Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?
Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?
Up with the Sea Peoples, down with the Phoenicians.
(“Who Put the Alphabet in Alphabetical Order?” is a They Might Be Giants kids’ song.)
As I discuss further in my post on Moses and the Bible, the Amorites were a branch of the Northwest Semitic ethnolinguistic family (the other branch being the Aramaeo-Canaanites). Amorite rulers were the top dogs in the Fertile Crescent during the Middle Bronze Age (~1900-1600 BCE), and one little Amorite dynasty in particular, ruling from the coastal city of Byblos, formed a close bond with the Egyptian state. These Amorites adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs for use with with their Northwest Semitic language, creating the earliest form of the alphabet (called Early Alphabetic or Proto-Sinaitic). This 27-letter alphabet, which represented only consonants, spread throughout the Amorite petty kingdoms of the Levant. I speculate that it made its way from Amorite-ruled Damascus down the King’s Highway and into the Arabian peninsula, where it gave rise to the Ancient North Arabian and Ancient South Arabian script families.1
I was surprised to learn that, at this point in history, there existed two “alphabetical” orders. One started with ʾ-B-G-D, the ancestor of our familiar A-B-C-D. (The ʾ symbol represents a glottal stop.) The other started with H-L-Ḥ-M. (Ḥ represents the “voiceless pharyngeal fricative,” or so I’m told.) As late as the 1400s BCE, both alphabetical orders were apparently still considered valid and worth learning in the Levant.2 The Ancient North Arabian script family (now extinct) also preserved both orders,3 but Ancient South Arabian settled on H-L-Ḥ-M alone. To this day, the Horn of Africa’s Geʽez and Amharic scripts (derived from Ancient South Arabian) still use “Halaḥam” order!
Anyway, back in the Levant, the Middle Bronze Age Amorite-speaking rulers, probably through some mixture of being defeated in battle and being culturally assimilated, gave way to Late Bronze Age Canaanite-speaking rulers. By the time of the Amarna letters (~1350 BCE), all of Egypt’s Levantine vassal kings, or at least their scribes, seemed to speak Canaanite. The scribes streamlined the Amorite alphabet into a new 22-letter form that suited the Canaanite dialect continuum.4 Byblos remained the most important scribal center,5 but it’s a bit anachronistic to think of this as a “Phoenician” city, as it would later become. The Phoenicians were indeed just a flavor of Canaanite, but the long-distance sea voyages associated with the Phoenician brand were, at this point, still several centuries in the future. So we can more accurately characterize the early 22-consonant alphabet as “Canaanite,” not “Phoenician.”
Unfortunately, not much early alphabetic writing survives, probably because its main substrate was perishable material like papyrus, wood, and leaves. Nonetheless, it’s clear that, at this stage, both the details of the letter forms and even the direction of the writing (right to left, left to right, boustrophedon, vertical…) varied widely across scribes and places.
Non-alphabetic writing systems seem so strange and unwieldy to alphabet lifers like myself that we might imagine that, once the alphabet emerged, it quickly outcompeted other scripts. But this didn’t happen. Writers of Egyptian (and Luwian) kept using hieroglyphs; writers of Akkadian and Hittite kept using cuneiform; writers of Greek kept using Linear B. For roughly 700 years (~1850 to 1150 BCE), the alphabet was limited to the Central Semitic languages of the Levant and Arabia.
That began to change thanks, I think, to our old friends the Sea Peoples (and the Ass Men). I’ve argued that the leaders of the Sea Peoples were Greek-speakers who fled Crete amid the destruction of the Mycenaean state system. That destruction put an end to Linear B. But, when some of the Sea Peoples established the kingdom of Hiyawa6 in the southeastern Anatolian region of Cilicia, they would have remembered the good old days.
Based on later Phoenician-language inscriptions in Hiyawa, it’s clear that the descendants of the Sea Peoples had contact with Phoenicians, but, following Willemijn Waal,7 I suspect that contact with the Canaanite alphabet started early, before the Phoenician variant became standardized. In this scenario, Greek-speaking Hiyawan elites recruited Canaanite scribes, who repurposed signs for non-Greek consonants as signs for vowels (which the Linear B syllabic script had always had but which the Semitic alphabet had heretofore lacked).
Thus the Canaanite consonant letter ʾālep took on the a sound, he took on the e sound, yod took on the i sound, and ʿayin took on the o sound. With u, the situation was a bit more complicated: the Canaanite letter waw represented the w sound, which Greek also used, but which has a phonetic affinity with the u vowel sound. So the scribes duplicated waw, with one copy (modified in shape but keeping the same name) continuing to represent the w sound and the other copy, added at the end of the alphabet, representing the u sound.
