Shropshire Routes to Roots

2. The alphabet evolves?

Middle-East influences

The ruler of a large domain may have felt that he was so important that everyone should know of his greatness - forever. The Egyptian pharaohs certainly did, and they built monuments such as the pyramids, as well as giant statutes of themselves. But what use is a statue, if nobody knows who it is of? Fortunately for the pharaohs, their culture had produced a form of writing, as had other cultures of the time, using pictures to represent the sounds of the language. It therefore became possible to record the deeds as well as the images of past rulers.

The letter 'a'

This is a simple example of how one letter, the letter 'a', evolved. The original idea was for the picture to represent the name of the letter. So if the letter was called, "alef" (The Egyptian eagle) then the picture should be an eagle. It could be displayed as a wall painting or as a hieroglyphic (written version) or as an even shorter version called an 'Hieratic' symbol.

Egyptian Alef bird Larger image, in a new window [10kb] [Reproduced with kind permission of Johnnie Atherton]

Alef hieroglyphic Larger image, in a new window [6kb] [Reproduced with kind permission of Johnnie Atherton]

Alef hieratic Larger image, in a new window [5kb] [Reproduced with kind permission of Johnnie Atherton]

It is amazing that the shape of the heiratic alef is almost the same as a modern 'a'. It is one of the most enduring symbols of past times.

Other alphabets

Other alphabets, similarly based upon the pictorial representation of sounds, were developed across the Middle East at this time. It was not long, however, before pictures changed into symbolic representations and gradually into pure symbols, where the actual mark made had little relevance to its original source - an alphabet.

One of the major causes of alphabet change was the surface (opens in a new window) upon which the writing was made.

Although the word "alphabet" has been used for simplicity, the first true alphabet that might be recognised today, was the Semitic Alphabet circa 1700 B.C., followed by the Phoenician alphabet circa 1000 B.C. There is then a direct line through the Greeks and the Etruscans to the Romans. At this point the alphabet we know today was almost in its final form.

Continue

Return to top of page