In Our Time - The Alphabet

Episode Date: December 18, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the feat of astonishing intellectual engineering which provides us with millions of words in hundreds of languages. At the start of the twentieth century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai peninsular, an archaeologist called Sir Flinders Petrie made an exciting discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script the Egyptian establishment had used for over 1000 years, but it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC, the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable: the Alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own.Did the alphabet really spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write, why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world? With Eleanor Robson, historian of Ancient Iraq and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford; Alan Millard, Rankin Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Ancient Semitic Languages at the University of Liverpool; Rosalind Thomas, Professor of Greek History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, at the start of the 20th century, in the depths of an ancient Egyptian turquoise mine on the Sinai Peninsula, an archaeologist called Sir Flindus Petri made an astonishing discovery. Scratched onto rocks, pots and portable items, he found scribblings of a very unexpected but strangely familiar nature. He had expected to see the complex pictorial hieroglyphic script of the Egyptian establishment, which had used it for a thousand years. But it seemed that at this very early period, 1700 BC,

the mine workers and Semitic slaves had started using a new informal system of graffiti, one which was brilliantly simple, endlessly adaptable and perfectly portable, the alphabet. This was probably the earliest example of an alphabetic script, and it bears an uncanny resemblance to our own. Did the alphabet spring into life almost fully formed? How did it manage to conquer three quarters of the globe? And despite its Cyrillic and Arabicic variations and the myriad languages it has been used to write,

why is there essentially only one alphabet anywhere in the world? With me to discuss the origin of the alphabet is Eleanor Robson, historian of ancient Iraq and fellow of all cells college Oxford, Roslyn Thomas, professor of Greek history at Royal Holloway University of London, and Alan Millard, rank in professor emeritus of Hebrew and ancient Semitic languages at the University of Liverpool. Alan Robson, the alphabet developed in the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean. Can you give us a sense of the scripts that dominated the region

before the alphabet, as we know it, began? There were two very important scripts, hieroglyphics that many people know about, and cuneiform writing or wedge-shaped writing, which was centred on ancient Iraq. Although they look very different, hieroglyphs are basically very pictorial, but we think of pictures of the little birds and the men with their arms in the air.

And cuneiform looks like random scratches on the surface of clay, but in fact structurally they're very similar. They have a central core of syllabic signs, that is signs that represent syllables like ma or of or pot. And there are signs that represent whole words or ideas that we can call logograms.

And they also have signs which signal what sort of word comes next. So next word is something made of a word, or the next word means a sort of person. So they're very complicated. They have several hundred different visual signs in their repertoire, and so they are very restricted to professional writers. Right, well, that's a very good summary, and I'd like to go into it a little bit more detail, taking them one at a time.

The Cuneiform writing, how long had it had it been in existence, who was using it and can we just go through it a little bit again? The earliest evidence we have for writing in the south of Iraq is from the very late 4th millennium BC, so about 3,200. This is cuneiform. This is on clay, and this is wedged, right. And, well, the very first writing we have isn't yet wedge scraped, it's just scratched onto the surface of clay.

And it's used by accountants working for the temples in the big cities to write down the things that the temples needed to. manage their labours, their land, their animals, the goods that their labourers made. The account is never going to get a better press as long as they live, if there is something to do with the invention of language. Absolutely. Well, the invention of writing. I mean, people were speaking for many, many thousands of years before the invention of writing.

So, yes, the first writing we have then is simply accountants' tools. It's numbers and concrete nouns, things that can be counted. And that's it for Mesopotamia, for Southern Iran. Ark. Similarly in Egypt, about the same time, it's difficult to date exactly when, whether Egyptian hieroglyphs or Mesopotamian cuneiform, which predates the other, they're more or less the same time. The earliest writing in Egypt is similarly numbers and concrete objects, but this time they're found in the tombs of kings and their little ivory labels recording the grave goods that were in those tombs.

