Great. NARRATOR: …with more in common than we think. Alphabets don’t seem to have anything to do with the rebus principle, so what is the connection between the way writing began, and the way most people write today? This should be an alphabet.” And this was the “boom.”. 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. Free Teaching Resources: https://www.havefunteaching.com/unlimited. Rebus is a smart word for it. In a song line trail, there is the knowledge that is given to you from the old people, in what they call “song line trails,” for naming all the different sites, the plants, trees, mountains, water hole and all of that, like a map, it is a map, in your mind. Now, one more step takes us to Nabataean Aramaic. Then it reached Italy in the hands of the Etruscans, and Europe was never the same. DR. YASMIN EL SHAZLY (Egyptologist): Writing always starts with pictures. In the first millennium – which is a different story altogether – the alphabet spread to cultures without earlier literary traditions. The Romans adopted and adjusted the Greek alphabet in much the same confident way they adopted and adjusted to the Greek gods. NARRATOR: Retenu was an Egyptian name for the Biblical land of Canaan. It’s a character. DR. ORLY GOLDWASSER (Egyptologist): This is the greatest experiment ever conducted to write language in pictures only, only pictures. Sometimes the connection is far from obvious, but it’s still there. If you want to record the language fully, pictograms will never succeed. NARRATOR: Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called the “rebus principle,” and it allows pictures to spell out words. We are at the very beginning of democratization of writing, which began right here, at Serabit El-Khadim, in about 1850 B.C. But, in many other cases he is not a duck at all. NARRATOR: 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. 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. And that, I think, was first developed in Egypt. This is a typical representation of someone from the Negev, someone who is an Asiatic, as defined by the Egyptians. NARRATOR: What makes hieroglyphs difficult is that Egyptian scribes used thousands of different symbols, and the rebus means that many of them have at least two different meanings. And it is probably during this time that this group had the idea to develop a new writing system by imitating the Egyptians, but adapting the writing to their own language. These became the Greek “nu” and our N. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, what was the Egyptian word for head? Barry B. Powell says it is a misnomer to refer to the Semitic abecedary as an alphabet. Writing shaped our world and the rise of human knowledge, from the trading of goods to tales of ancient goddesses and kings. YIDUMDUMA BILL HARNEY (Wardaman Elder): All these song line trails that were made, happening all the way right back from the beginning of everything, to people, to people, to people, all the way right back, billion years ago, to million years, come down to hundred years, and now, now come back, right up to us. There are too few signs here. Almost all the world’s alphabets share this same root. Do you think I am drawing a picture or a character? And it is in those enclaves of so-called civilization that the need was, I think, first felt for some kind of record keeping. A to Z: The First Alphabet. It’s just obvious. NARRATOR: Squabbling aside, where was the rebus born? Those enemies were completely destroyed. Last time that I saw him he was in a box, he moved now into a basket. NARRATOR: 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. Instead of thousands of pictographic characters they employ just a few dozen simple shapes. Gill, N.S. In most alphabets the characters are arranged in a definite order, or sequence, and each alphabetic character represents either a consonant or a vowel rather than a syllable or a group of consonants and vowels. This is how to write fish in the ancient oracle bone script. NARRATOR: At root, like hieroglyphs, Chinese characters are stylized pictures. Important thing to clarify! We don’t know exactly how to pronounce that. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: “Brush with Silence” brings calligraphers from about 20 different cultures together. German for Beginners: Pronunciation and Alphabet, M.A., Linguistics, University of Minnesota. The Sinai Desert: Thirteen-hundred feet above the sand dunes rises the plateau of Serabit El-Khadim. Those enemies were shackled. They were beheaded. ORLY GOLDWASSER: For me it’s worth all the gold of Egypt, this little piece that stays here in the basket. The Secret Life of Scientists and Engineers. Then the shadow of the old moon, he went into all the rock, as well, during the creation time. Five-thousand 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. Season 47 Episode 13 | 54m 1s | Video has closed captioning. The First Alphabet Leave a reply Premiering this Wednesday is a documentary on the history of writing that experts have been working on for sixteen years; twelve years to puzzle out a story and four to film and edit. It’s a conceptual revolution in the meaning of a picture. In Egypt, too, writing has been found that uses only consonants. What prompted them to start recording things, not for the ear but for the eye? TV-G | 1h | Documentary | Episode aired 23 September 2020. Now the connection between that and our A in English is quite obvious. That is, an alphabet requires symbols for vowels. (Dramatization) Oh! Orly Goldwasser has made them a lifetime’s study. DR. YONGSHENG CHEN (Philologist): Egyptian and Chinese writing are very comparable. Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. NARRATOR: But what about the Egyptians? ORLY GOLDWASSER: Gardiner looks on it, and it’s very easy for him to read the Egyptian part. NARRATOR: Today, we take it for granted, but writing is arguably the most powerful idea we humans have ever come up with. ZAI YUHONG (English name “Sophia,” Chinese for “Teacher,”): (Translated from Chinese) I am going to draw a picture. Second, the alphabet emerged from a weak segment of society, far from the cultural and political centers of the day. NARRATOR: So, these lines represent something, something that is not present. DR. AHMAD AL-JALLAD (Philologist): This document is a leaf from a seventh century Koran, dated to 675 C.E., the first Islamic century. The earliest known alphabet in the wider sense is the Wadi el-Hol script, believed to be an abjad, which through its successor Phoenician is the ancestor of modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin (via the Old Italic alphabet), Cyrillic (via the Greek alphabet) and Hebrew (via Aramaic). Researchers uncover the evolution of writing and the story of the alphabet, dating back to millennia, old carvings in an Egyptian turquoise mine. GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) And this little panel of “irrigated land,” which we already know from the pre-dynastic clay vessel, stands for the sound value “sh.” So, you read his name as “War-sh.” Here are new possibilities of script being seized. Although it is conventional to refer to the introduction of the vowels by the Greeks as an "addition" to the 22 consonants, Powell explains that some unknown Greek reinterpreted 5 of the Semitic signs as vowels, whose presence were required, in conjunction with any of the other, consonantal signs. These three strokes indicate that the character being written has something to do with water. Irving Finkel from the British Museum is an expert on Mesopotamia and the region’s first civilization, Sumer. And this was the huge, the fantastic invention. Then there is all human footprints, all over, you can see it. PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) What appears at the bottom of this stela is really very interesting, since one finds here an engraving of someone riding a donkey. NARRATOR: But, next to the main characters in this grisly tale are seemingly random pairs of images, such as a catfish and a chisel. YASMIN EL SHAZLY: This is the earliest known complete text, ancient Egyptian text. ZAI YUHONG: (Translated from Chinese) It is “fish.” How do you know it is fish? NARRATOR: Gardiner guessed that they must spell out a similar dedication in the Canaanite language to a Canaanite goddess. ORLY GOLDWASSER: A Canaanite wouldn’t call this goddess Hathor. The aleph, he, heth (originally an /h/, but later long /e/), yod, 'ayin, and waw became the Greek vowels alpha, epsilon, eta, iota, omicron, and upsilon. YONGSHENG CHEN: Egyptian and Chinese writing are very comparable. Sponsored By: Related to This Episode. Where would we be without the world’s alphabets? In Egypt or Mesopotamia or somewhere else entirely? NARRATOR: Hieroglyphs are indeed magic. GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) The big rectangle divided into small panels shows the irrigated land, and left and right of the Nile Valley are the mountains. So the word “turquoise” appears here. There are 214 classifier signs and the majority of Chinese characters are formed using one. West Semitic people from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (where Phoenician and... Poetry as Inspiration for the Alphabet. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: The Romans turned everything the other way, systematically. As it happens, “ga” means milk. NARRATOR: The incredible story of writing can finally be told. IRVING FINKEL: The way I look at it is this: these writing systems have in common the rebus principle. So, he would draw the picture which represented milk. And if so, who was responsible for it? Every mission left one inside the temple precincts. When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs, I could feel that there were so many similarities. YONGSHENG CHEN: The phonogram-classifier combination is a very good way to represent a word. The king appears with his entourage. It makes smartphones and computers possible, and yet it is thousands of years old. They just turn it around, because they don’t care about the image. Another simplification, it looks simply like a six. So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley. Character. And of course the thing about human ingenuity is that when there’s a sharp need for something, it tends to crystallize in discovery. Gill, N.S. But this is not decoration. Below it is a rectangle, similar to the ones on the Abydos vase. The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt. The term ‘alphabet’ came from the first two letters of the Phoenician alphabet – ‘Aleph’ and ‘Beth.’ While some languages have their own set of alphabets, the most commonly used is the Latin alphabet, which is also shared by several languages aside from English. Their heads were put between their legs, and even their penises were cut off and, in some instances, put on their heads. YASMIN EL SHAZLY: They are spells that help resurrect the king in the afterlife. NARRATOR: A to Z: The First Alphabet, right now, on NOVA. Then, another Egyptologist examined an object that Petrie had brought back from Serabit to the British Museum. NARRATOR: Aboriginal culture has been handed down orally, through poetry and song, for tens of thousands of years, without the need to write anything down. IRVING FINKEL: And of course, there’s a bit of a squabble between Egyptologists and Assyriologists about who invented writing, and of course, we did. ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yes, with an R at the beginning, and here they will reach the R. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, this is the Canaanite head. Interesting Facts About the English Alphabet, Latin Alphabet Changes: How the Roman Alphabet Got Its G, Learn the Greek Alphabet With These Helpful Tips. Everything is in the leading direction. Digging up Bible stories! (Premiered September 23, 2020), NARRATOR: It’s our most important tool, one we all take for granted: writing. That’s the moon that you can see there. And that’s how you develop into a purely alphabetic system later on. NARRATOR: Turquoise was part of the magic that helped the dead rise to eternal life. And it gets stylized in Phoenician, simplified to simply this. Some cultures still do. That meant that not everyone had to work the land, and a more complex society could develop. Exploring a variety of writing systems. They only make sense in light of the rebus principle. NARRATOR: This individual clearly participated in more than one expedition, because he’s pictured on another stela, where the hieroglyphs give us his name. The fact that his name is still there made him, in a sense, immortal. Instead, he says the first alphabet is the Greek revision of Semitic syllabic writing. PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The brother of the Prince of Retenu, a certain Khebded, who joins the expedition to help the Egyptians. It represents one of the earliest examples of writing Arabic in a calligraphic style. With so many different writing systems, can we ever hope to trace the common origin of them all? Zhuang Yimin, Flying Sparrow Films Co. Ltd, Courtesy of The Egypt Exploration Society, Griffiths Institute – University of Oxford, Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Ocean University of China, Foreign Affairs Office of the People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, China, UNITÉ DÉCOUVERTE ET CONNAISSANCE / SPECIALIST FACTUAL, A NOVA Production by DOX Productions/Films à Cinq for NOVA/WGBH Boston in association with Arté France and the BBC. NARRATOR: The rebus principle was the key that unlocked writing for the peoples of the Fertile Crescent. By comparison, the history of … The First Alphabet The printing press transformed the spread of information, igniting the Industrial Revolution. It’s inevitable. Now, a controversial new theory has proposed that the original alphabet was actually an early form of Hebrew.If it 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 in the modern Arabic script, a straight line. So, the modern Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet that we use to write English are, are cousins. The history of alphabetic writing goes back to the consonantal writing system used for Semitic languages in the Levant in the 2nd millennium BCE. NARRATOR: It seemed that the inscriptions in the mines were related to the hieroglyphs in the temple, but how? Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, whic… See? And then the Romans just change the direction, and you reach your A in English and in Latin. These are the world’s alphabets. is "what was the world's first alphabet?" The palette tells the story entirely through pictures. If your review contains spoilers, please check the Spoiler box. ORLY GOLDWASSER: In the Bible, we know the god Baal, and he had a consort. Oh! NARRATOR: How did our ancestors conceive of writing? Some funders of NOVA also fund basic science research. The first examples have been found around Egyptian mining operations in the Sinai desert. Both Egyptian people and Chinese people believe that it is the perfect method. Your score has been saved for A to Z: The First Alphabet. The answers to those questions can only be found in an archaeology of the human mind. Something similar happened at Serabit, but on the plateau the cultural exchange between Canaanites and Egyptians seems to have had momentous consequences. 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. NARRATOR: The code breaker was Sir Alan Gardiner. WRITE A REVIEW NO, THANK YOU. Additional funding for "How Writing Changed the World" is provided by the George D. Smith Fund. In der folgende Liste finden Sie als Kunde unsere Testsieger der getesteten What is the first letter of the arabic alphabet, während der erste Platz den oben genannten Vergleichssieger ausmacht. NARRATOR: The need was to tally up food production, so that it could be taxed and distributed to the cities. BILL HARNEY: That was the mud, and people come along and put their foot there. NARRATOR: At the edge of the plateau, Flinders Petrie and his wife Hilda came across the ruins of an ancient Egyptian temple, dominated by dozens of stone markers, or “stelae.”, PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) These commemorative stelae are one of the features of the temple at Serabit El-Khadim. A to Z: The First Alphabet The birth of writing and the first alphabet were among the world’s most vital inventions. 