Earliest version of alphabet in Ancient Egypt

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Earliest version of alphabet, a forerunner, appears in Ancient Egypt per recent study (2018)
www.livescience.com/62580-earliest-alphabet-discovered.html



The earliest example of our alphabet — a possible mnemonic phrase that helped someone remember "ABCD" — has been discovered on a 3,400-year-old inscribed piece of limestone from ancient Egypt, a scholar believes.

Three of the words start with the ancient equivalent of B, C and D, creating what may be a mnemonic phrase.

Thomas Schneider, a professor of Egyptology and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia, reported the discovery in a paper published recently in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research. This discovery "would be the first historical attestation of 'our' alphabet sequence," he told Live Science in an email.

Modern-day scholars sometimes call the early ancestor of our ABCD alphabet sequence the "abgad" sequence, because this phrase mentions some of the first letters of the early version of our alphabet. Until this discovery, the oldest example of this sequence had only dated back about 3,200 years, Schneider wrote in his paper. [Cracking Codes: 5 Ancient Languages Yet to Be Deciphered]

The alphabet that we use today is derived from that used by the Phoenicians, a civilization that flourished between roughly 3,500 and 2,300 years ago in the Eastern Mediterranean. They used what scholars call a Semitic language, a term that refers to a branch of languages that trace their origins to the Middle East, each sharing some similar words. The early forerunner to our alphabet was written in Semitic languages. Few texts that are written in Semitic languages date back 3,400 years or more, however.
Earliest ABCDs?

A team of archaeologists from the Cambridge Theban Tombs Project, led by Nigel Strudwick, discovered the inscribed piece of limestone in 1995 in a tomb that belonged to an Egyptian official named Sennefer, and recently Schneider studied and deciphered it. While the text is written in hieratic — a form of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing — "all [the] words appear to be of foreign linguistic origin" and are mostly Semitic, wrote Schneider in his paper.

One side of the limestone piece contains a series of Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols that represent the words "bibiya-ta" (a word that can mean "earth snail"), "garu" (a word that can mean "dove") and "da'at" (a word that can mean "kite"), Schneider wrote in his paper. More than 3,000 years ago, the "g" would have represented the sound that "c" does today, Schneider told Live Science. This means that the first letter of each of these words is the ancient equivalent of "BCD." [Photos: 5,000-Year-Old Hieroglyphs Discovered in Sinai Desert]

There are symbols in front of these three words that are harder to interpret, but they could spell out "elta'at" (a word that can mean "gecko" or "lizard"), Schneider wrote in his paper.

It's possible that all the signs together formed the phrase "and the lizard and the snail, and the dove and the kite …" wrote Schneider in the paper — a phrase that may have helped the person who wrote the text to remember the proper order of the ancient forerunner of today's alphabet.
Another alphabetic sequence

The other side of the inscribed piece of limestone also contains a series of Semitic words written in hieratic, Schneider said. They spell out the words "hahāna lāwī ḥelpat mayyin leqab." The first letters of the first four words in that series — the letters "hlhm" — represent the first few letters of another ancient alphabetic sequence, one that never became as popular as the ancient forerunner to our alphabet.

These words form a phrase that means, "to make pleasant the one who bends reed, water [according] to the Qab." The "qab" is a unit of measurement that equals about 1.2 liters, Schneider wrote. This phrase likely helped the person who wrote this inscription to remember the first few letters of this alphabetic sequence, Schneider said.

Ben Haring, a senior university lecturer in Egyptology at Leiden University, was the first to recognize the "hlhm" sequence on this limestone piece and published a paper on it in 2015 in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies.
Semitic alphabet practice?

Whoever wrote these inscriptions 3,400 years ago may have been trying to remember the start of both alphabetic sequences, Schneider said. Sennefer was an official who dealt with Egyptian foreign affairs and likely understood the Semitic languages that were used in the Eastern Mediterranean, Schneider said.

When Sennefer's tomb was being constructed, perhaps the scribes helping to build the tomb were trying to learn the languages, and one of them wrote these words down as a practice exercise, Schneider told Live Science.

Schneider's article was recently published, and it remains to be seen how scholars will react to his findings.

Haring, who identified the "hlhm" sequence, said that he welcomes Schneider's work, but is cautious about the idea that the other side of the limestone piece bears evidence of the ancient forerunner to our modern alphabet sequence. A major problem with research into this piece of limestone is the lack of texts written in Semitic dating back 3,400 years, Haring said. This means that when scholars analyze the words, they have to use Semitic texts from later periods to understand them, even though their meanings could have been different 3,400 years ago, Haring said.

When Haring published his "hlhm" finding in 2015, he published it as a suggestion — even he wasn’t convinced of his own discovery at the time. He said that since that time, his finding has received widespread acceptance among scholars. It remains to be seen if Schneider's finding will receive the same acceptance.

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Quick recap for comparison- previous data before 2018 study...


