Hidden History: The Alphabet's Egyptian Roots | Parable Full Episode

I think it's very nice to know your alphabet. The alphabet, a small collection of symbols that represent the sounds of language. In English, for example, 26 letters stand for some 500,000 words. It's arguably one of the most powerful tools available to man. Without it, and without its invention some 3,500 years ago, communication, knowledge, one might say civilization itself as we know it would not exist. And it was invented only once. Every modern alphabet from Arabic to Spanish to French evolved from the original invention. So, is there an archaeological big bang, a decisive time and place where it can be shown to have been first invented? Man has played many parts during the years Before the alphabet, our ancestors used pictures to tell stories of a battle or a hunt. It was the Egyptians who advanced picture writing into a complex system called hieroglyphics. Made up of more than 700 symbols, hieroglyphics took too long to learn and could only be read by the elite, a small group of kings, priests and scribes. David Sachs is a writer and a journalist from Ottawa. In his book, Letter Perfect, he traces the evolution of letters backwards to the roots of Egyptian hieroglyphics. I met with him in Toronto where he explained how the transition first began. Hieroglyphics used pictures of objects used in various ways. And we believe the earliest alphabet borrowed some of these pictures and turned them into letters. And the letters, in many cases, evolved to become the letter shapes we know today. So here we have an eye with an eyeball. An eye with an eyeball as an Egyptian hieroglyph. And later, in around 1750 B.C., it shows up in alphabetic writing as much the same shape, a little more roughly rendered. But by about 1000 B.C., it shows up in alphabetic writing like that. Just the eyeball. Letter O. O is for orangutan, and that's what Andy is, of course. Now, if there had been a guy like me 2,000, 3,000 years ago, he would have added to this, this, and mixed up the entire course of human history. Would be totally different. All the graffiti artists would be writing. The tattoos would be different. Everything would be different because we wouldn't have an O that looked like an eyeball. The O would look like a fish. Yes, good thing you weren't there. I wasn't there. What does E stand for? Why, E is for these playful young African elephants. So where are we? We're at the E. It's striking. In the earliest alphabetic writing, the E letter shows up as the image of a stick man with holding his hands in the air and sort of jumping up. It's actually striking. He's standing like, this is a stick man. It looks like a Keith Haring cartoon. He's standing like this, jumping up in the air, and you just look like an E doing that. You look very much like an E. Talk it over with your physical education instructor or your doctor. So this man with his head and his hands up, rotate it sideways and you've got your modern E. That's exactly right. Like letters in a bowl of alphabet soup or cereal, be a letter perfect pedestrian. The evolution of those letters made it easy for any language in the world to adopt an alphabetic system. Today, 4.8 billion people across the globe use letters to express themselves and create written works of science, imagination, and faith. I hooked up with Skam, a Toronto graffiti artist who tells me how he relies on the alphabet. Graffiti is about lettering? Graffiti is about lettering. You have to know how to do lettering before you go on anywhere else. You develop your own lettering style? Exactly. Everyone has their own style. This is your tag? That's called a throw-up. That's called a what? A throw-up. This is your throw-up. It's not a vomit kind of thing. Well, sort of, you know what I mean? Yeah, because essentially you're just throwing it up fast. It's in between a tag and a piece. There's three elements. The first element is a tag. Obviously it's a signature. Tag is just a signature? Tag is just a signature. This is how I tag my name. Oh, that's a tag. That's a tag. Cool, that's Skam. And then there's something like this, which is a stylized bubble letters. An example of my throw-up, okay? And then you go on to the masterpiece. Tag, throw-up, masterpiece. Here's a piece of mine. That's a masterpiece of mine. That's your masterpiece? Yeah. It is a masterpiece. It's beautiful. I love it. And it's all made up of letters, eh? It's all letters, but it's stylized. The letter has evolved, right? It's totally evolved. It's personal style. You know, everyone has their own style. So the letters keep changing? The letters keep changing, but there's also foundation to it. You can rotate it. You can inflate it. You can