This Is Where the First Alphabet Was Born - NOVA - PBS

This is one of the tech boys mines and if you look all over the walls there are these scratches from where the workers pickaxes have been. But here something else is going on. There are about 30 or 40 of them all over this place. Some of these have been copied from hieroglyphics but some are completely new and here's how the system works. You take the symbol and you say the name but you only take the first sound and you discard the rest. So for example this here, this is an ox. You can see the horns and the head here. To the miners this would be Alif. Now Alif just take the first sound and discard the rest. This is another symbol. This is a symbol for house. To them it would be bait. So you just take the bear sound at the beginning and if you put these two together you start understanding what you're actually looking at here. This is the birth place of the alphabet. This new script was simpler to learn than hieroglyphics because the alphabet did not represent complete words but spoken sounds. It was able to convey any thought with These miners are the ones who gave birth to this and their legacy is still with us today and is so important. In the centuries and millennia that followed, nearly all the early written languages fell into obscurity as those civilizations waned. But this alphabet would only grow, spreading across the planet, reshaping and branching into many different forms. It now forms the basis of most known written languages, allowing millions and then billions of ordinary humans to access knowledge, to communicate and to document their thoughts and their existence in every corner of the globe. For me this is one of the most powerful moments in the human story because unbeknownst to the underdog, they had changed the world. One of civilization's most profound and revolutionary ideas didn't come from an educated elite. It came from inside these dark and miserable minds through the copying and innovating of lowly migrant workers.