Invention of the alphabet: a non-institutional cultural product by illiterate Canaanite miners

Invention of alphabets...

Pharaoh's Land and Beyond: Ancient Egypt and Its Neighbors. Edited by Pearce Paul Creasman, Richard H. Wilkinson. Chapter XI, The Flow of Words: Interaction in Writing and Literature during the  Bronze Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0190229092

The high iconicity of the hieroglyphic script again played a key role on the stage of intellectual history at another crossroad of Egyptian and Levantine cultures. […]

Unlike the case of the Minoan and Anatolian scripts, the invention of the alphabet was not born in the environment of erudite scribes, but was apparently created as a non-institutional cultural product by illiterate Canaanite miners. Though they were experts in their professional field of mining, the inventors of the alphabet were far removed from the circles of professional writing in cuneiform and Egyptian. It is precisely this naïveté that allowed them to invent something completely new, as they were unencumbered by the scripts of their day. They were able to think outside the box, inventing a novel writing system--an alphabetic script made of fewer of thirty signs.

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Like the inventors of the Cretan and Anatolian hieroglyphs, the Canaanites borrowed the Egyptian idea of turning pictures into script. Yet, not being professional scribes and not working in the service of any official ideology or institution, they did not bother to invent a whole set of new icons. They adopted roughly two dozen icons from the hieroglyphs around them--those that they found useful for their own purposes--and added a few new signs of their own.


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