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. They may not raise the dead, but, like all writing, they allow them to speak. He is just the sound of the duck, “soh.” For example, the word “daughter” is “soht,” or something like that. NARRATOR: And yet, writing hasn’t always existed. IRVING FINKEL: The giant leap came when somebody conceived of this matter: that you could draw a picture which represented something that someone could recognize, but at the same time that sign could be used just for the sound of the thing it looked like. IRVING FINKEL: 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, farmers all around, administrators, a central temple and so forth. NARRATOR: What were the first records to record human history? They are looking at the line of slayed enemies. Even though you can see the general idea of head. In Hebrew, the first two letters of the abecedary (as in A-B-C) are, likewise, aleph and bet, but unlike the Greek letters, the Semitic "alphabet" lacked vowels: Aleph wasn't an /a/. It looks like ugly, very ugly hieroglyphs, but it’s not Egyptian. The Phoenicians and Arameans began to write, and soon the alphabet spread to the Aegean, where it spurred the Greeks to emerge from centuries of illiteracy. It is the ancient technology of writing, and its story is the story of civilization itself. There is a dog there. From this background, he posits that it's even possible the legendary Palamedes really did invent the (Greek) alphabet. Cut French bread, which gives the meaning “tuh,” so, “soh-t.”. A collection of 16 previously untranslated ancient inscriptions lay in museums for 100 years but have now proven that Hebrew is the very first Alphabet in earth history from which all other alphabets, including English, Latin and Arabic, are derived. A to Z: The First Alphabet. Inside the tomb, Egyptologist Yasmin El Shazly brings historian Lydia Wilson to see something extraordinary. It looked like the letter “t” in the ancient paleo-Hebrew alphabet, and that reminded him of a Canaanite goddess known from scripture. It’s oracle bone script. PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) What we see here with this bull’s head, which is crowned by two horns, is probably the first prototype of our letter A. What they did in this place would transform the most important technology human beings have ever invented, one we all use every single day. NARRATOR: The walls of Teti’s tomb are carved with thousands of stylized pictures. They sit in silence, and they write their own scripts. Waw was also kept as a consonant called wau or digamma, and located in the alphabet's order between epsilon and zeta. Would you like to write a review? Follow the evolution of the written word, from 4,000-year-old carvings in an Egyptian turquoise mine to modern-day alphabets. Egypt could be named as the nation with the first alphabet were the provision of vowels was considered unnecessary. Traders and seafarers, they spread the alphabet across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where it was taken up by Greeks and then Romans. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: So, they looked at this bull, but they would say “aluf” instead of the Egyptian word. And this image is not at all the image of an Egyptian. So, anybody who saw that in ancient Mesopotamia would say, “Ah, barley.”. CHINESE BOY: (Translated from Chinese) The fish has scales; the two crosses look like scales. NARRATOR: At the moon dreaming site, Bill can sing to his ancestors, for these are not representations of them, these are the ancestors, gone into the rock. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/what-was-the-first-alphabet-119394. If the vowels are dropped from English sentences, while the consonants remain in their correct position with respect to the other consonants, literate, native English speakers can usually still understand it. BRODY NEUENSCHWANDER: They would make it much simpler than that, I suppose, just a couple of strokes of the brush, really. NARRATOR: 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 B.C. In both places, people had learnt how to irrigate the land to increase food production. Alphabet, set of graphs, or characters, used to represent the phonemic structure of a language. ORLY GOLDWASSER: We don’t know exactly, but it was something like “tapt” or “topt,” but it’s of no interest for the Canaanites. So, for example, if you see this letter here looks like a line with a small tail. GÜNTER DREYER: True writing starts when the sounds of a language are represented. She has been featured by NPR and National Geographic for her ancient history expertise. Let's explore the oldest runic writing system as well as the oldest runic alphabet, known so far. ORLY GOLDWASSER: The complete name of the Canaanite goddess that he presumes should play the role of Hathor here: Ba’alat. He has a small inscription in Egyptian and a parallel inscription in the strange signs below. It was quickly adopted by their neighbors and relatives to the east and north, the Canaanites, the Hebrews, and the Phoenicians. But researchers are only now uncovering the origin story to our own alphabet, which may have gotten its beginnings in a turquoise mine 4,000 years ago. Egypt: the Saqqara funerary complex near Cairo. These round and semi-round elements are numerals. The original alphabet was developed by a Semitic people living in or near Egypt. So, anybody who saw that in ancient Mesopotamia would say, “Ah, barley.”