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Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
Inventing the Alphabet | The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK AND Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR
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By Johanna Drucker
“Inventing the Alphabet” is a comprehensive intellectual history of alphabet studies. The book provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker, the inaugural Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, chronicles the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been “invented” as an object of scholarship.
Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history.
Drucker aims to dispel the misconceptions surrounding the existence of more than one alphabet—the myriad of letter forms throughout the world are actually considered as script—as well as the links between the original alphabet that was created around 1700 BCE and the alphanumeric notation that provides the infrastructure for the internet.
Ed&IS: Why is the alphabet such an important invention?
Johanna Drucker: The one thing that is important for people to understand is that the alphabet was only invented once, in the ancient Near East, in a cultural exchange between cuneiform writing in the north and hieroglyphic writing in the south and amongst speakers of Semitic languages, sometime around 1700 to 1400 BCE.
When people think about different alphabets they’ll say, “Like Arabic? That can’t be the same as our alphabet, right?” They are confusing alphabet and script. Script is the different letter forms. If you think about Cyrillic writing for Russian, that’s a script. But the sequence of letters, the names of letters, and what we call the powers of letters—that is, the sound that’s associated with them—are the same across all alphabetic scripts.
The first letter in Arabic [script] is the alif, and that is the same as the alef [in Hebrew] which is the same as the “a.” The letters look really different. Part of that has to do with the way that the letter forms are made, what the technologies were, and so forth, and also, modifications over time. But there is only one alphabet.
What is mindboggling to me is that the alphabet that was invented around 1700 BCE undergirds the entire global communication system of the internet. That gives me chills. Alphanumeric notation—and that does include the Arabic numerals which were a later invention—that is what global communication depends on.
Ed&IS: How does the book address the alphabet from a global variety of cultures and traditions?
Drucker: It’s such an important point, because of the confusion between alphabet and script. You know what a pair of pants is. You know it can be loose and wide-legged, it can be as tight as skin, it can buckle at the knees, it can go up to your waist or hang on your hips. So, think about scripts as style, and think about the letters as the set of categories of things.
If I’m using the clothing analogy to get someone dressed, I might want to know how many categories I need. I might have headgear or what is worn on the torso, you can make the classification any number of things. You might use more vernacular: shirts, hats, underwear, pants, socks, shoes, right? If you wanted to dress somebody as an 18th Century buccaneer, those categories would be linked to a library, and what would come onstage would be the buccaneer who is dressed in this kind of pants, this kind of socks, this kind of shoes. So, the scripts are styles of letters.
Now, some scripts have more characters, and some scripts have less. Again, that has to do with adaptations that are necessary for different languages. Some languages have different sounds and one of the amazing things about the alphabet and its creation is that it depends upon the capacity to distinguish sounds in speech, knowing how many there are, and which ones are meaningful.
To me, this is an amazing intellectual achievement. If I said to you, “As a speaker, you know nothing about linguistics. I want you to analyze English as you use it and tell me how many sounds there are.” You couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. Could you, listening to a native Japanese speaker, know how many sounds there were in that language that are meaningful? So, what happens in the ancient Near East around 1700 BCE is that there is a sufficient understanding of the sound structure of language to begin to make a set of signs to represent those sounds.
This is why the history of the alphabet ends with Unicode, because Unicode is a meta-level description of the number of kinds of things (glyphs, not sounds, in this case) that you need to distinguish, in order to register any script for communication. It’s an information issue [that] gets really fascinating because Unicode inventories libraries of scripts.
Ed&IS: How do magical and angelic alphabets relate to an understanding of the more commonly recognizable alphabets?
Drucker: This is such a fascinating subcategory. There are a lot of script forms that we think first emerged around the beginning of the Common Era that were used for incantations. And when the ancient Near East was beginning to be excavated by people like Henry Layard and other explorers, in the ruins of Nineveh and ancient Assyrian palaces and libraries they find incantation bowls [with] really interesting signs on them that are not associated necessarily with the actual alphabet. And then, it turns out they kind of are.
They’re magical alphabets called ring letters. Imagine if you had the letter “A” and on its feet you had open circles, and on its top too. It turns out that these ring letters are associated with magical properties, and by the Middle Ages, there’s a whole mythology that says these ring letters are actually copied from constellations of stars which shows that the origin of letters was a gift from God, because these are natural signs in the heavens that have been used as the basis of letters.
And then there are all kinds of alphabets that have idiosyncratic histories. There’s one called Adam’s Alphabet and it was supposedly given to Adam by God. One is associated with Noah. One was supposedly given to Abraham by the Angel Raphael as he entered Canaan.