And often the grave goods don't survive, but we have the labels. So we're not talking about, I stumbled a paragraph a so ago, so that people are absolutely clear. We're not talking about language. You're talking about the signs of language. Language had been spoken for many, many thousands, tens of thousands of years. Here we're talking about the writing of it down, which is what we're talking about here. Yes, but what's even more interesting is this early writing

isn't even language-specific, because they're representing numbers and whole words, and you could read them almost in any language, and it's difficult because there are no indicators of the sounds of these words. So one could read them in almost any language. And it's only later that the representation of sounds come into writing, perhaps a few hundred years after that. So the Babylonian cuneiform is telling us about numbers and it's a trading language.

And the Egyptian hieroglyphic is doing more than that, isn't it all? It very quickly becomes more than that. But the very first writing is simply recording ownership. And then it becomes able to record. called, particularly the deeds of kings. It becomes a display language for showing off about the great defeats of royalty. Alan Millard, can you take us more deeply into the hieroglyph? Everybody listening will have an idea of the picture language of the...

Yes, I think what happened was that people drew the pictures, but there were various things they wanted to represent, which could not be shown easily by pictures. I use a simple English example. If you draw a picture of a thin man and a king, You can read, the king is a thin man, or the thin man is king. But if you simply take the sounds, you can produce the idea of thinking, which is difficult to draw as a picture.

And that's what happened, both in Babylonia and in Egypt. It's what we call the rebus principle. You draw the thing and you make it stand for the idea. Did they do a thin man and a king? No, no, that's an example from English, just to make it clear. It's a cracker, isn't it? But once they did that, they could write almost anything they wanted to because they had a sound system, a system for representing sounds.

So they had system for representing sounds. How far could they take this in terms of ideas? I mean, it was very good for saying where the kings were going to go into the next world and the number of goods she was going to take, and slaves who was going to take, or she, whatever. Both in Egypt and Babylonia from 2,500 BC onwards, we find almost all the things we would think of writing down being written down. Abstract ideas as well as concrete, philosophical ideas, religious concepts, ideas about this life and the next life.

Riddles, we find. And poetry, literature? Poetry, certainly, yes. How many pictures would the Egyptian hieroglyphs have? How many, have you got any idea? We talk about 26 letters of our alphabet, which we were coming to in, in, in, you. in a few moments, but how many pictures would you have to know as a hieroglyphic scribe?

I think to read hieroglyphs fully, you need to know about 600 signs and to read Babylonian cuneiform about 300. Of course, at different periods in the lives in the histories of those scripts, the numbers of signs would vary. In the early period there were many more signs, but for economies' sake,

the scribes reduced the number. Once they used the signs for their sound values, they didn't need so many pictures of objects because they could spell out, as it were, the sounds of the object. And you're saying that it could do everything that can be done in 2003? Yes. Had they had a space program, they could have written the instructions for the space program. Really? That's astonishing, isn't it?

So there's no limitations on this then, Rodelin? Well, I mean, some people, yes. some people have claimed that the alphabet could do all sorts of things which cuneiform and hieroglyphs couldn't because of the exact, when the Greeks created or elaborated on the alphabet from the Phoenicians, and they took it over, because there was an exact, this is the theory, because there's an exact link between the sound and the letter,

you can do so much more with it. I don't go along with that, but that has been, suggested that it's just a much more flexible and much more intricate and much cleverer system that can represent absolutely anything that can be said. One of the things about the Babylonian cuneiform and the Egyptian hieroglyph is they lasted for a very, very long time. Alan began by talking about in the fourth millennium, say, 3,200 BC

and they're still flourishing in 1,000 BC. That's a very long time. Did they change much over this period? And if not, why not? As far as I know They don't change a very great deal Over that period The hieroglyphs particularly

Very very conservative And are virtually the same Towards the end Of the hieroglyphic period As at the beginning As Eleanor said They start off, let's labels But then they develop

And it's an extremely conservative script Were there a special Were the scribes Especially taught were they socially elite, they were clearly some sort of elite, especially trained to do we know about how they came to be what they were?