. NARRATOR: The name of the goddess was the key to understanding the mysterious Serabit script. IRVING FINKEL: 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. It shows a big rectangle in the middle, which is separated into small rectangles; on the left and right of it there are zig zag lines. Greek Modification of the Phoenician Symbols, The Semitic Letters That Became Greek Vowels. It was rich deposits of the gemstone that brought regular mining expeditions to Serabit. The reins are being held by someone leading the way. February 10, 2021 . Additional funding is provided by the NOVA Science Trust. Ancient Egyptian life was largely confined to this narrow strip of green; the desert highlands on either side were where the dead were buried. ThoughtCo. ORLY GOLDWASSER: And this is the great invention: this is the alphabet. YASMIN EL SHAZLY: Yes, these are all magic spells, designed to resurrect the king so he could live forever in the afterlife. … The first complete alphabet in world history is the Greek alphabet, as it emerged around the start of Ancient Greece, roughly 800 BCE. He wants the name of the goddess, because if his theory is correct, he has “the beloved of….” The beloved of whom? The first line of the Iliad in the same abbreviated form is unrecognizable: Powell attributes the Greek invention of the first real alphabet to the need for vowels to transcribe the meter (dactylic hexameters) of the great epics, Iliad and Odyssey, attributed to Homer and the works of Hesiod. As the alphabet plays such an important role in our world today, one might expect that this writing system has existed since the dawn of civilization. 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 beauty of our present alphabet began to take shape. Take your bread that rots not, your beer that sours not. And it was in the mine workings that the Petries made another discovery. IRVING FINKEL: When you scrutinize what happened, it is actually very dramatic in one important sense, what we like to call in our department the “giant leap for mankind.”. This is the original Alphabet ABC Song by Have Fun Teaching. Human there. PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The first person to really work on the site was the great English archaeologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie, whose first dig here in Serabit El-Khadim, was in 1905. PIERRE TALLET: (Translated from French) The basic principle of the alphabet, which is, in the end, a much simpler writing system, made writing much more accessible to a larger number of people. IRVING FINKEL: It’s drawn, quite recognizably, as a pictographic sign. there was the crucial conceptual leap. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/a-to-z-the-first-alphabet NARRATOR: So, 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. It all links up. GÜNTER DREYER: (Translated from German) The palette conveys a historical event, the victory of King Narmer over Lower Egypt, the Delta people. (2020, August 26). National corporate funding for NOVA is provided by Draper. What do you think it is? He was in the mud, now he’s in the rock. ORLY GOLDWASSER: Yeah. The Greek alphabet originally had only 5 vowels; the additional, long ones were added over time. A to Z: The First Alphabet. There is no linking or other HTML allowed. So, they think of the method of rebus, rebus principle. This site may not be as famous as the pyramids, but it holds far greater significance for our history. When I started to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs, I could feel that: so many similarities. * They based it on the idea developed by the Egyptians, but used their own specific symbols. Beginning in ancient Egypt, A TO Z: "The First Alphabet" explores some of the first known scribes, and how they discovered that by recording names and histories, it … So, writing binds humanity together, practically more than any other activity. The first alphabet emerged among Semitic speaking mercenaries in Egyptian service for managing their warfare and economic activities. And thousands of tablets like this one suggest that the reason for moving beyond a purely oral culture was something utterly prosaic: the need to keep ledgers. What Are the Letters of the Greek Alphabet? CHINESE PUPILS: (Translated from Chinese) A fish! They could immediately relate to it because this was the head of their own god Baal. The beginnings of the first alphabet’s family tree are shrouded in mystery. NOVA: Beyond the Elements: Life. And I believe that this is a representation of Egypt. Vocabulary for ESL learners and teachers. Origin of the Word "Alphabet". And everybody makes puns, and puns are a natural human form of humor.