rotate it. You can do anything you want to it. It's just whatever you personally feel. But do you know where the alphabet started? I think Greek. That's what the Greeks would like you to know. You know? No. They added vowels. Okay. Cool? I learn something every day. The modern alphabet has come down to us from the Greeks, but they merely added the vowels. Before the Greeks, the alphabet was made up only of consonants, with the vowel sounds implied by the context. Scholars say that the Greeks got their alphabet from the ancient Phoenicians, who got theirs from the Canaanites, a Hebrew-speaking Semitic people who lived in what is now modern Israel. So who invented the alphabet? The Greeks or the Semites? I met up with John Darnell, an archaeologist from Yale University, who tells me that the Greek invention of the vowel has caused misunderstandings about where the alphabet actually came from. Arguments with the classical world usually revolve around the vowel. And that's one of those things where you can say, okay, we got the alphabet without the vowel. You did the alphabet with the vowel. So we can each claim something and leave it at that. Personally, I think those vowels, I mean, to me, it's like people who can't remember vowels have to put them in. I mean, come on. You know, who needs the vowels unless you're kind of a slow reader? So I wouldn't be proud of inventing the vowels. It's like saying I count with my finger. Yeah, the vowels are just the icing on the alphabetic cake anyway. I don't even regard it as that. I see it as a step backward, a big step backward. So you can't give too much credit to the Greeks. And personally, I also don't think it was the Canaanites who invented the alphabet. The Canaanites were big into phallic symbols and fertility goddesses and used them everywhere. If they invented our alphabet, why do none of the modern letters look like human sexual organs? I asked author David Sachs why Canaanites routinely get the credit for inventing the alphabet, given that our letters are devoid of sexual symbolism. Isn't it significant in the Canaanites world, phallic symbols, it's true, it's true. Phallic symbols, goddesses, fertility goddesses, they were like everywhere. How come they're not in the alphabet? I've seen French postcards where they are. Yes, but the original alphabet, no. They're using fences, pegs, no fertility goddesses, no phallic symbols, how do you explain that? I'm not sure I can. I'm just saying that I think it's significant that they're not there, which would lead me to think that maybe it wasn't a Canaanite thing, but an Israelite thing. Oh, because the Israelites didn't like... In fact, the latest archeology suggests that the alphabet was invented not in Canaan, but in Egypt, not by Egyptians, but by Semites, maybe the biblical Israelites. And what we think happened is that someone from the outside, a member of the underclass who was a Semite, he might've been a mercenary soldier or a skilled laborer or even a slave, perhaps a prisoner of war. He looked at this hieroglyphic system and he said, why don't we just use 25 or so symbols to mean precise sounds for our speech, Semitic. The first Semitic inventors of the alphabet had their own language, different from Egyptian. And so when they saw an Egyptian picture such as ox, they called it the Semitic word for ox, which is aluf. Later this alif became the letter alpha and was assigned the sound ah. Over time, the shape of the ox changed, but eventually alif and beth, the Semitic word for house became alpha and beta, the first two letters of our modern alphabet. The archeology suggests that the alphabet traveled from Egypt into the Sinai desert and finally to the biblical promised land, modern Israel. This route sounds extraordinarily familiar. You'll remember in the biblical story, Moses leads a revolution, a mass exodus of Israelite slaves out of Egypt and into the desert around 1300 or 1400 BC. Is it possible that the spread of the alphabet has something to do with the movement of the Israelites from Egypt to the promised land and beyond? I find it very interesting that if you look at the oldest alphabetic writings, it's Semitic people inventing the alphabet in Egypt. And if you trace it, like Hansel and Gretel, the oldest alphabetic writings, you go into the Sinai and end up in Canaan, a kind of familiar route to anybody who studied the exodus. It's a heck of a coincidence. You know, the archeology suggests that the skill of writing radiated out from Egypt northward along the Levant, starting off, let's say, in what is now southern Israel and moving north to the Lebanon-Syria area. And you know, that looks a little bit like the path of the children of Israel. So if the alphabet followed the path