There is a very limited set of these magical and angelic alphabets. They have a stable graphic form, but they’re never used for writing texts, so they exist as exemplars. This is incredible because most of what we know about scripts comes from the fact that they are in use for documents, labels, texts, and inscriptions. Imagine that you have a set of 26 or 28 signs and they stay stable across hundreds of years just transmitted as images. These magical and angelic alphabets just get passed down as visual graphic examples.
The ring letters are really part of Jewish Kabbalah tradition and they show up in that particular world. But the angelic alphabets show up in Christian cabala as well, and in medieval lore. There’s a mythic explorer named Aethicus Ister who supposedly traveled to the East and came back with this incredible alphabet that shows up in manuscripts all over Europe in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th Centuries. It showed up in Germany and in the British Isles, incredible.
Think about what it means to have had a copy of that in medieval Europe.
Ed&IS: How do you hope to open your readers’ eyes to the origins of the alphabet and the importance of this history?
Drucker: The book is also a history of knowledge [about] the alphabet. There are fantastic scholars of Semitic epigraphy, which is the study of inscriptions in Semitic languages, incredible archaeologists who recover remains [of language]. They can find some little scrap of ceramic that has one and a half signs on it, and they can identify the place, the date, the source of this particular pair of signs [to] help reorient the history of the alphabet. It’s like finding some little piece of DNA that says, “Between this chimp and this orangutan, there was this piece in between.”
Incredible scholarship, but what no one has done is to trace the intellectual history. In other words, it would be like if you studied the history of education and you knew that there were principles that had to do with child-centered education, child psychology, development, and learning abilities. You had all the principles of education, but you never heard of Paulo Freire, you never heard of John Dewey. It’s as if the knowledge of the field has been lifted out of its history.
What I’ve done is to go back and look at that whole, and all these intellectual lineages of knowledge, production and transmission. That’s why it took 40 years. The amount of research just finding the references is so intense that I had been tracking some of them for years and years and years. What I said to a friend earlier today was that when I found the two-volume work by Isaac Taylor from 1899 on the shelf in Doe Library at Berkeley titled “The Alphabet” I thought, “The one thing I want to do in my life as a scholar is to be sure that this intellectual lineage is brought forward to another generation, because it’s just all lost.”
Modern Archaeology: Putting the Evidence of the Alphabet in Place THE DISCOVERY OF THE SIDON INSCRIPTION
The first major Phoenician monument discovered on native soil was found near the ancient coastal city of Sidon, and it caused a popular and scholarly sensation. Before this, the only identifiable Phoenician inscriptions (besides a pair of inscribed pillars from Malta) were those on coins, the earliest of which might date to the fifth century BCE. But on February 22, 1855, Aimé Peretié, a diplomat attached to the French consulate to Beirut, was walking southeast of the site of the ancient coastal city of Sidon, apparently looking for signs of treasure in what he believed to be an ancient cemetery. Peretié’s attention was drawn to a disturbed area of rubble and debris. Investigation led him, and the workmen he had hired, through a series of shafts to underground chambers. Here they discovered royal tombs. While they did not come across gold or other treasure hoards, what they found was, arguably, infinitely more valuable. In what was later labeled Tomb V, they unearthed an intact sarcophagus carved in Egyptian style bearing a magnificent Canaanite (Semitic) language inscription written in the Phoenician script, now known to date to the fifth century BCE.
News spread that for the first time, a monument had been found in situ in the lands associated with the history to which the inscription would attest. This discovery provided evidence for a wide range of scholarly investigations—historical, philological, paleographic, and biblical. Accounts of the discovery spread quickly, and their details provide a picture of technologies of knowledge distribution in the mid-nineteenth century, as well as information the artifact provided about the alphabet.
American missionaries made hand-drawn copies of the inscription and sarcophagus on site. According to a contemporary account, one of these drawings was made by Dr. C. V. A. Van Dyck, a member of the Albany Institute (among the oldest museums in America), who was in Syria at the time. He immediately sent the drawing back to his colleagues in upstate New York. Another copy went to a scholar in London (M. le chevalier Bunsen) who passed it to a M. Dietrich, a scholar in Marburg with knowledge of Semitic languages. Other copies of the drawings were produced, and attempts at decipherment or translation followed immediately. However, since the inscriptions had been copied by hand by persons who had no familiarity with the unknown script, they proved to be flawed, hampering attempts at accurate analysis (some of the characters were illegible).
In April 1855, just a few months after the discovery, Van Dyck’s drawing was presented to the Albany Institute’s Society, and in May 1855, a translation of the inscription by Messrs. Salisbury and Gibbs was published in the New Haven Daily Palladium, one of many to follow.