They're very, very complicated training schools, aren't there, for the cuneiform scribes and for the hieroglyphic scribes, very intense, and that's what's often said about the difference between those and the alphabet. The alphabet is much easier to learn, it's much quicker, and so more people

can learn it faster, and it therefore goes further the social scale. What do we know about these schools then, Alan? Oh, we're knowing increasingly, just in the last five years, a very interesting study has done on the minutiae of scribal education and the curriculum. So we know that they started off by learning, just like our children do, by making the elements of script.

So for the case of Babylonian scribes, the little wedges on the clay, and then to write whole syllables, and then people's names, and then they move on to write... lists of words grouped thematically. So the first long list of words they learned was the list of trees and wooden objects, terribly boring, and then things made of reed

and then metal and then stone, etc. And then after a while they learn their numbers and their multiplication tables, etc. And then it's only after a long elementary period that they start to write whole sentences, model legal documents and contracts, and also proverbs, and then begin to write and copy.

out much longer pieces of literature. And it's all by wrote learning. It's copying and listening and memorising and writing again and again until they've got it off by heart. So we have their school exercises in hundreds and thousands of copies. And are we talking about a tiny proportion of people who are literate able to do? Can we put a percentage on it? I think it's vanishingly small.

A, we're only talking about people who lived in cities, forget about all the villagers and the nomads. and if we actually look at the archaeology of schoolhouses, they're tiny, the size of this room. Well, we have to explain to our listeners that this is an exceptionally small room. Exactly. It's twice as big as a table we're sitting in.

And there's probably only physically room for the teacher and perhaps two or three children in it. And when we look also at the numbers of scribes active in the big institutions in the temples and palaces, again we see a very small number. We're talking about probably dozens of people, people who are literate in any one city. Alamara, do we find an intellectual elite

crossing into a social or political elite? Yes, the political elite would comprise many people who had learned to write, but as they moved up the ranks, they would not actually write themselves because, like some of us, they would have secretaries to do it for them, so that we find one or two kings

who boast of their ability to read and write, and in Egypt most of the pharaohs were educated and able to read and write, and we find references to them doing that. In Tutankhamun's tomb, there were found some scribal writing implements which had been used with his name on them, and we may assume that he used them

as a youngster when he was learning hieroglyphs. Was there a sense that because this was so exclusive and because it was so difficult, it was important to keep it exclusive and difficult, so that it was part of the sort of power pyramid? There are some indications that the scribes were a closed shop. there are some indications that it went down in families. The scribal business was a family business.

But I think if you could pay the teacher, you could learn to be a scribe. That, of course, meant that it was only fairly well-to-do people who could afford to train their children to become scribes. So we have the hieroglyphics, and we have the Babylonian cuniform, and they're going from, say, 3,200 down to 1,000, but around BC. But around 1800 BC, in your book,

the inference of the alphabet. You write how the invention of the alphabet may be imagined. And you picture a Canaanite writer, a Canaanite scribe working alone in the port of Biblos. And he, you say, and he alone, which is amazing. I think he was a scribe who had learnt Egyptian. He may also have been familiar with Babylonian cuneiform. But neither system of writing was very convenient for representing his Canaanite language. Just as in fact, our alphabet is not very convenient for represent. representing English. If you think about the letters T and H, they stand for the in that, they stand for th in thank you, and they stand for taha in Ant Hill. So the Babylonian and Egyptian

systems didn't really fit the Canaanite language, and I believe this scribe saw that in Egyptian there were signs which represented simple syllables like ba and da and ga. which were pictures. And what he did was to analyse his language, which was quite a sophisticated feat, to separate out all the principal sounds, the phonemes of his language. And he drew a picture to represent each sound.

What he did was what we call the principle of acrophony. He would draw a picture of a door and say, when you see this picture, you don't read it as door, you just read it as d with any vowel following. And by that means he created an alphabet of perhaps 30 signs, each one representing a consonant plus any vowel. Strictly it's a limited syllabary and not an alphabet at this stage.

