Egyptologists discover earlier Example of Alphabet
Egypt, History, 11/16/1999

On the track of an ancient road in the desert west of the Nile, where soldiers, couriers and traders once traveled from Thebes to Abydos, Egyptologists have found inscriptions in limestone that they say are the earliest known examples of alphabetic writing.

Their discovery is expected to help fix the time and place for the origin of the alphabet, one of the foremost innovations of civilization. Carved in the cliffs of soft stone, the writing, in a Semitic script with Egyptian influences, has been dated to somewhere between 1900 and 1800 B.C.. two or three centuries earlier than previously recognized uses of a nascent alphabet.

Although the two inscriptions have yet to be translated, other evidence at the discovery site supports the idea of the alphabet as an invention by workaday people that simplified and democratized writing, freeing it from the elite hands of official scribes.

As such, alphabetic writing was revolutionary in a sense comparable to the invention of the printing press much later. Alphabetic writing emerged as a kind of shorthand by which fewer than 30 symbols, each one representing a single sound, could be combined to form words for a wide variety of ideas and things. This eventually replaced writing systems like Egyptian to be mastered.

"These are the earliest alphabetic inscriptions, considerably earlier than anyone had thought likely," said John Coleman Darnell, an Egyptologist at Yale university "They seem to provide us with evidence to tell us when the alphabet itself was invented, and just how ." Mr. Darnell and his wife, Deborah, a doctoral student in Egyptology, made the find while conducting a survey of ancient travel routes in the desert of southern Egypt, across from the royal city of Thebes and beyond the pharaohs' tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

In the 1993-94 season, they came upon walls of limestone marked with graffiti at the forlorn Wadi el-Hol, roughly translated as "Gulch of Terror." The Darnells returned to the Wadi with several specialists in early writing.

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