed the Aleph-beth for the language of Canaan, as a means to preserve the language and to preserve the languages learned by seventy scholars he sent abroad to document the languages confounded by God at Babel. While that Aleph-beth continued into a Phoenician kingdom, it was also taken into Egypt by Niul, the second son of Phaenius Farsaidh. • • • • • • • |
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