In his language, no word began with a vowel, so on that principle he couldn't produce a picture to represent a vowel. and in fact to write many of the Semitic languages, it's not essential to indicate the vowels. If you look at a modern Arabic or Hebrew newspaper and can read them, you'll find that the vowels are not represented. But because you know the language and the patterns of the language,

you know how the vowels will appear. And we see the same today in text messaging. Yeah, I want to come back. But this is the big invention, isn't it, the alphabet, the phoneme, the idea that he got back to the lowest denominator. Let's come back to whether it was one man, how you know is one man, why it was Biblos. Let's just leave that right of the thing,

because the most important thing is we've had the pictures, we've had the syllabular, by the pictures, a picture of water, we've had the syllables, war, ter, and now we have t, and R, just, and they stand for, and various people, Stephen Pinker famously wrote sentences with X's in the middle, but you could read them because of the starting point.

Now, it seems to me an extraordinary thing to arrive at. How do you think, rather than he arrived at it, if it was a he, or not a them, or a her? Well, I think, as Alan says, he was a scribe properly who did know Egyptian, but if he was feeling it didn't really fit the language, I mean, what does one say about a genius? What does one say about someone who has a brilliant idea?

you know, the minute you've invented a paperclip, you can't manage without. I'd like you to say as much as you can, because, I mean, how do you think he arrived at this idea that you can use, you can use, you go from a picture of water to syllables of water to W? Well, to some extent, isn't it to the case that Egyptian, there is an element in Egyptian already that is, has an alphabetic principle. They do have these picture signs. they have the signs for meanings, but they also have a few letters which represent a sound. I mean, that's how Champolion actually deciphered the hieroglyphs from the beginning because there were certain names like Cleopatra, which were written out letter by letters. So that wasn't actually a gigantic leap which this man in Biblos had to make all at once.

I mean, there was that element already in Egyptian, wasn't there? It did exist in Egyptian, but the Egyptians never isolated. it from all their other signs. So they never realized that they had an alphabet within their system. Except perhaps that they used it especially for writing foreign names that couldn't cope, that didn't fit very well into the Egyptian phonetic system.

So that if you were a scribe outside Egypt and having to write in Egyptian, then most of the names you were writing were non-Egyptian names. So perhaps you might be using the single consonant signs rather more than a scribe in Egypt would. Can we go back to our man in Canaan before we come back and try to prove whether he lived or not, but certainly something happened

then which was remarkable mention. Just so to explain, to take it even further, because the connections are very close, aren't they? There's a picture of water in Egyptian hieroglyph, which is wavy lines, that's water, we did when we were kids, wavy water. Now then he

finds a word that, he finds the word that, will you take it on from then? Then we get M, which is actually written as wavy water. I'm doing my finger woggling up and down. Yes, if you say I've stopped quickly enough, it's an M, yeah. Yes, and that's mute. And then you have the word for, well, Alan has just mentioned,

duh for door, well, in the Canaanite language, that's something like Daltu, and that again is D. And then the ox gives us Aleph, or Al-Pu, which is the letter A, or in fact the guttural sound at the beginning of that word which eventually turns into A and for most of the alphabet we can actually identify the signs we can see visually which signs that each sound comes from

So it's both an abstraction and some atomisation, isn't it? Absolutely. Somehow or other he got to the base of it and you use a word like resh and if we print a capital R, as a capital now, you can look like a head on a neck, which it originally was. So we go picture to syllable, to sign.

And then this sign, we'll go to this in a minute, later on, this sign becomes fantastically adaptable all round the world. But let's go back to our man in Canaan. Now then, how do you know it was a man, and how do you know he was in Biblos and this is one person? This is speculation. Ah, well. There were a bit of speculation.