of exodus, where was it born? And who was the first to pack it up and carry it on its journey? The baby's name is Moses. Well, the Bible says Moses hiked up Mount Sinai and was given the Ten Commandments, which were supposed to be carved in stone by the finger of the biblical god El. According to the Bible, the commandments were written in the script of God. This would explain how Moses communicated with so many slaves. He had access to a revolutionary new form of communication, the alphabet. So is there any archeological evidence of Hebrew slaves using the alphabet and praying to the biblical god El? In fact, there is, in the Valley of Terror. In 1994, John Darnell and his wife were tracking ancient Egyptian road systems through the Valley of Terror when they stumbled upon a large wall covered with inscriptions. Among them, he discovered two sets of early alphabetic writings. I asked him to describe his findings when I spoke to him in Toronto. These two are early alphabetic inscriptions. So this is the great, great, great, great granddaddy and mommy of our alphabets. As far as we know, at this point in time, yes. Couldn't someone look at that and say, wait a minute, alphabetic writing was introduced by Moses? Oh, that was probably an older idea. I don't understand why Darnell is avoiding the obvious, namely that the inscription he found corroborates the Bible. Instead, he concocts a theory that the inscriptions were carved not by Hebrew slaves, but by Semitic soldiers who may have been part of a military expedition led by an Egyptian general named Bebi. Bebi. His name is Bebi? Bebi. That's an Egyptian name. Maybe it's his nickname. Well, it's probably just his name. I think it sounds like a nickname. No, a lot of people name Bebi. You're my Bebi, that's why. Bebi is the boss. Bebi is the boss of these armors. So he's a kind of overseer over... Over these Western Semitic language speakers. He's a general. He's bossing them around. He doesn't like it if they say, yes, sir, that's my Bebi. Well, probably not. Why do you think they're a force? Well, because Emira Meshach, Meshach means force. It can be a group, it can be an army of soldiers. Laborers. It can be an expeditionary force of miners, whatever. Laborers. Laborers, whatever. Are you saying you're leaning more towards it's a military expedition instead of a workforce? Whatever it is, it's going to be organized along similar lines. So it's going to have a commander, it's going to have scribes. Couldn't an argument be made that this is some kind of archeological confirmation of the biblical story? And I'll tell you why. I mean, just as Mr. layperson, just listening to what you're saying. The Bible tells us that there are West Semites that eventually become called Israelites. They're laborers. They've got these Egyptian overseers. And what you're telling me is there's a guy named Bebi, he's an Egyptian, he's an overseer, and he's got this workforce under him. Isn't there here some kind of synchronicity between the two tales? The tale that you find on these walls and the tale that we read in the Bible? Is that controversial? Not controversial, but the development of the alphabet in military or paramilitary situation makes sense because this type of mixed hieratic hieroglyphic writing is what we find military scribes writing in these inscriptions. But I wasn't convinced by Darnell's explanation. The alphabet seems to be revolutionary, almost like a secret code designed for rebellion, like the Jamaican patois or the Brazilian capoeira. The alphabet could have been born out of a fight for freedom. Its very essence is a form of liberation, a kind of democratization of knowledge that would take the art of writing out of the hands of the elite and put it into the hands of any child who could remember 26 symbols. Historians as well as other scholars have long recognized that literacy is a democratic movement. That dictatorships, at least in ancient times, dictatorships often relied heavily on illiteracy among the underclass. So that what the alphabet did was it made reading and writing so simple that non-scholars could master it. So it was revolutionary. It was revolutionary, yes. It was one of these landmarks in history that opens up power to a wider group of people. Another interesting characteristic of the first alphabetic writing is that the word El appears. Although El has different meanings, it eventually becomes one of the words for God in the Bible. Incredibly, the inscriptions Darnell found in Egypt include the name of the biblical God. And still, Darnell sees no connection with the Bible. There's two inscriptions. There are two inscriptions. One of them says El. Again, as a lay person, I would say, isn't that the biblical God, or one