The final evolution of the alphabetTime: around 2000BC. Place: Mesopotamia. We’re watching the evolution of the alphabet unfold in real time on this very webpage. (Given a little imagination.) Ironically, during the same period the Egyptians thought up a complete alphabet system. But two factors hampered its adoption and development: • profound conservatism and no perceived need for change
So, this Egyptian alphabet never got properly off the ground and was smothered in a welter of hieroglyphs, pictograms and ideograms. The Chinese also ran into problems during their own evolution towards an alphabet (which they never reached). The problem was that nearly all Chinese words were only one syllable long. In speech, subtle intonations marked different specific meanings between similar syllables. But when writing these single-syllable words, there was simply too much ambiguity to properly understand which particular word was meant. Consequently, the Chinese resorted to a more complex written system. Each of their basic syllable signs was uniquely marked as a particular word by adding extra symbols to show its context and meaning. Adding these extra markers meant that each word had its own unique written form. Unfortunately, this also prevented any simplification from a syllable system to a one-letter-per-sound Chinese alphabet. Sumer summaryLet’s recap here. By now in the evolution of the alphabet, the Sumerians, like the Egyptians and Chinese, had developed:Pictogram: a simplified drawing used as a symbol for an object. Ideogram: a pictogram which also symbolises other ideas associated with the object. Phonogram: a symbol or picture which represents the sound of a syllable or whole short word. A ‘puzzling’ evolution of the alphabet: the rebusBrilliantly, the Sumerian scribes then extended the invention of the phonogram even further. They used the phonograms for short words to represent part of a longer word, if the sound of the short word appeared in the longer one. For example, texters often write ‘2moro’. The ‘moro’ bit is sort of spelt out but the ‘2’ is a phonogram being used as part of the longer word.Phonograms used in combination to show longer words are called a ‘rebus’. A rebus is a picture-code. It is a way of showing the sounds of words through picture-symbols. You see them often in activity books for children, or newspaper puzzles. However, 600 phonograms is not quite the same as 26 letters. And meanwhile, other cultures were evolving other writing systems. On top of all that, just as things were hotting up ... ... the evolution of the alphabet almost screeched to an abrupt halt when the Sumerians were conquered in 1720BC by King Hamurabai of the Babylonians. However, fortunately, the conquerors sensibly took over the entire writing system at the same time. The Babylonians in turn left behind thousands more cuneiform clay tablets dealing with astronomy, medicine, law, science, mathematics etc. But what goes around comes around. The Babylonians too eventually fell from power while the Assyrians rose; and the Assyrians helped spread the same system of cuneiform writing all over the Mesopotamian region, whence it also migrated into the Middle East. There, another stage took place in the evolution of the alphabet as we know it, via the Phoenicians. Reaching the Phoenician lineThe Phoenicians were based in Byblos, Sidon and Tyre – cities now in Syria and Lebanon, at the north-east corner of the Mediterranean – and they were astonishingly energetic and successful traders. By about 1000BC, they knew of several versions of cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs and other phonogram systems in use around the Middle East and the shores of the Mediterranean.(Meanwhile, cuneiform writing had been further simplified and developed by the Canaanite and Ugarit tribes of the Eastern Mediterranean to produce several systems of symbols representing single syllables. Try saying that six times quickly.) The evolution of the alphabet was at this point driven by the heat of commerce. There were Phoenician shipping routes and settlements all over the Middle East, the north coast of Africa and the south of Europe. They were thus in a good position to take on the best aspects of all the available writing systems. Moreover, because the Phoenicians spoke a different language from those to which the various writing systems originally belonged, they could cheerfully adopt symbols from all over with no concern for the original words and pictograms which they had stood for. Keep It Simple, SailorThe Phoenicians therefore took symbols which represented single consonants instead of syllables or whole words. They abandoned all vestiges of the parent systems and even gave new sounds to some of the symbols, to better fit their own pronunciation. They wrote the signs rapidly in simplified versions with the Egyptian brush, ink and paper system, which was extremely easy to use. They cut the number of symbols down to a minimum.The outstanding Phoenician contribution to the evolution of the alphabet was speed. In maritime commerce, time is money and you mustn’t miss the tide. Another major factor in this accelerated evolution of the alphabet was, of course, that the Phoenicians could take their writing everywhere they travelled. All over the Middle East and southern Europe, the new, efficient system of one-letter-to-one-sound was observed, learned and used. Phoenician use of the alphabet influenced the Semitic alphabets (Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, etc) and was directly adopted by the ancient Greeks to write their own language
Note for the interested The city of Byblos, a major Phoenician port and commercial centre, was also the main trading point into Greece for Egyptian papyrus-paper. This paper became known by the Greeks as ‘byblos’, by association with the city (rather like ‘manila envelopes’ after the city of Manila). This meaning of the word ‘byblos’ was later extended further to include books made of the same paper. Later again, the same word came to mean not just any book but The Book ... hence our word ‘Bible’. The ancient Greeks had already developed their own writing system, mysteriously represented by the as-yet-undeciphered text called Linear A and another, known, called Linear B. But those systems had been destroyed, along with most of early Greek civilisation, by massive invasion and conquest sometime around 1200BC. Slowly, some Greek communities recovered, and around 400 years later they started again with the Phoenician alphabet. It had to be adapted, because Greek contained a lot of sounds quite different from Phoenician – most notably, plenty of vowels. (The Phoenicians, probably on account of all their long sea-voyages, had always suffered from vowel-trouble.) After another four hundred years or so, one particular form of Greek script, ‘Ionic script’, had proved the most popular throughout Greece. The Greek alphabet had been born. And at this point, like the Middle Eastern writing systems upon which it was based, it was still written from right to left with a rush-brush on papyrus. The importance of writing materials, againHere, a very interesting change took place in the evolution of the alphabet from the point of view of the calligrapher. Greek writers started to use reeds instead of rushes to write with.A reed is tough and woody where a rush is soft and fibrous; reeds don’t make good brushes. They can be trimmed and split, however, to form a square-ended writing implement. The disadvantage of such a tool is that it doesn’t hold ink in its fibres, as a brush does, so it tends to dribble onto the paper unless held up at an angle to a slanting writing surface; and its hard corners tend to catch on the texture of the papyrus paper, which makes it difficult for a right-handed scribe to push the pen from right to left. So, there was some dithering among writers. A number of Greek inscriptions have even been found in which the words run first from right to left, then left to right on the following line, and so on down in a kind of zig-zag formation. But eventually, Greek changed direction entirely and began to be written from left to right, as do the modern European alphabets which derive from it. (The Middle Eastern communities of the time also adopted the reed pen but in many cases wrote on leather, which was smoother than papyrus and more forgiving to the nib when the pen was pushed from right to left. Today, therefore, Arabic, Hebrew etc still run right-to-left on the page.) The evolution of the alphabet as we know it was now complete: an efficient system of symbols including all the consonants and vowels needed to represent the spoken word. For the purposes of calligraphy, it remains only to translate those letterforms into what we now recognise as the Roman or Latin alphabet. But that is a different story which belongs on a different page.
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