There were female scribes. not very many. We know very little about what was going on in Canaan at this time. But as you said at the beginning, the discovery of some graffiti in the Turquoise Mines in the Sinai Peninsula give us some of the earliest examples of the alphabet. When they were discovered by Flinders Petrie, he didn't know what they were. The Egyptologist Salon Gardiner recognized in 1915 or thereabouts that they were probably an early form of the alphabet because he could read two or three words

on this acrophonic principle that each picture stands only for the initial sound of its name, as W for Water might do. Gardner was able to read one or two words as Semitic Canaanite. Since then, a number of other examples have been found at different sites in the Holy Land, which may be a little earlier than some of the,

from the Sinai Peninsula, and many which are later, and enable us to trace the development of these signs down to about 1,000 BC when they form what we may call a conventional script, the early alphabet, that we see at Biblos. I think Biblos is a likely place for the invention of the alphabet because it had been a very cosmopolitan port from prehistoric times. The Egyptians fetch cedar wood from the Lebanon through Biblos, and from before 3,000 BC we have connections between Biblos and Egypt

with Egyptian inscriptions shortly afterwards. It was also the end of a trade route from Babylonia, and we know that there were connections between Babylonia and Biblos as an early date. But Roslyn and Thomas, it was still far away from the two big power centres, the Babylonian and the Egyptian. Was that significant, the fact that it was some distance away? Yeah, I think it probably was, because the big power centres have all the vested interests,

all the institutions, the scribal schools and so on, which are, as it were, churning out these people very skilled in these very complicated systems. And I suppose they wouldn't have any need to move over to this much simpler system. So I don't think it would be a coincidence at all that it was in these areas to the edge of the great power centres where a much simpler system was developed. they didn't have the structures and so on, which had been working for millennia, a couple of millennia anyway,

and yeah, so I think that's very, very likely. As far as you know, having been discovered that, it kept itself very local for hundreds of years, it stayed in that small area for until roughly about 1,000 BC. Why do you think that was? Well, if we think about the Greeks and their contact with the Phoenicians and Canaanite. I'm talking about the first age.

because that came much later. I suppose the absence of sort of contact with the rest of the Mediterranean and the Assyrians, the earlier Babylonian systems, wouldn't need to take it over. It began to go around the Middle East through trade, again through sales, who have brought so many words, including our own language, and the contribution of just, as it were, people bringing words back with the loot that they brought back.

And they started to take the words around. Through people moving as well as objects. And coming back to Rosalind's point, I think also that the Egyptians and the Babylonians had a huge amount invested in their very complicated scripts that went beyond the mere mechanics of how you wrote it. And that it was the language of their gods, for instance. It was the language of their culture.

And there was this huge prestige associated with being literate. And that once you started to unpack that and make it more accessible, then in some sense that might be a whole undermining of the structure of authority within Egypt or Babylonia. And so I think it is very significant that the alphabet develops on the edge of these big power structures and that it spreads, although it does have spread eventually into Iraq, but through immigration and that immigrants into the north of Iraq, into Assyria, the Aramaans takes the alphabet in. But it takes the Assyrians, Well, the Assyrians never entirely give up the cuneiform writing system

because it has too much prestige for them. It's the language of scholarship and tradition and religion. And the alphabet may be used for mundane things like bureaucracy, but never for the writings of power and control. Thank you. Could I come in on that with a modern parallel? The Japanese writing system, the Japanese are very well aware of some of the advantages of the alphabet,

and every so often there have been moves to try and make the system slightly simpler and more alphabetic. But in fact, yes, too much is vested in it and too much Japanese identity is felt to reside in this much more complicated writing system, so they don't change.

And although the alphabet is already more adaptable and more flexible and liberating in many ways, we haven't got to that point because as Alan hinted earlier, you could learn it in the morning where it takes you many years to learn the other things. It's held back for a very very long time. Then it does begin to spread about

1,000 BC and a big factor here are the Phoenicians who are great traders and they begin to take the language right across the Mediterranean and it also goes into the eastern of the Persian Empire. Can you say a little about the Phoenicians? Yes, well they're fascinating

and they are starting to move out from the west coast of the Levantine, of the Levant by about 1000 BC driven out by the Assyrians getting to Cyprus, then they trade with mainland Greece, Crete, get as far as Sicily and indeed southern Spain. And so they're spreading across the Mediterranean.

