Innovation No. 39 of 77 in the book

The First Alphabet

The Sinai Peninsula miners who adapted complex hieroglyphs into a simplified set of phonetic letters

When

c. 1800 BCE

Dynasty

12th Dynasty

Era

Middle Kingdom

Every alphabet on earth — Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek — descends from a single ancestor, and it was invented in Egypt around 1800 BCE, in the Middle Kingdom.

Writing itself had already flourished along the Nile for well over a thousand years. The year 1800 BCE is highlighted because it marks the birth of the first true, independent alphabet (known as Proto-Sinaitic or Early Alphabetic), whereas earlier scripts like Egyptian hieroglyphs were complex, mixed writing systems combining hundreds of ideograms and phonetic signs.

The inventors weren’t priests but Semitic-speaking workers at the Sinai turquoise mines. They took a handful of Egyptian hieroglyphs and used each to stand for a single sound — a letter.

Instead of memorizing hundreds of signs, you now needed a couple of dozen. Writing became something almost anyone could learn.

The A-B-C started as graffiti in an Egyptian mine.

Flinders Petrie found the evidence in 1905 at Serabit el-Khadim, an Egyptian turquoise mine in the south-central Sinai. Among the ruins of a temple to Hathor were crude rock inscriptions and a small sandstone sphinx carrying both standard hieroglyphs and a set of unfamiliar, rustic signs. In 1916 Alan Gardiner worked out why: the writers were recording a Semitic language phonetically, and his reading of the recurring phrase gave "Beloved of the Lady" — the goddess Ba'alat.

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