of the names of the biblical God? That's probably a name for God, which relates to a general... It's not an Egyptian God. Well, I wouldn't relate these at all to the Israelites. Well, I'm just asking, it says El. They still say El in every synagogue. There's a synagogue around the corner that's still saying El. Well, do we have El, or do we have El in someone's name? Even if you have El in someone's name, like, you know, Yehi El, it still means El. Yeah, but then you get into the question of Huat El. I wouldn't use these as anything more, really, than just to say that we see that there are Semitic language speakers who are functioning in the Pharaonic world. In the world of Pharaoh. In the world of Pharaohs in Egypt, who are integrated into that world. So who are not living as outsiders, but who are in it, and have developed this alphabetic way of writing. And these guys are, in essence, that's we're seeing the big bang of alphabetic writing. I think you could say that. The more research I do about the alphabet's development, the more I see its connection to the story of the Exodus. So I've decided to travel to the Sinai Desert, where I've heard that there are several inscriptions that may prove that Hebrew slaves, not Semitic mercenaries, invented the alphabet. And that I'm right, and Professor Darnell is. Well, let's see. Today, most scholars follow Professor Darnell's theory, that the alphabetic inscriptions from Egypt's Valley of Terror were not made by Hebrew slaves, but by a military expedition of Semitic mercenaries. But everyone agrees that the inscriptions at Sarabit al-Khadim, here in the Sinai Desert, were made by slaves. Sarabit is off the beaten path. 100 years ago, alphabetic inscriptions were found in caves that were ancient turquoise mines, worked by slaves. I'm convinced that if we take a second look at these inscriptions, what we'll find is archaeological proof for the biblical story, and that it was Hebrew slaves, praying to the biblical God, that first used the alphabet. This is the temple right here. And where is the cave? The cave is right here. Okay, let's go. Finding the cave wasn't the easiest task. Even with local guides to direct us, we made a grueling trip through the Egyptian desert, only to wind up at the wrong cave. We doubled back and eventually found the right cave. Incredibly, the inscriptions in this cave do record the prayers of Hebrew-speaking slaves asking the biblical God to free them. This is the writing of a slave, a slave who worked in this mine. You can still see the chisel marks. And he wrote his cry to God saying, help me, don't forget me, here where he worked and he slept and he probably died. Here you see the inscription going this way and going this way. In those days you could write this way, sideways, backwards, upwards. It depends which way you started. You picked a spot and you just went in the other direction. And it represents an incredible moment in human history. Not only is it the first inscription that records the name of God, El, but it also records the oldest or maybe the second oldest alphabetic inscription. It's 3,500 years. I mean, it's pretty incredible that after all these years we would be here to record this man's cry. Whether the alphabet's invention has anything to do with the biblical exodus is still uncertain. But the inscriptions found here at Serebit do confirm that a Hebrew-speaking people who believed in one God were responsible for spreading the alphabet northwards from Egypt into the desert and into Israel. Ultimately, the Bible itself could be written in alphabetic script. I was in a cave in the Sinai desert. Slaves tagged the walls and they were saying, hi, I'm here, I exist. I think that's what it was. I think, I mean, as a graffiti artist too, I'm saying, you know, what can I do in this world that someone will know me eventually? They were calling out to God. Exactly. What's my life about? No one knows what we're about and where we're going. So I, you know, I want to do something and be remembered. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to infringe on the rules of the game, but you think I could try my hand in this? Would that be in like insulting the whole professional kind of thing? If you want to try. But I mean- Don't spray yourself. Do we need to watch, like, do we need a guard? No, I mean, everybody- You never know when those Egyptian overseers may come. Maybe I should do an N and an A because the naked archeologist. How's that? You know, I got to think now, what does my N look like? Everyone's got to start somewhere. I feel good about this. I'm going to give a traditional A, one of the first A, the bull's head. There it goes. And it says, hey, I'm here, the naked archeologist. I exist.