And at the same time, certain areas of Greece, particularly the Ubeans from the east coast of Greece, are beginning to move eastwards at the end of the so-called Dark Ages. And so we hear, for instance, of Greek pirates or raiders on the, on the Phoenician coast. some governor writes to an Assyrian king saying there are these Greeks here again can I deal with them so the Greeks are moving east and the Phoenicians are moving west and there are lots of places where we know from the archaeology

that there are Phoenicians resident in areas we think of as Greek and vice versa there are certainly Greeks resident on the west coast of Syria by about 800 BC Well the Phoenicians for a moment I mean how did they develop the alphabet How did they use it? How did they come across it? I mean, just hold it with them. Because they, as it were, took it across, let's say, in rough figures for 100, even 200 years,

they were moving it around more emphatically towards the West. And then he got into the Indo-European languages and came into Latin and eventually to our language and so on. Well, I think they're developing the Canaanite alphabet. Indeed, they are part of, they are West Canaanite, basically. We call them Phoenicians. but I think they call themselves Canaanites. So they're the same people.

And they, as far as I know, they develop it slightly, but they still only have 22 letters. And the Greeks add these extra letters. They're traders, their city dwellers as well. Let's look a little at the history. What happened about 1,200 BC was a breakdown of the old state system in the Near East, in Syria, Palestine, there were a lot of city states, many of them subject to Egypt. About 1,200 BC, there were movements of people, especially from the Greek area and Crete into the Near East,

which caused the breakdown of the old systems, and they were replaced by what we might call tribal states, Israel, the Arameans in Damascus and others. And these new states didn't take up the old writing systems of Egypt and Babylonia, Instead, they took up the alphabet for writing their own languages which were descended from Canaanite, probably. This meant that the alphabet began to spread, and the dead hand of conservative scribes from Babylonia and Egypt was removed. Consequently, when the Phoenicians travelled,

they took it with them, and we can imagine Phoenician merchants going to Greece, and the Greeks bringing their trading goods, and the Phoenicians writing down on wax tablets or on place, Paras, Archimedes, three obols, so and so, so money more. And the Greeks looking and saying, what's that? And the Phoenician trader will say, well, that's telling me how much you owe me. And the Greeks said, well, we want to do that too, to make sure you're not cheating us. And so I think they took over the alphabet in that way.

But what they did... Can we just... I really are all rushing to get to the Greeks and I'm not yet. We've got plenty of time. And when we get there, the story's nearly done. So we'll just paddle about before then. about a thousand years ago is there any sense of

these systems in conflict with each other we still have despite what alens tells us about the disruptions and the sort of period of pre bcc sort of dark ages away in the middle east if you want to put it that way and the breakdowns but you still have a massive hieroglyphic system in egypt

which is very influential a massive cuneiform system the babylonia which is very influential their state systems as rosalind has pointed out by analogy with the Japanese, it matters very much to keep them and hold them, this might, and so. Is this alphabet a sort of rather insignificant upstart around the edges, still not thought of as being particularly important? Is it still a third language? Depends who's doing the thinking, I think. If you look at actually what is written on those early alphabetic inscriptions, in fact, some of them are strikingly like those early

cuneiform and hieroglyphic inscriptions I was talking about, they're marks of property ownership. And it takes, I mean, so the earliest archaeologically attested alphabetic inscriptions are very short and the sign forms are often irregular and they haven't quite decided which direction the script ought to go in yet. Sometimes they go left right,

sometimes right left, sometimes alternating. And so it's a very, only when the Phoenicians come that those sorts of things get standardized and that we get writing going from right to left, the signs of the letters more or less standardized. So that's, I think, the point at which the alphabet becomes a formal state control system because what you see, perhaps not even state control, but suddenly some sort of central control because you see the standardization that you expect from a formal education system. So that happens relatively early in the first millennium BC.

