The alphabet
Semitic workers in Egypt adapt a handful of hieroglyphs into signs for sounds.
- When
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Bronze Age, Holocene
Inscriptions at Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai and at Wadi el-Hol in Egypt, from around 1800 BCE, use a small set of signs derived from hieroglyphs but applied on the acrophonic principle — a picture of a house, bayt, stands for the sound b. That reduces writing from hundreds of signs to about two dozen, and puts literacy within reach of people who are not professional scribes. Every alphabet in use today, from Latin to Arabic to Devanagari, descends from this one.