By some definitions, an alphabet is only a true alphabet (and not a mere abjad) if it represents both consonants and vowels. So we can say that the first true alphabet was linguistically Greek, in line with conventional wisdom — but it was geographically Anatolian. This helps to explain why the now defunct Phrygian (Ass Man!) alphabet is so similar to the Greek alphabet: both descend from the early 23-letter Hiyawan alphabet, which spread out of Cilicia both northward into central Anatolia (where the Phrygians lived8) and westward along the southern Anatolian coast into the Aegean (where “regular” Greeks lived). In Greece proper, the alphabet fragmented into various “epichoric” forms, one of which was adopted by the Etruscans in Italy and ultimately gave rise to the Latin alphabet on my keyboard.
If the Phoenicians (sensu stricto) didn’t play much of a role in the origin and spread of the alphabet, then why did the ancient Greeks think they did, going back at least as far as Herodotus? Well, not all of them did. I’m persuaded by the case made in a delightful recent article by the aforementioned Willemijn Waal that the Phoenician theory stemmed from a misinterpretation of an inherited term, phoinikeia grammata. Herodotus and others read it as “Phoenician letters” and took it to mean the alphabet, which therefore must have come from the Phoenicians. But it could also be interpreted as palm-leaf writing, and some ancient Greeks did read it this way. (The same Greek word, φοῖνιξ, can mean Phoenician, purple, or date palm, among other things.) “Palm-leaf writing” probably referred to pre-alphabetic, Late Bronze Age texts written in Linear A and Linear B on palm leaves. (There’s a specific species of date palm, Phoenix theophrasti, that grows mainly in Crete, and Linear B, used to write Greek, was adapted from Linear A, used to write the non-Indo-European “Minoan” language, likely by people on Crete.9) Modern scholars call the most common type of Linear B clay tablet the “palm-leaf tablet” because of its shape, which might have harked back to leaf texts that have long since decayed.
In fairness to the Phoenicians, there’s at least one place to which they did bring the alphabet: Iberia. There, the Celtic-speaking Tartessian culture, which traded heavily with the Phoenicians, transformed the Phoenician alphabetic model into the first of the “Paleohispanic” scripts.10 But these scripts didn’t survive Roman conquest — much like the Phoenicians themselves!
Postscript: A Worked Example
So, for example, an Egyptian hieroglyph of a head
became the Early Alphabetic letter
which represented the r sound at the beginning of the Amorite word for “head.” The letter was simplified way down to something like 𐩧 in the proto-Arabian alphabet and something like 𐤓 in its sister Canaanite alphabet. That Canaanite form was transmitted to the Hiyawan alphabet, leading to the Greek letter rho (Ρ), which sprouted a leg in the Latin alphabet and became R. Cute, right?
Note that the modern Arabic script descends from neither Ancient Arabian script family; instead, it goes back to Aramaic.
See Schneider 2018, “A Double Abecedary? Halaḥam and ʾAbgad on the TT99 Ostracon.” The ostracon in question comes from Egypt, but I’d still bet it reflects contemporary scribal culture in the Levant.
Lehmann 2012, “27–30–22–26 — How Many Letters Needs an Alphabet? The Case of Semitic,” p. 27, n. 23: “there seems to be a certain ‘zone of uncertainty’ in the Ancient North Arabian, where letter inventories or abecedaries are found in (modified) Abgad, Halaḥama or simple order by graphic shape.”
Lehmann 2012: “The Levantine Northwest Semitic languages display such an enormous number of lexical isoglosses, which all too often differ from a graphemic point of view only, that the major requirement was not for a supra-regional standard language. Rather, it deserved a graphemic system that was able to blur the articulation and pronunciation differences for the purpose of East-Mediterranean and Levantine mercantile affairs, a scriptio franca.”
As shown by the painstaking work of Vita 2015, Canaanite Scribes in the Amarna Letters. After Byblos, the top homelands for the scribes who wrote the Amarna letters were Amurru and Mušiḫuna, which were in present-day Syria, not “Phoenicia.” (To be clear, the Amarna letters were rendered in cuneiform, not an alphabetic script, but it seems plausible that professional scribes mastered multiple writing systems.)
The Phrygian alphabet later gave rise to the Lydian and, probably, Carian and Sidetic alphabets of Anatolia. See Adiego 2018, “Local Adaptations of the Alphabet among the Non-Greek Peoples of Anatolia,” and Oreshko 2022, “The Rare Letters of the Phrygian Alphabet revisited” (noting that the Phrygian “arrow letter” has counterparts with “(nearly) identical shape and comparable phonetic values in three other Anatolian alphabets: Lydian, Carian and Sidetic”).
See Nash 2021, reviewing Salgarella 2020, Aegean linear scripts: rethinking the relationship between Linear A and Linear B (“Salgarella’s work contributes to the growing consensus that LB was developed on Crete”).
Whether the Tartessians were Celtic-speaking and where exactly the Paleohispanic scripts came from are still disputed, but I’m following my gut and De Hoz 2018, “The Southwestern Palaeo-Hispanic Script: State of Knowledge, Hypotheses and Controversies.”