It doesn't look like a prestige, high prestige script, though. Nor does Cuneiform. It depends what writing is for. Hieroglyphs were for display and for showing off with. Cuniform was a bureaucrat's tool. The alphabet was a merchant's tool. We're back to accountants for basically being literacy and numeracy, being very closely linked.

That's a very good division into those three. But then we got the alphabet transferring to Greece, which has a far greater need for vowels. And now we have the great vowel insertion in Greece. Can you tell us about... We are now in Greece, Summers, happiness, dissidents. I'm not a Greek specialist, that's my colleague's business. But the Greek language can't be written without some marks to indicate vowels.

The Greek word for no is who, and you can't write that unless you have a sign for vowels. So what the Greeks did very quickly was to take some of the signs of the Phoenician, an alphabet which marked sounds which were not used in Greek and used them to mark the vowels that were needed for Greek. So, for example, the first letter of the alphabet, alpha, the Semitic Aleph, Alpoo, as Eleanor has said, a picture of an ox's head, indicates the noise that Cockney makes when he says, bo'-oh, a sort of push in the back of the throat.

The Greeks don't have that noise, so they took that sign and used it for the sound a. The ox's head is our capital letter A turned upside down. If you turn the letter upside down, you'll see the two horns sticking up. And that was originally the picture of the ox's head. And the Greeks did that with several sounds, several signs for sounds they didn't use from Phoenician, producing these vowels, which enabled them to produce what is really the first alphabet with a sign for each sound, not a sign for a syllable, but a sign a sign bha, a sign b, and so on.

So they could break the words of their language down into basic sounds and represent each one. They had to add a few new letters at the end of the alphabet for sounds which Phoenician didn't have. But basically that was the alphabet. When does this start to come into Greek right? When can we see this happening, Rosalie? The earliest evidence,

now is the first half of the 8th century. Various people have been hoping for it to appear earlier, but it doesn't happen. And since Greek is written on bits of, oh, pottery, broken bits of pottery, these survive forever. So the fact that we haven't found any earlier bits of Greek alphabet before the second quarter of the 8th century

is making it pretty clear that that's something happened about then. And, yeah, these first graffiti are, or sort of informal bits of writing are labelling. The graffiti's going to over them in this programme as well as accountancy, really. Yes, graffiti comes in. It's a technical term for non-official, non-inscribed writing, which is slightly scribbles, basically, scribbles and labels and so on. But I've always thought that Homer was dictating or writing, whichever it is,

maybe it was dictated in the 8th century. So it would seem that it gets going quite quickly, and then it gets going as a massively complicated, important literary language which we in translation, or if we've known Greek, can read very fluently today. Well, the indications are going both ways. Some of the earliest graffiti are labels, and they're quite funny there.

Sometimes the pot has an inscription on it saying, I am the cup of Senso, I am a cup of Korokos, where the object actually speaks in the first person. Lots and lots of proper names are written. down very early on. But as you say, I mean, Homer probably was written down pretty early on. It's hard to imagine how they could write this long epic out when they've still learning the alphabet. But one of the most interesting of the early graffiti is actually a piece of writing on a pot found in the island of Pitha Kusai, which is modern Iskia in the Bay of Naples, probably about 740 BC, which says, I am the pot of Nestor. I'm the lovely pot of Nesta,

and whoever drinks from this will feel the desires of sweet Aphrodite. So, and that's incredibly early, and already you've got a reference to Homer, because the cup of Nesta comes in Homer, it's in hexameter, so you've got the use of writing for verse. And it also seems to be a sort of parody or a joke of the common curse form. Whoever does this shall be damned forever. This instead reverts that and says whoever drinks from this.

shall feel the desire of love. So it is extraordinary that, you know, it's one of the earliest pieces of graffiti, has all this going on just in it, and it's writing out poetry. How do you account for this great surge of energy into literature that we read still, mostly in translation, we read still now,

was it the flexibility, was it the insertion of the vowels, was it the final falling away? I mean, there were obviously betrayed movements, and economic under toes. But the alphabet itself, it's coming to us now. It's in Greek, it's got the vowels. It's going to fit language after language after language after language.