EGYPT'S PIONEERING DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING- NON-ALPHABETICAL AND ALPHABETICAL





Egypt a pioneer of writing before Mesopotamia
"The earliest known Sumerian writings date back to 3000BC while the
German team's find shows that Abydos inscriptions date to 3400BC. The
first Pharaonic dynasty began in 2920BC with King Menes. The earliest
known writing in Dynasty Zero is much earlier than the oldest writing
discovered in Mesopotamia."
--Gaballa Ali Gaballa, Secretary-General of the
Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities: 1999. IN: Nevine El-Aref, "Did writing originate
in Egypt?" Al-Ahram Weekly: 1 - 7 April 1999, Issue No. 423


Certain writing forms in Mesopotamia and only understandable from
Egyptian perspective

"[Archaeologist] Dreyer asserted that the obsidian used to make this
bowl came from Ethiopia suggesting significant cultural contacts among
Nile Valley populations. He concluded his presentation by noting
similarities between specific Egyptian and Mesopotamian objects and
suggesting that perhaps there is an initial influence of Egyptian writing on
Mesopotamia because there are signs on Mesopotamian objects that are
only "readable" from the standpoint of the Egyptian language, but not the
Mesopotamian language."
-- German archaeologist Gunther Dreyer. 2000. "Beginnings of Writing
in Ancient Egypt" IN: - "Recent Finds in Predynastic Egypt." ANKH
Journal 8/9: 1999-2000.




Africa's Nile Valley shares in creation of the historic alphabet

"Discoveries by Gunter Dreyer of the German Archaeological Institute
suggest that the origin of Egyptian writing needs to be reexamined,
offering the possibility that the idea of writing was developed in Egypt
several centuries before it occurred in the Near East. Inscriptions from
hundreds of pots and labels found at the royal cemetery at Abydos show
some hieroglyphic writing as far back as 3400 BCE, with most occurring
about 3200 BCE. Sumerian writing seems to have begun about 3100 BCE.
The Egyptians formed and used writing in a different way than the Asians.
The linguistic pictographs of Sumer were rudimentary were used primarily
used for commerce. Those of Egypt were more representational of real
objects and were primarily employed to identify kings, tombs and the like.

A remarkable find involving early experiments with alphabetic writing in
Egypt has been recently made by John C. Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale
University, and his wife Deborah. Inscriptions discovered in the limestone
cliffs on an ancient road between Thebes and Abydos, a route once heavily
traveled by Asian traders and mercenaries in the Egyptian desert, are in a
Semitic script with Egyptian influences. Dated between 1900 and 1000
BCE, they are two or three centuries older than previous evidence of an
alphabet in the Semitic-speaking territory of the Sinai Peninsula or in the
Syria-Palestine region occupied by the Canaanites. While there have
always been indications that Semites were inventors of the alphabet,
researchers had heretofore assumed that it was developed in their own
lands by borrowing and simplifying Egyptian hieroglyphs. Instead
Darnell's discovery now suggests that, working with Semitic speakers in
Egypt, native scribes simplified formal pictographic Egyptian writing and
modified the symbols into an early alphabet using a semi-cursive form
commonly used in the Middle Kingdom."

--Martin Isler (2001). Sticks, stones, and shadows: building the Egyptian
pyramids. Univ of Oklahoma PRess. p. 56



The Egyptian Western Desert- location of Egyptian military scripts
adopted by both Egyptian scribes and Semitic speakers into alphabetic forms
www.codex99.com/typography/11.html


"However, now with the recovery of alphabetic writing from the
Egyptian Western Desert, the fairly high degree of literacy in Egyptian
(knowledge of hieratic, and a hybrid of hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts as
well) presumed by these texts, and the well known Asiatic pres-ence
within Egypt proper from the early Dynastic periods onwards, strongly
suggest that it is to Egypt itself that we must look for the geographi-cal
home of alphabetic writing. More specifically, the Bebi inscription and its
immediate neighbors offer tantalizing clues about the context in which
Semitic-speaking Asiatics adopted and adapted certain aspects of the
Egyptian writing system for the needs of their own language(s). The
Egyptian military, known both to have employed Asiatics (as the Bebi
inscription so wonderfully attests) and to have included scribes, would
provide one likely context in which Western Asiatic Semitic language
speakers could have learned and eventually adapted the Egyptian writing
system. Indeed, the prominence of lapidary hieratic, the form of hieratic
utilized by army scribes, as models for alphabetic forms at the Wadi el-Hõl
(and at Serabit).."
--J. Darnell et al. 2005. Two Early Alphabetic Inscriptions from the Wadi
el-Hol: New Evidence for the Origin of the Alphabet from the Western
Desert of Egypt, Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 2005.




Egyptian writing system developed independently of Mesopotamia both as to
designs and as to uses of writing. QUOTE:

""It is often assumed that Egyptian writing was invented under a stimulus of the
Mesopotamian writing system, developed in the late fourth millennium BC, that might
have come at the time of the short-lived Uruk Culture expansion into Syria. A variety of
artistic and architectural evidence for contact between Mesopotamia and late Predynastic
Egypt has been found, but none of it can be dated precisely in relation to Tomb U-j.
Moreover, **the Egyptian writing system is different from the Mesopotamian and must
have been developed independently...

A second point *of contrast with Mesopotamia* is in uses of writing. The earliest
Egyptian writing consists of inscribed tags, ink notations on pottery, again principally
from the royal cemetery at Abydos, and hieroglyphs incorporated into artistic
compositions, of which the chief clear examples are such pieces as the *Narmer Palette,*
which is probably more than a century later than Tomb U-j. Thus, while administrative
uses of writing appear to have come at the beginning—examples from the Abydos tombs
include such notations as “produce of Lower Egypt”—the system was integrated fully
into pictorial representation. An intermediate, emblematic mode of representation in
which symbols, including hieroglyphs, were shown in action also evolved before the 1st
Dynasty. These three modes together formed a powerful artistic complex that endured as
long as Egyptian civilization."

--Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, ed. Kathryn A. Bard and
Steven Blake Shubert, ( London and New York: Routledge, 1999)