Meanwhile, after quarrels with the English consul about ownership rights were resolved, the object was removed from the subterranean tomb near Sidon by the French. A contemporary witness described a ceremonial procession: a team of oxen pulled a cart bearing the weighty sarcophagus trimmed with flowers and palm leaves along a rocky route to a French vessel, La Sérieuse. The entire population of the city turned out to watch and cheer its progress. When the oxen failed in their efforts to keep the cart moving along a sandy track, the stalwart sailors of the French navy lent their physical strength and spirit to the undertaking. The object, carefully swaddled and protected, was loaded onto the ship, which set sail for France. Attributing a “Phoenician” identity to the artifact was (and arguably still is) an act of colonial appropriation. The term is anachronistic, “an heirloom of Western reception” from classical antiquity, since there is no record of any entity (“ethnic, political, or national”) “that understood or labelled itself Phoenicia.” However, the term has become ubiquitous in the literature to identify the region, the people, and the script. It will be used here—though it should be remembered that like all nomenclature for geographical regions, peoples, and languages, it has a complex history.
In August 1855 came the announcement that the noble and very wealthy French antiquarian Monsieur le Duc de Luynes had acquired the object and was donating it to the Louvre. Luynes created squeezes from the inscription and published the results, along with a translation of the text transcribed in Hebrew letters. This technique provided more accurate images than the drawings of the American missionaries, and on the basis of these improved facsimiles, new translations were produced. The sarcophagus and its inscription spawned a rapid flurry of publications. In an 1856 account, published barely a year after the discovery, the Abbé J. J. L. Bargès summarized the many responses the inscription had provoked. They are telling for their desire to situate the object within biblical historical periods rather than the modern ones then emerging:
The discovery of the Phoenician inscription made in Sidon, in the heart of ancient Phoenicia, had already caused a great sensation in the scholarly world; everyone was impatient for the decipherment of the epigraph, which contained around a thousand characters. Some believed it was contemporary with Moses; others dated it to the time of Abraham; yet others, braver still, assigned it to an era before the universal Flood, certain that it had been the threat of the cataclysm threatening to swallow the globe and all of its inhabitants that had caused the king mentioned in the inscription to have this sarcophagus carved in basalt, an extremely hard stone, before he died and to place it in a tomb cut from the living rock two meters below the surface of the earth.
By 1859, nearly a dozen different translations had been produced and circulated widely enough that a scholar named William Turner could inventory each author’s reading of every glyph and sign in the inscription. In his inventory, Turner noted 324 individual variants of the twenty-two letters in the Phoenician inscription, pointing out where the reading of the text depended on careful (and debatable) understanding of the glyphs. The text furnished precious information on the language spoken by the Phoenicians about 500 BCE, and no inscription of any length in this tongue had ever been found before. Turner stated that the writing was “traced by a firm hand, trained and skilled” except for the first few lines which “showed some inexperience of the engraver with the tool.” Indeed, the inscription shows a mature state of the letterforms, highly standardized, their right-to-left direction and regular angles, size, and orientation expertly executed. The text was a funerary inscription for King Eshmunazar II warning ordinary and royal persons alike not to disturb the coffin of the dead king and threatening misfortune should they do so.
Turner made an attempt to date the inscription through a combination of historical and paleographic evidence, comparing the state of the writing with other inscriptions, particularly some recorded by Richard Pococke in Cyprus in 1743 and inscriptions found at “Marseilles, Carthage, Citium, Malta, Athens, and most of the coins of Phoenicia and the neighboring regions to the north.” The chief point of this discussion was to emphasize the significance of the inscription’s having been found in “Phoenicia proper.”
Turner characterized the Phoenician language as close to biblical Hebrew and therefore useful as “a direct contribution towards elucidating the language of the Hebrew Scriptures.” The term biblical Hebrew designates an archaic branch of the Canaanite Semitic language in use by the tenth century BCE. He noted the absence of the matres lectionis (“mothers of reading”) and other details in the inscription’s orthography. Like the other scholars involved in these translations, Turner had not seen the original artifact, only the various reproductions of its inscription. But his work showed how rapidly epigraphic methods and historical analysis could advance given such a rich piece of evidence.
This first discovery of a Phoenician inscription in situ merits considerable attention because it profoundly changed historical knowledge and inquiry. Successive discoveries built a more complete picture of the history of the kings of Sidon, and with each new inscription, the inventory of letterforms increased along with the capacity of scholars to identify even the smallest variations among them. Meanwhile, other major discoveries shifted the geographic focus in exciting ways—to the ancient kingdom of Moab and to that most significant city, Jerusalem.