It was just the excitement of it? Well, gosh, that's difficult to say. I mean, literature isn't exclusive to the alphabet. We have the most extensive and beautiful and powerful literatures in hieroglyphs and in cuneiform. So one can't attribute poetic flowering simply to the discovery of the alphabet, but certainly the discovery of literacy. I mean, I think it could be said here that the oral poet, the oral epic poet, who,

the many oral poets who lay behind Homer, Homer was the last of them, they saw no need to write down. And maybe you start writing down literature when you feel it's under threat or you're going to forget it or a great poet is about to die and therefore his oral poet who will die with him. I mean, I think it's not inevitable that you start writing literature once you have... I do think that we're denying a sort of massive change that did happen, but I don't much as you do it. But I would reckon that people listen to this programme know a lot more about literature post-700 BC than they do about Egyptian literature and literature written cuneiform.

I think we're kind of setting out as a political correct denial here. And as for the oral thing, I mean, we know a transition. Socrates spoke and asked questions. Plato wrote it down, but he wrote dialogues and said writing was bad for you, it hurt your brain. And his pupil Aristotle was a writer and got on with it. and I think then it's been got on at a completely different level ever since.

But we've known about Greek literature for many, many hundreds of years. Sumerian literature has only been deciphered in the last 50. So it's a matter of the Western modern world's ignorance of these ancient literatures, not a question of their intrinsic value or otherwise, I would argue. It's the prestige of Greek literature, isn't it? Absolutely. But it did things that are quite... Don't some things deserve prestige?

Yes. Certainly. Some of the Egyptian, Babylonian and Sumerian compositions have that prestige, but our education system doesn't introduce them to children. So you actually do think we've got the sort of same possibilities. That would be wonderful if it's true. Of the poets, playwrights, thinkers in Sumerian, and they're just waiting there to be found.

Absolutely. Well, some of us know them already and are gradually introducing them for the rest of the world. Other programmes back in there. I hope so. Well, can you give us an example then? Well, perhaps listeners will have heard of the hero Gilgamesh, and the epic of Gilgamesh is one of the most beautiful and powerful epics describing the search for immortality.

And it's about love, friendship, loss, death and memory, and is, was originally known in various varieties of cuneiform from the early second millennium before. see right through to the end of cuneiform writing at the turn of the first millennium of the common era and then is transformed in other ways into other literatures as well Alan finally can you ask you it it seems as if the alphabet only been invented once but like the wheel why do you think that is

yes I think that's true as we've already said it was a stroke of genius and once it was invented there was really no need to reinvent it It spread across the world. It went with the Phoenicians westwards to Greece. It went with the Arameans, as Eleanor said, to Iraq, and further east still, so that some of the Indian scripts are based on the Aramaic alphabet, which is a descendant of the original alphabet. Every alphabet in the world is actually descended from that one original or is an imitation of it.

We find a very early imitation at a place in Syria called Ugarit, about 1,300. but you see, where scribes trained in Babylonian cuneiform, took up the idea of the alphabet and made a cuniform alphabet. And now I have two-thirds of the world's languages in that alphabet. Do you see anything preventing the rest of the world joining in now? You were talking about elitist in Japan. I think it helps that the Romans conquered a very great deal of the remains of the illiterate west of Europe, and then that alphabet was taken over by the colonial post.

house who then developed their rule in other parts of the world. I mean, that's surely got to be added in as a big political reason why the alphabet's covered a large part of the world. But we fail to mention, we're back on the old colonialism, we've failed to mention it's intrinsic values of being atomised and this brilliant invention of the phonemes and so. It's learned very fast. It's learned very fast.

Go to go now. Very sorry. We'll have to come back to it, particularly to those Samarian stuff. Thank you very much for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com. UK forward slash radio four.